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That pleasure is man's chiefest good (because it is the perception of good that is properly pleasure) is an assertion most certainly true, though under the common acceptance of it, not only false, but odious; for, according to this, pleasure and sensuality pass for terms equivalent. Pleasure in general is the apprehension of a suitable object, suitably applied to a rightly disposed faculty, and so must be conversant both with the faculties of the body and of the soul respectively, as being the result of the fruitions belonging to both. It is too often assumed that religion is an enemy to all pleasures — it bereaves them of all the sweets of converse, dooms them to an absurd and perpetual melancholy, designing to make the world nothing else but a great monastery; with which notion of religion, nature and reason seem to have great cause to be dissatisfied. He who would persuade men to religion, both with art and efficacy, must found the persuasion of it upon this, that it interferes not with any rational pleasure, that it bids nobody quit the enjoyment of any one thing that his reason can prove to him ought to be enjoyed. An argument from experience may be taken to urge that it must be the greatest trouble in the world for a man to shake off himself and to defy his nature, by a perpetual thwarting of his innate appetites and desires. But this religion requires.

I. PLEASURE IS, IN THE NATURE OF IT, A RELATIVE THING. So it imports a peculiar relation and correspondence to the state and condition of the person to whom it is a pleasure.

II. THE ESTATE OF ALL MEN BY NATURE BECOMES CHANGED. It is more or less different from that estate into which the same persons do, or may, pass by the exercise of that which the philosophers call virtue, and into which men are much more effectually and sublimely translated by that which we call grace; that is, by the supernatural overpowering operation of God's Spirit. A man, while he resigns himself up to the brutish guidance of sense and appetite, has no relish at all for the spiritual, refined delights of a soul clarified by grace and virtue. The Athenians laughed the physiognomist to scorn who, pretending to read men's minds in their foreheads, described Socrates as a crabbed, lustful, proud, ill-natured person; they knowing how directly contrary he was to that dirty character. But Socrates bade them forbear laughing at the man; for that he had given them a most exact account of his nature; but what they saw in him so contrary at the present was from the conquest that he had got over his natural disposition by philosophy. True pleasure is that of the mind, which is an image, not only of God's spirituality, but also of His infinity. Religion belongs to it in reference —

1. To speculation, as it sustains the name of understanding.

2. To practice, as it sustains the name of conscience. Religious pleasure never satiates or wearies; it is in nobody's power, but only in his that hath it. So that he who hath the propriety may be also sure of the perpetuity. The man never outlives it, because he cannot outlive himself. Then it follows that to exhort men to be religious is only in other words to exhort them to take their pleasure — a pleasure made for the soul, and the soul for it — suitable to its spirituality, and equal to all its capacities.

(R. South, D.D.)

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KJV: Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace.

WEB: Her ways are ways of pleasantness. All her paths are peace.