Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul;
Ver. 11. As pilgrims and strangers] Excellently doth Justin Martyr describe the Christians of his time: they inhabit their own countries, saith he, but as strangers; they partake of all as citizens, and yet suffer all as foreigners; every strange land is a country to them, and every country a strange land. (Epist. ad Diog.)
And strangers abstain] Thoughts of death will be a death to our lusts, Lamentations 1:9. Her filthiness is in her skirts, and all because she remembereth not her last end. As the stroking of a dead hand on the belly cureth a tympany, and as the ashes of a viper applied to the part that is stung draws the venom out of it; so the thought of death is a death to sin.
From fleshly lusts] Those parts in our bodies that are the chiefest and nearest both subjects and objects of lust and concupiscence, are like unto the dung gate, 1 Chronicles 26:16; Nehemiah 3:13, whereby all the filth was cast out of the temple. God hath placed them in our bodies, like snakes creeping out of the bottom of a dunghill, and abased them in our eyes, that we might make a base account and estimation of the desires thereof, as one well observeth.
Which war against the soul] Only man is in love with his own bane (beasts are not so), and fights for those lusts that fight against the soul. And whereas some might say that other lusts fight against the soul, as well as fleshly lusts, it is answered that other lusts fight against the graces, bat these more against the peace of the soul. (Capell on Temptation.) Take we up therefore that motto of Otho II, Pacem cum hominibus, cum vitiis bellum; Let us quarrel with our faults and not with our friends.