Heligio itleiici

ITS SEaUEL

(JlljrTstiau Moxals.

BY

SIR THOMAS BROWNE,

/ K t., M.D.

WITH RESEMBLANT PASSAGES FROM

cowper's task,

AND A VERBAL INDEX.

PHILADELPHIA :

LEA AND BLANCHARD.

1844.
e. SHERMAN, PRINTER.
 ;

TO THE READER.

Certainly that man were greedy of life who should

desire to live when were at an end, and
all the world
he must needs be very impatient who would repine at
death in the society of all things that suffer under it.

Had not almost every man suffered by the press,

or were not the tyranny thereof become universal, I
had not wanted reason for complaint but in times ;

wherein I have lived to behold the highest perversion

of that excellent invention; the name of his Majesty
defamed, the honour of parliament depraved, the
writings of both depravedly, anticipatively, counter-
feitly imprinted ; complaints may seem ridiculous in
private persons, and men of my condition may be as
incapable of affronts as hopeless of their reparations.
And truly had not the duty I owe unto the importunity
of friends, and the allegiance I must ever acknowledge
unto truth, prevailed with me, the inactivity of my dis-

position might have made these sufferings continual

and time, that brings other things to light, should have
satisfied me in the remedy of its oblivion. But because
things evidently false are not only printed, but many
things of truth most falsely set forth, in this latter I

could not but think myself engaged. For though we

have no power to redress the former, yet in the other
the reparation being within ourselves, I have at present
IV TO THE READER.

represented unto the world a full and intended copy of

that piece which was most imperfectly and surrepti-

tiously published before.
This I confess about seven years past, with some
others of affinity thereto, for my private exercise and
satisfaction I had at leisurable hours composed which ;

being communicated unto one, it became common unto

many, and was by transcription successively corrupted
until it arrived in a most depraved copy at the press.
He that shall peruse that work, and shall take notice of
sundry particularities and personal expressions therein,
will easily discern the intention was not publick and ;

being a private exercise directed to myself, what is

delivered therein was rather a memorial unto me, than
an example or rule unto any other and therefore if ;

there be any singularity therein correspondent unto the

private conceptions of any man, it doth not advantage
them, or if dissentaneous thereunto, it no way over-
throws them. It was penned in such a place and with
such disadvantage, that (I protest) from the first setting
of pen unto paper I had not the assistance of any good
book, whereby to promote my invention or relieve my
memory ; and therefore there might be many real
lapses therein, which others might take notice of, and
more that I suspected myself. It was set down many
years past, and was the sense of my conceptions at
that time, not an immutable law unto my advancing
judgment at all times ; and therefore there might be
many things therein plausible unto my passed appre-
hension, which are not agreeable unto my present self.
There are many things delivered rhetorically, many
expressions therein merely tropical, and as they best
illustrate my intention ; and therefore also there are
 TO THE READER. V

many things to be taken in a soft and flexible sense,

and not to be called unto the rigid test of reason.
Lastly, all that is contained therein is in submission
unto maturer discernments ; and as I have declared, I

shallno further father them than the best and learned

judgments shall authorize them under favour of which
;

considerations I have made its secrecy publick, and

committed the truth thereof to every ingenuous reader.

Thomas Browne.

1*
 EDITOR'S PREFACE.

It is very remarkable that notwithstanding their close

relationship these two Treatises by Sir Thomas Browne
have never been linked together in the same volume
until now. Religio Medici was the earliest production
of his pen that admirable Sequel Christian Morals the
;

last which fell from it. It is delightful to perceive the

perfect harmony that reigns in both works although well

nigh half a century rolled away between the respective
periods of their composition. The pure and lofty
thoughts which dwelt in his heart in the pensive evening
of life were but the same that the author had cherished

and avowed in the bright morn of early manhood.

Religio Medici was at first surreptitiously published,
in 1642. Even in those ' dissonant times' (to use the
gentle phrase of Harry Lawes who lived in them) this
piece of serene wisdom found so many readers that two
editions were immediately disposed of. It came out

under the author's sanction in the following year, and

numerous reimpressions were called for in his lifetime.
Some of his other works Sir Thomas Browne greatly
altered and enlarged, but a majestic self-esteem led him
to make no change whatever in this confession of faith

after he had once delivered it to the world.

Its fate in one respect has been peculiarly untoward,
for it has been constantly printed with great incorrect-
Vni EDITOR S PREFACE.

ness. A table of errata prefixed to the authentick edi-

tion of 1643, shows that it underwent a nice examination
by the author ; who seems thenceforward to have left
the care of the press to others, by whom the trust was
discharged with singular indiligence. The subsequent
editions were printed without any reference having been
made A few of the errours pointed out
to that table !

in it were occasionally detected but many have been ;

constantly overpassed which mar the author's meaning,

and some that contradict and reverse it. The impres-
sion of 1682 (the year in which Sir T. B. died) is the
faultiest of any, for it not only continues those impor-
tant blunders but is deformed by many new ones. The
latter have been avoided in the foho of 1686, but it

leaves the others untouched. The reprint of 1736 can-

not claim even this modified praise.*
So much care has been taken to banish the whole of
these errours, as well as toweigh the irresolute punc-

* There have been three modern editions of religio medici. The first
of these was printed at Oxford in 1831. The editor states that "every
former edition is so corrupt, and so full of errata, as in many places to
be utterly unintelligible." But he himself never saw the table mentioned
above, and he perpetuates errours which should have been cured by it.

The second modern edition appeared in the valuable collection of Sir

Thomas Browne's Works printed at Norwich in 1835. Mr. Wilkin, the
editor, candidly confesses that he did not discover until the last sheet
had been worked off, that the errours enumerated in the table of 1G43,
Jiad passed through every subsequent edition, his own included. He
cancelled some, and gave an accurate account of the whole at the end of
his preface.
The third was published in London in 1838. The editor did not con-
sider it needful to undergo the fatigue of collating the earlier impres-
.-sions ; he has not even used the information he might have acquired so
easily from Mr. Wilkin, but has been content with giving a tolerably
faithful reprint of the worthless edition of 1682.
 EDITOR S PREFACE. IX

tuation of every previous edition, that the one now

oftered to the public may venture to claim the singular
praise of being the first that presents with accuracy the

text of a book which issued from the press two hundred

years ago.
Doubtless this work of an original thinker may aflbrd
room for annotations ;
yet it is hoped there will be no
irreverence in divesting it of those (equal to itself in

bulk) by which it has been hitherto accompanied.*

They have been reprinted often enough to be placed
within the reach of any one who may be anxious to
consult them, but their constant alliance with the text is

unnecessary and uncomfortable. They are by no means

entitled tokeep company for ever with the tersely-writ-
ten volume to which they have been tacked so long, for
they are often composed in a vein quite repugnant to
that of Sir Thomas Browne, and with a total forgetful-
ness of the caveat to be found at the end of his preface.
Every one acknowledges the luxury of possessing the
text of a favourite author (the man who has no favourite
books is incapable of friendship) without the clog of a
commentary proceeding from different and perhaps un-
congenial minds. In the wanderings of the eye from
the author to his annotators we too often have that train
of thought suddenly snapt in which he was profitably

* Though diffuse they are omissive, and sometimes charge Sir Thomas

Browne (as he elsewhere tells us) with borrowing from books which he
never read. Sir Kenelm Digby's Observations were occasioned by the
corrupt and surreptitious edition, and often have no application to the
genuine one. They wore accordingly denounced therein as hasty and
erroneous, and as intended to exhibit the conceptions of the observator
rather than to illustrate those of the author.
X EDITORS PREFACE.

leading us,* or we regale upon some frigid criticism

which makes nothing manifest but the reluctance dull
men feel to let a man of genius express himself after his
own fashion. Surely he who wrote religio medici has
attained the dignity of a classic, and well deserves to
have his pure gold presented to us unmixt with baser
matter.
This is one of the books which give pleasing evidence
of the stability of our language for the two last centuries.
The thoughts of Sir Thomas Browne, profound and
original as they are,and notwithstanding the out o' the
way-ness of his expressions, may be apprehended as
readily now as when they were first poured forth and ;

this noble creature who wrote not for an age, but for
'

all time,' is quite as perspicuous as some whom we call

(by the happiest phrase in the world) writers of the

We have the testimony of Sir Thomas's daughter

that ' CHRISTIAN MORALSwas the last work of her honoured
and learned father.' It must be added with regret, for
the fact is not to the credit of his countrymen, that two
editions sufficed for more than a century. The first

was faithfully published from the original manuscript,

in 1716, by Dr. John Jeffery, Archdeacon of Norwich;
the second in 1756, by Dr. Samuel Johnson who en- ;

riched it with a life of the author and some short ex-

* The more we read the more perplext,

The comment ruining the text.
The few notes which will be found in this edition of religio hedici and
CHRISTIAN MORALS are the author's own.
 —;

EDITOR S PREFACE. XI

planatory notes. For the next we are indebted to Mr.

Wilkin in 1835.*
Although the greater part of this work is preceptive,
yet in some of its later sections the meek and vene-
rable man doffs the teacher's gown, and gives us again
glimpses of that sweet character which he had in part
unveiled before, and whose entire disclosure makes this

piece of mental biography one of the most curious and

interesting books in our language. The twenty-second
section (the longest in christian morals) is irresistibly

touching when viewed in this personal light; and it will

be difficult to see it in any other, if with the opening
words " In seventy or eighty years a man may have a
deep gust of the world," we combine the recollection
that he who wrote them was then between seventy and
eighty years of age.
There is another passage among the outpourings of
this more stately Montaigne which I can never read
without applying the close of it to himself, although he
whom the compellation of little Jlock did deject on ac-
count of his own unworthiness, may have thought of no
one less than of himself when it dropt from his pen :

'*
Though human souls are said to be equal, yet is there
no small inequality in their operations ; some maintain
the allowable station of men, many are far below it
and some have been so divine as to approach the apo-
GEUM of their NATURES, AND TO BE IN THE CONFINIUM OF
spirits."!
In lieu of the accompaniments withheld from the
present edition of religio medici others are substituted

* It is printed in the fourth volume of his edition of Sir Thomas

Browne's Works, religio medici appears in the second,
t See pp. 182, 167.
XU EDITOR S PREFACE.

whose Utility it is hoped may not be questioned. Neither

that work nor its sequel christian morals is severely
methodical : it is the more desirable therefore that the
substance of the several divisions of each should be in-
dicated, that the reader might be put in possession of a
brief abstract of the volume by which he may be en-
abled to recur to particular portions of it with facility.
The editor has adhered in these tables to the language
of his author; but it was often found difficult (and
sometimes impossible) to express in a line or two the
contents of sections so laden with thought as those of
Sir Thomas Browne.
They are likewise studded with forcible and remark-
able words, which may perhaps be advantageously
pointed out by an Index. That which has been pre-
pared is not confined to peculiar and uncommon terms,
but embraces familiar ones whenever they are employed
in a peculiar sense or in some unwonted construction.
One of the chief advantages of a dictionary may be
said to lie in the examples it atTords of the sense in
which words have been used by the best writers. As
this adjunct of the present edition will lead to a great
number of striking passages in these Contemplations
which have not been adduced either by Dr. Johnson or
Mr. Richardson, it may be found to serve as an exem-
plary supplement to our two principal lexicographers.
Probably none who have felt the comfort of a full index,
or the misery of a lank one, will be inclined to murmur
at the somewhat unusual copiousness of that which is

here offered to their acceptance.

Like most writers of his time Sir Thomas Browne
was capricious or careless in regard to orthography.
That of the two lexicographers just mentioned has
 —

EDITORS PREFACE. Xlll

therefore been followed, whose agreement upon this

point seems to offer at length a convenient and desirable

standard whereby to regulate what was once so tor-
mentingly precarious.
Few men with a pen in their hand are more inno-
cently employed than he who is engaged in re-editing
a good old book. It may save him perchance from
adding a new and needless one to the swarms already
existing " that serve only to distract
weaker judgments,
and to maintain the tradeand mystery of typogra-
phers."* The pleasant task which I have just accom-
plished has brought its own reward by making me
better acquainted with this volume of up-raising ethicks.
If I should be instrumental in causing it to be more
generally read than heretofore that circumstance will
bring with it fresh matter of grateful remembrance.
John Peace.
City Library, Bristol,
New Year's Day, 1844.

* Rel. Med. p. 46. Or it may be a safe way of adopting, without

arrogancy, the counsel of Lord Bacon :
— " For the opinion of plenty is

among the causes of want, and the great quantity of books maketh a
show rather of superfluity than lack ; which surcharge, nevertheless, is

not to be remedied by making no more books, but by making more good

books, which as the serpent of Moses might devour the serpents of the
enchanters," Advancement of Learning, book ii.
 CONTENTS.

RELIGIO MEDICI. Part. I.

Sect. I.

II.
The author a Christian
Of the reformed religion
-----
----- 25
26
III. Charitably disposed to the un-reformed - - - 26
IV. But not hopeful of reconcilement - - - - 28
V. A
sworn subject to the faith of the church of
England 28
VI. Having no genius to disputes in religion. Follow-
ing to wheel of the church 30
VII. His greener studies polluted with two or three
heresies 32
VIII. In doctrines heretical there will be super-heresies 33
IX. Wingy mysteries in divinity. Nourish an active
faith 34
X. Content to understand them without a rigid
tion by an adumbration
;

XI. Eternity of God. ' With

-----
this I confound my
defini-

under-
35

standing' 36
XII. Trinity. The visible world a picture of the in-
visible 37
XIII.

XIV. But one

Wisdom
my
of God.
devotion'
first
-------38
cause.
' With this attribute I recreate

Every essence hath its final

cause 41
XV. Natura agit frustra. Wisdom seen in
things
niliil

---41 all
XVI CONTENTS.

XVI. Two books from whence I collect my divinity.

Nature is the art of God - - - - 42
XVII. Cryptic and involved method of Providence. All
obey the swing of that wheel - - - 45
XVIII. Fortune (like nature) a relative term. No effect
but hath its warrant
XIX. Second causes perversely commented
... on.
- -

Con-
46

spiracy of passion and reason against faith - 48

XX. Atheism. There was never any - - - 50
XXI. Credulous disbelievers. Niceties that become us
not. Solved by '
a divine concourse' - - 51
XXII. Other niceties, of an easy and possible truth - 53

time
XXIV. Too many
--------55
XXIII. The Bible the only work too hard

books in the world -

for the teeth of

- - - 56
XXV.
------
Obstinacy of the Jews. Inconstancy of Christians.
Persecution 57
XXVI.
It

XXVIl. Miracles
may
:
-----
All that suffer in matters of religion not martyrs.
be homicide
equal. To create nature as great a
59

miracle as to contradict or transcend her - 60

XXVIII. Reliques. Their efficacy to be suspected - 61
XXIX. Cessation of oracles. Uncertainty of human
history - 62
XXX. Spirits and witches. Power of evil spirits - 62
XXXI.

XXXII.
Traditional magic.
spirits

Spirit of God.
-.-.---64
....
Invocated
Courteous revelations of good

64
X XXIII. Tutelary and guardian angels . - - - 66
XXXIV. Man a microcosm, or little world - - - 68
XXXV. The immaterial world. Creation. Inorganity of
the soul 69
XXXVI. The whole creation a mystery : man particularly 70
XXXVII. All flesh is grass. The soul outlives death by its

proper nature : without a miracle - - 72

XXXVIII. Death should not amaze a Christian - - 73
XXXIX. In this world
scurely ..-----74
we manifest our divinity but ob-
 CONTENTS. XVU

XL. Naturally bashful yet not

ashamed thereof
as -----
;
so much afraid of death
75

XLII. Age doth not

-------76
XLI. Unanxious for fame. The world but a dream or
mock show
rectify, but incurvate our natures 77
XLIII.

XLIV.
Some

We
thread of life ------
other hand than that of nature twines the

are happier with death than we should have

78

been without it 79
XLV. To be immortal, die daily. Judicial proceeding at
last day] 81
XLVI. To settle the period of the world, impiety. Anti-
christ the philosopher's stone in divinity - 82
XLVII. The resurrection the

XLVIII. How
actions
shall the
-------84
dead arise
life

1
and spirit

Types of the
of all

resurrec-
our

tion to be found in nature - - - - 85

XLIX. Heaven. To define it (or hell) surpasseth my
divinity 86
L. LI. Hell. The heart of man the place the devils
dwell in 88
LH. Never afraid of hell. The servant, not the slave
of the Almighty 90
LIIL Life an abyss and mass of mercies. God better
to the worst than the best deserve - - 91
LIV. All salvation through Christ - • - - 92
LV. Our practice runs counter to our theory. We are
all monsters - 93
LVL Church of God narrowed. We go to heaven
against each other's will - - - - 95
LVn. Many

LVIII. "
contrarily
The
saved
-------96
who

compellation of
to man seem

' little
reprobated

flock' doth deject

; and

my devotion" 96
LIX. Yet I doubt not of my salvation through the
mercy of God 97
LX. Who deny good works yet challenge heaven by
the efficacy of their faith - - - - 97
•2*
XVlll CONTENTS.

Part II.

I. Charity : without it faith a mere notion. Naturally

framed to it, having no antipathies ; contemn
nothing but the multitude. A rabble among the
gentry, a nobility without heraldry - - - 99
II. Proper motives of charity. A phytognomy or phy-

III.
siognomy of plants and

The
Difference effaces
act of charity hath
------
many
animals.

branches.
Chiromancy.

Nakedness
101

of the soul to be apparelled. Controversies need

not passion. Merciless pens - - - - 104
IV. Uncharity to whole nations. The community of sin
doth not disparage goodness. Self-love. Hard to
judge others, since no man knows himself - - 106
V. Unselfishness. Sympathy. Friendship ; its powerful-
ness. Three mystical unions : two natures in one
person
two bodies
; three persons in one nature
--.
; one soul in
108
VI. Wonders in true affection : the soul its object. To
pray for our enemies no harsh precept - - 110
VII. No such injury as revenge ; no such revenge as con-
tempt of an injury. Man a mass of antipathies.
Charity to ourselves to be at variance with our
vices Ill
VIII. Father-sin of pride escaped. A common and school
philosophy for tlie reason of others ; a reserved and
experimental mine own. Vanity of toiling for
for

the knowledge which death gives every fool gratis 113

IX. Marriage. Harmony an hieroglyphical and shadowed
:

lesson of the whole creation. Incurables in physic,

law, divinity. No catholicon but death - - 115
X. No man bad. Poisons contain their own antidote.
Lord defend me from myself,' part of my litany.
'

Nothing truly alone but God - - - - 118

XI. My life a miracle of thirty years. Dreams. Are we
not all asleep 1 and the conceits of tliis life mere
dreams to those of the next . . - . 120
XII. Sleep. Bedward dormative 122
 !

CONTENTS. XIX

XIII. Avarice a deplorable piece of madness, beyond the

power of hellebo^. We may be liberal without
wealth. Poor men may build hospitals, and erect
cathedrals. Purblind statists - - . - 123
XIV. Charity ; to love God for himself, and our neighbour
for God. All that we truly love is invisible - 125
XV. No felicity in that the world adores. No happiness
but in obedience. Thy will be done - - 126

CHRISTIAN MORALS. Part I.

I. Pursue virtue virtuously - . - - . 133

II. A triumph (not ovation) over thy passions - - 134
III. Chastity. Adjourn not this virtue - - - - 134
IV. Be temperate to serve God better - - - - 134
V. Charity.
VI. Charity.
VII. Avaricious
Diffuse thy beneficence early
Give largely, widely
men live but unto
....
one world
-

-
-

-
-

-
135
135
136
VIII. The covetous merciless to themselves . - - 136
IX. Be grained
X. Plain virtue.
XI. Law
in virtue ; not lightly dipt
Have no by-ends ....
of thy country not the non ultra of thy honesty
. - - 137
137
13S
XII. Morality not ambulatory. No new ethics - - 138
XIII. Envy, an absurd depravity
XIV. Humility, owe not to humiliation ... -
138
139
XV. Forgiveness to be total
XVI. Charity the crowning grace
XVII. Fasten the rudder of thy
-----
will. Steer straight unto
139
140

good 140
XVIII. Bid early defiance to thy rooted vices - - - 141
XIX. Be substantially great : thine own monarch - - 141
XX. Be deaf to calumniators : they relieve the devils - 142
XXI. Annihilate not God's mercies by ingratitude - - 143
XXII. Conscience will shorten the great assize - - 143
XXIII. Flattery is a juggler. Fall not into self-adulation - 144
XXIV. Study the dominion of thyself - . . - 145
XXV. The hand of Providence. Fortune hath no name in
Sacred Scripture 145
XX CONTENTS.

XXVI. Be content though

of bravery
XXVII. Content may dwell in all stations
..--.--
-
poor.

- - 147
Yet fall not into affectation
146

XXVIII. Dross in all human tempers; but nothmg totally

bad 14S
XXIX. Overlook

XXX.
sities
not the mercies often bound up in adver-

Pass not the Rubicon of sin.

...
Merciful interven-
149

tions may recal us 149

XXXI. Men and women. Confound not their distinctions 150
XXXII. Rest not under the merits of thy ancestors shine :

by thy own - - 150 '

XXXIII. Dull not away thy days in sloth. Tediousness of

doing nothing 151
XXXIV. Busy not thy best member in the encomium of thy-
self 152
XXXV.

XXXVI.
Modesty preventeth
thankful for honest parents
Soldiery : their heroical vein.
a multitude
.... of sins.

The English gen-

Be
152

tleman 153

Part II.

I. Glut not thyself with pleasure. The strength of

delight is in its seldomness - - - . 154
II. Zoilism. Human lapses not to be too strictly
judged 155
III. Avoid dogmatism : let well weighed considerations
guide - - - _ 156
IV. Natural parts and good judgments rule the world 157
V. Swell not the leaves of learning by fruitless repe-
titions 1.58

prospect .......
VI. Despair not of better things whereof there

VII. Speckled face of honesty in the world -

is

-
yet no

-
159
ItO
VIII. Weigh not thyself in the scales of thy own opinion.
Self-conceit a fallacy of high content
IX. Physiognomy.
X. Court not
Schemes of look
felicity too far. It
....
sharpens affliction
- -

-
161
162
163
 CONTENTS. XXI

XL Ponder the acts of Providence. Judgment on

others, our monitions 164
XII. Good natured persons best founded for heaven - 165
\XIII. To learn to die, better than to study the ways of
'
dying - .- • - - - - 166

Part III.

T. No one age exemplary. The world early bad - 169

II. He honours God who imitates him _ . - 170
III. Embrace not the blind side of opinions - - 171
IV. To be virtuous by epitome be firm to the principles
of goodness - - 171
V. Guide not the hand of God.
good of others ..----
VI. Grain not vicious stains which virtuous washes
Repine not at the
172

might expunge 173

VII. Fatalism. Burden not the stars with thy faults - 174

IX.
virtues
Be able to be alone
--------
VIII. Let every division of life be happy in its proper
175
175
X. The whole world a phylactery : wisdom of God in
every thing we see 177
XL Think not to find heaven on earth : true beatitude
groweth not here 178
XII. Revenge ; feminine manhood. If no mercy for
others, be not cruel to thyself - . . 179
XIII. Study prophecies when they are become histories 180
XIV. Live unto the dignity of thy nature - . - 181
XV. The vices
ourselves
XVI. Forget not
we
.-.-...
scoff at in others, laugh at us within

wheel of things, but beat not thy

tlie
182

brains to foreknow them - . - . 183

XVII. Ingratitude, degenerous vice - - - -! 184
XVIIL Virtue of taciturnity 185
XIX. Oaths. Honest men's words Stygian oaths - - 185
XX. Personate only thyself Let veracity be thy virtue
in words, manners and actions . - - 186
XXll CONTENTS.

XXI. Labour
strained paradoxes ....
in the ethicks of faith ;

XXII. In seventy or eighty years one may have a curt

not in old high-
187

epitome of the whole course of time - - 187

XXIII. Elysium of a virtuously-composed mind. Forget
not the capital end of living - - - - 189
XXIV. Inequalities of this world will be righted in the
world to come 190
XXV. The

XXVI. That
to a better -.--.--
great advantage of this life,

the last flames are deferred,

that

owing
it is exordial

to the lon-
191

ganimity of God 192

XXVII. Wishes of good men for the world's
XXVIII. The world seems in its wane
XXIX. The world a parenthesis in eternity.
.... bettering

Parallelisms
- 193
194

in different ages - - - - - -194

XXX. Join both lives together, and live in one but for the
I other 195
Kciigio illcMd*
!
 RELIGIO MEDICI.

I. For my religion, though there be several circum-

stances that might persuade the world I have none at

all, as the general scandal of my profession, the natural

course of my studies, the indifFerency of my behaviour
and discourse in matters of religion, neither violently
defending one, nor with that common ardour and con-
tention opposing another ;
yet in despite hereof I dare,
without usurpation, assume the honourable style of a
Christian. Not that I merely owe this title to the font,

my education, or clime wherein I was born, as being

bred up either to confirm those principles my parents
instilled into my unwary understanding, or by a gene-
ral consent proceed in the religion of my country; but
having in my and confirmed judgment seen
riper years
and examined all, I find myself obliged by the princi-
ples of grace, and the law of mine own reason, to
embrace no other name but this neither doth herein:

my zeal so far make me forget the general charity I

owe unto humanity, as rather to hate than pity Turks,

Infidels, and (what is worse) Jews; rather contenting
myself to enjoy that happy style, than maligning those
who refuse so glorious a title.

3
 ;

26 RELIGIO MEDICI.

II. But because the name of a Christian is become

too general to express our faith, there being a geogra-
phy of rehgion as well as lands, and every clime dis-

tinguished not only by their laws and limits, but cir-

cumscribed by their doctrines and rules of faith ; to be
particular, I am of that reformed new-cast religion,
wherein I dislike nothing but the name ; of the same
belief our Saviour taught, the apostles disseminated,
the fathers authorized, and the martyrs confirmed
but by the sinister ends of princes, the ambition and
avarice of prelates, and the fatal corruption of times,
so decayed, impaired, and fallen from its native beauty,
that it required the careful and charitable hand of these
times to restore it to its primitive integrity. Now the
accidental occasion whereupon, the slender means
whereby, the low and abject condition of the person
by whom so good a work was set on foot, which in
our adversaries beget contempt and scorn, fills me with
wonder, and is the very same objection the insolent
pagans first cast at Christ and his disciples.
III. Yet have I not so shaken hands with those des-
perate resolutions, who had rather venture at large
their decayed bottom than bring her in to be new
trimmed in the dock who had rather promiscuously
;

retain all than abridge any, and obstinately be what

they are than what they have been, as to stand in dia-
meter and sword's point with them we have reformed :

from them, not against them for omitting those impro-

;

perations and terms of scurrility betwixt us, which only

difference our affections, and not our cause, there is be-
tween us one common name and appellation, one faith
and necessary body of principles common to us both
and therefore I am not scrupulous to converse and live
 RELIGIO MEDICI. 27

with them, to enter their churches in defect of ours,

and either pray with them, or for them. I could never

perceive any rational consequence from those many
texts which prohibit the children of Israel to pollute
themselves with the temples of the heathens ; we being
all and not divided by such detested im-
Christians,
pieties as might profane our prayers, or the place
wherein we make them or that a resolved conscience
;

may not adore her Creator any where, especially in

places devoted to his service where if their devotions
;

offend him, mine may please him, if theirs profane it,

mine may hallow it. Holy-water and crucifix (dan-
gerous to the common people) deceive not my judg-
ment, nor abuse my devotion at all: I am, I confess,
naturally inclined to that which misguided zeal terms
superstition; my common conversation I do acknow-
ledge austere, my behaviour full of rigour, sometimes
not without morosity yet at my devotion I love to use
;

the civility of my knee, my hat, and hand, with all

those outward and sensible motions which may express
or promote my invisible devotion. I should violate my
own arm rather than a church, nor willingly deface the
name of saint or martyr. At the sight of a cross or
crucifix I can dispense with my hat, but scarce with
the thought or memory of my Saviour I cannot laugh
;

at, but rather pity the fruitless journeys of pilgrims, or

contemn the miserable condition of friars ; for though
misplaced in circumstance, there is something in it of
devotion. I could never hear the Ave-Mary bell* with-

* A church bell that tolls every day at six and twelve of the clock ; at
the hearing whereof every one in what place soever, either of house or
street, betakes himself to his prayer, which is commonly directed to the
Virgin.
 ;

28 RELIGIO MEDICI.

out an elevation, or think it a sufficient warrant, be-

cause they erred in one circumstance, for me to 6i"r in

all, that is, in silence and dumb contempt ; whilst there-

fore they directed their devotions to her, I offered mine
to God, and rectified the errours of their prayers by
rightly ordering mine own : at a solemn procession I

have wept abundantly, while my consorts, blind with

opposition and prejudice, have fallen into an access of
scorn and laughter. There are questionless both in
Greek, Roman, and African churches, solemnities and
ceremonies whereof the wiser zeals do make a Chris-
tian use, and stand condemned by us, not as evil in
themselves, but as allurements and baits of superstition
to those vulgar heads that look asquint on the face of
truth, and those unstable judgments that cannot consist
in the narrow point and centre of virtue without a reel
or stagger to the circumference.
IV. As there were many reformers, so likewise many
reformations ; every country proceeding in a particular

way and method, according as their national interest,

together with their constitution and clime inclined them

some angrily and with extremity, others calmly and
with mediocrity, not rending but easily dividing the
community, and leaving an honest possibility of a re-
conciliation which though peaceable spirits do desire,
;

and may conceive that revolution of time and the mer-

cies of God may effect, yet that judgment that shall
consider the present antipathies between the two ex-
tremes, their contrarieties in condition, affection, and
opinion, may with the same hopes expect an union in
the poles of heaven.
V. But to difference myself nearer, and draw into a
lesser circle ; there is no church whose every part so
 ;

RELIGIO MEDICI. 29

squares unto my conscience, whose articles, constitu-

tions,and customs seem so consonant unto reason, and
as it were framed to my particular devotion, as this
whereof I hold my belief, the Church of England to ;

whose faith I am a sworn subject, and therefore in a

double obligation subscribe unto her articles, and en-
deavour to observe her constitutions; whatsoever is
beyond, as points indifferent, I observe according to the
rules of my private reason, or the humour or fashion of
my devotion ; neither believing this, because Luther
affirmed it, or disapproving that, because Calvin hath
disavouched it. I condemn not all things in the council
of Trent, nor approve all in the synod of Dort. In
brief, where the Scripture is silent the church is my
text ; where that speaks, 'tis but my comment where ;

there is a joint silence of both, I borrow not the rules

of my religion from Rome or Geneva, but the dictates

of mine own reason. It is an unjust scandal of our ad-
versaries, and a gross errour in ourselves, to compute
the nativity of our religion from Henry the Eighth,
who though he rejected the pope, refused not the faith
of Rome, and efiected no more than what his own pre-
decessors desired and assayed in ages past, and 'twas
conceived the state of Venice would have attempted in
our days. It is as uncharitable a point in us to fall

upon those popular scurrilities and opprobrious scoffs

of the Bishop of Rome, to whom as a temporal prince
we owe good language. I confess there is
the duty of
a cause of passion between us by his sentence I stand ;

excommunicated, heretic is the best language he affords

me yet can no ear witness I ever returned to him the
;

name of antichrist, man of sin, or whore of Babylon.

It is the method of charity to suffer without reaction

3*
 ;

30 EELIGIO MEDICI.

those usual satires, and invectives of the pulpit may

perchance produce a good effect on the vulgar, whose
ears are opener to rhetorick than logick ;
yet do they in
no vi^ise confirm the faith of wiser believers, who know
that a good cause needs not to be patroned by a passion,
but can sustain itself upon a temperate dispute.
VI. I could never divide myself from any man upon
the difference of an opinion, or be angry with his judg-
ment for not agreeing with me in that from which per-
haps within a few days I should dissent myself. I have
no genius to disputes in religion, and have often thought
it wisdom to decline them, especially upon a disadvan-

tage, or when the cause of truth might suffer in the

weakness of my patronage where we desire to be in-
:

formed 'tis good to contest with men above ourselves

but to confirm and establish our opinions 'tis best to
argue with judgments below our own, that the frequent
spoils and victories over their reasons may settle in
ourselves an esteem and confirmed opinion of our own.
Every man is not a proper champion for truth, nor fit

to take up the gauntlet in the cause of verity ; many,

from the ignorance of these maxims, and an incon-
siderate zeal unto truth, have too rashly charged the
troops of errour, and remain as trophies unto the enemies
of truth. A man may be in as just possession of truth
as of a city, and yet be forced to surrender ; 'tis there-
fore far better to enjoy her with peace, than to hazard
her on a battle : if therefore there rise any doubts in
my way I do forget them, or at least defer them, till

my better settled judgment and more manly reason be

able to resolve them ; for I perceive every man's own
reason is his best CEdipus, and will upon a reasonable
truce find a way to loose those bonds wherewith the
 RELIGIO MEDICI. 31

subtleties of errour have enchained our more

flexible and

tender judgnaents. where truth seems

In philosophy,
double faced, there is no man more paradoxical than
myself; but in divinity I love to keep the road and ;

though not in an implicit, yet an humble faith, follow

the great wheel of the church, by which I move, not
reserving any proper poles or motion from the epicycle
of my own brain by this means I leave no gap for
:

heresy, schisms, or errours, of which at present 1 hope I

shall not injure truth tosay I have no taint or tincture.
I must confess my greener studies have been polluted
with two or three, not any begotten in the latter cen-
turies, but old and obsolete, such as could never have

been revived but by such extravagant and irregular

heads as mine for indeed heresies perish not with their
;

authors, but like the river Arethusa, though they lose

their currents in one place they rise up again in another.
One general council is not able to extirpate one single
heresy ; it may be cancelled for the present, but revolu-
tion of time and the like aspects from heaven, will re-
store it, when it will flourish till it be condemned again;
for as though there were a metempsuchosis, and the
soul of one man passed into another, opinions do find
after certain revolutions, men and minds like those that

first begat them. To see ourselv'es again we need not

look for Plato's year.* Eveiy man is not only himself;
there have been many Diogenes, and as many Timons,
though but few of that name ; men are lived over again,
the world is now as it was in ages past; there was none

* A revolution of certain thousand years, when all things should re-

turn unto their former estate, and he be teaching again in his school as
when he delivered this opinion.
32 RELIGIO MEDICI.

then but there hath been some one since that parallels
him, and is as it were his revived self.
VII. Now the first of mine was that of the Arabians,
that the souls of men perished with their bodies, but
should yet be raised again at the last day : not that I

did absolutely conceive a mortality of the soul; but

if that were, which faith, not philosophy, hath yet
throughly disproved, and that both entered the grave
together, yet I held the same conceit thereof that we
all do of the body, that it should rise again. Surely it

is but the merits of our unworthy natures, if we sleep

in darkness until the last alarum a serious reflex upon :

my own unworthiness did make me backward from

challenging this prerogative of my soul; so I might
enjoy my Saviour at the last, I could with patience be
nothing almost unto eternity. The second was that of
Origen ; that God would not persist in his vengeance
for ever, but after a definite time of his wrath he would
release the damned souls from torture : which errour I
fell into upon a serious contemplation of the great at-
tribute of God his Mercy and did a little cherish it in
;

myself, because I found therein no malice, and a ready

weight to sway me from the other extreme of despair,
whereunto melancholy and contemplative natures are
too easily disposed. A third there is which I did never
positively maintain or practise, but have often
wished it
had been consonant to truth and not oflensive to my re-
ligion, and that is the prayer for the dead whereunto ;

I was inclined from some charitable inducements,

whereby I could scarce contain my prayers for a
friend at the ringing of a bell, or behold his corpse
without an oraison for his soul : 'twas a good way me-
thought to be remembered by posterity, and far more
 ;

K.ELIGIO MEDICI. 33

noble than an history. These opinions I never main-

tained with pertinacity, or endeavoured to inveigle any
man's belief unto mine, nor so much as ever revealed
or disputed them with my dearest friends ; by which
means I neither propagated them in others, nor con-
firmed them in myself, but suffering them to flame upon
their own substance without addition of new fuel, they
went out insensibly of themselves : therefore these
opinions, though condemned by lawful councils, were
not heresies in me, but bare errours, and single lapses of
my understanding without a joint depravity of my will.

Those have not only depraved understandings, but dis-

eased affections, which cannot enjoy a singularity with-

out a heresy, or be the author of an opinion without
they be of a sect also ; this was the villany of the first

schism of Lucifer, who was not content to err alone,

but drew into his faction many legions of spirits and ;

upon this experience he tempted only Eve, as well un-

derstanding the communicable nature of sin, and that
to deceive but one was tacitly and upon consequence
to delude them both.
VIII. arise we have the pro-
That heresies should
phecy of Christ but that old ones should be abolished
;

we hold no prediction. That there must be heresies, is

true, not only in our church, but also in any other;

even in doctrines heretical there will be super-heresies

and Arians not only divided from their church, but also
among themselves : for heads that are disposed unto
schism and complexionably propense to innovation, are
naturally indisposed for a community, nor will ever be
confined unto the order or economy of one body and ;

therefore when they separate from others they knit but

loosely among themselves nor contented with a gene-
;
34 RELIGIO MEDICI.

ral breach or dichotomy with their church, do subdi-

vide and mince themselves almost into atoms. 'Tis
true, that men of singular parts and humours have not
been free from singular opinions and conceits in all

ages ; retaining something not only beside the opinion

of their own church or any other, but also any particu-
lar author ; which, notwithstanding, a sober judgment
may do without offence or heresy; for there is yet,
after all the decrees of councils and the niceties of the
schools, many things untoucht, unimagined, wherein
the liberty of an honest reason may play and expatiate
with security, and far without the circle of an heresy.
IX. As for those wingy mysteries in divinity and
airy subtleties in religion, which have unhinged the
brains of better heads, they never stretched the pia-
mater of mine methinks there be not impossibilities
;

enough in religion, for an active faith; the deepest

mysteries ours contains, have not only been illustrated,
but maintained by syllogism and the rule of reason : I

love to lose myself in a mystery, to pursue my reason

to an altitudo ! 'Tis my solitary recreation to pose
my apprehension with those involved enigmas and rid-
dles of the Trinity, with incarnation and resurrection.
I can answer all the objections of Satan and my rebel-

lious reason with that odd resolution I learned of Ter-

tullian, certum est quia im-possihile est. I desire to ex-
ercise my faith in the difficultest point ; for to credit
ordinary and visible objects is not faith, but persuasion.
Some believe the better for seeing Christ's sepulchre,
and when they have seen the Red Sea, doubt not of the
miracle. Now contrarily I bless myself, and am thank-
ful that I lived not in the days of miracles, that I never

saw Christ nor his disciples; I would not have been

 ;

RELIGIO MEDICI. 35

one of those Israelites that passed the Red Sea, nor one
of Christ's patients on wliom he wrought his wonders
then had my faith been thrust upon me, nor should I

enjoy that greater blessing pronounced to all that be-

lieve and sawnot. 'Tis an easy and necessary belief
to credit what our eye and sense hath examined I be- ;

lieve he was dead and buried, and rose again and ;

desire to see him in his glory, rather than to contem-

plate him in his cenotaph, or sepulchre. Nor is this
much to believe ; as we have reason, we owe this faith

unto history : they only had the advantage of a bold

and noble faith, who lived before his coming, who upon
obscure prophecies and mystical types could raise a
belief, and expect apparent impossibilities.
X. 'Tis true there is an edge in all firm belief, and
with an easy metaphor we may say the sword of faith
but in these obscurities I rather use it in the adjunct the
apostle gives it, a buckler ; under which I conceive a
wary combatant may lie invulnerable. Since I was of
understanding to know we know nothing, my reason
hath been more pliable to the will of faith I am now ;

content to understand a mystery without a rigid defini-

tion, in an easy and Platonick description. That alle-

gorical description of Hermes* pleaseth me beyond all

the metaphysical definitions of divines where I cannot ;

satisfy my reason humour my fancy I had as

I love to :

lieve you tell me that anima est angeAus hominis, est

corpus Dei, as entelechia ; lux est umbra Dei, as actus
perspicui ; where there is an obscurity too deep for our
reason, 'tis good to sit down with a description, peri-
phrasis, or adumbration ; for by acquainting our reason

* Sphaera, cujus centrum ubique, circumferentia nullibi.

 36 RELIGIO MEDICI.

how imable to display the visible and obvious effects

it is

of nature, becomes more humble and submissive unto

it

'the subtleties of faith and thus I teach my haggard and

;

unreclaimed reason to stoop unto the lure of faith. I

believe there was already a tree whose fruit our un-

happy parents tasted, though in the same chapter, when
God forbids it, 'tis positively said the plants of the field
were not yet grown for God had not caused it to rain
;

upon the earth. I believe that the serpent (if we shall

literally understand it) from his proper form and figure

made his motion on his belly before the curse. I find

the trial of the pucellage and virginity of womep,
which God ordained the Jews, is very fallible. Ex-
perience, and history informs me, that not only many
particular women, but likewise whole nations have es-
caped the curse of childbirth, which God seems to pro-
nounce upon the whole sex yet do I believe that all ;

this is true, which indeed my reason would persuade

me to be false and this 1 think is no vulgar part of

;

faith, to believe a thing not only above, but contrary to

reason, and against the arguments of our proper senses.
XI. In my solitary and retired imagination,

(Neque enim, cum lectulus, aut me

Porticus excepit, desum mihi,)

I remember I am not alone, and therefore forget not to

contemplate him and his attributes who is ever with
me, especially those two mighty ones, his wisdom and
eternity ; with the one I recreate, with the other I con-
found my understanding : for who can speak of eternity
without a solecism, or think thereof without an ecstacy?
Time we may comprehend, 'tis but five days elder than
 ;

RELIGIO MEDICI. 37

ourselves, and hath the same horoscope with the world

but to retire so far back as to apprehend a beginning,
to give such an infinite start forwards as to conceive
an end in an essence that we affirm hath neither the
one nor the other, it puts my reason to St. Paul's sanc-
tuary ; my philosophy dares not say the angels can do
it ; God hath not made a creature that can comprehend
him, 'tis the privilege of his own nature. I am that I
am, was his own definition unto Moses ; and 'twas a
short one to confound mortality, that durst question
God, or ask him what he was ; indeed he only is ; all

others have and shall be, but in eternity there is no dis-

tinction of tenses ; and therefore that terrible term, pre-
destination, which hath troubled so many weak heads
to conceive, and the wisest to explain, is in respect to
God no prescious determination of our estates to come,
but a definite blast of his will already fulfilled, and at
the instant that he first decreed it ; for to his eternity,
which is indivisible and all together, the last trump is

already sounded, the reprobates in the flame, and the

blessed in Abraham's bosom. St. Peter speaks mo-
destly when he saith, a thousand years to God are but
as one day ; for to speak like a philosopher, those con-
tinued instances of time which flow into a thousand
years, make not to him one moment ; what to us is to
come, to his eternity is present, his whole duration
being but one permanent point without succession,
parts, flux, or division.
XII. There is no attribute that adds more difficulty
to the mystery of the Trinity, where, though in a rela-
tive way of Father and Son, we must deny a priority.
I wonder how Aristotle could conceive the world eter-
nal, or how he could make good two eternities; his
4
 38 RELIGIO MEDICI.

similitude of a triangle comprehended in a square, doth

somewhat illustrate the trinity of our souls, and that the
triple unity of God ; for there is in us not three, but a
trinity of souls, because there is in us, if not three dis-
tinct souls, yet differing faculties, that can and do sub-
sist apart in different subjects, and yet in us are so
united as to make but one soul and substance if one :

soul were so perfect as to inform three distinct bodies,

that were a petty trinity conceive the distinct number
;

of three, not divided nor separated by the intellect, but

actually comprehended in its unity, and that is a perfect
trinity. I have often admired the mystical way of Py-

thagoras, and the secret magick of numbers beware of ;

philosophy, is a precept not to be received in too large

a sense; for in this mass of nature there is a set of
things that carry in their front, though not in capital
letters yet in stenography and short characters, some-
thing of divinity, which to wiser reasons serve as lumi-
naries in the abyss of knowledge, and to judicious
beliefs, as scales and roundles to mount the pinnacles
and highest pieces of divinity. The severe schools
shall never laugh me out of the philosophy of Hermes,
that this visible world is but a picture of the invisible,
wherein as in a portrait, things are not truly, but in
equivocal shapes, and as they counterfeit some more
real substance in that invisible fabrick.
'-• XIII. That other attribute wherewith I recreate my
devotion, is his wisdom, in which I am happy and ; for
the contemplation of this only, do not repent me that I

was bred in the way of study : the advantage I have of

the vulgar, with the content and happiness I conceive
therein, is an ample recompence for all my endeavours,
in what part of knowledge soever. Wisdom is his
 ;

RELIGIO MEDICI. 39

most beauteous attribute, no man can attain unto it, yet

Solomon pleased God when he desired it. He is wise
because he knows all things, and he knoweth all things
because he made them all but his greatest knowledge
;

is in comprehending that he made not, that is, himself.

And this is also the greatest knowledge in man. For

this do I honour my own profession, and embrace the

counsel even of the devil himself; had he read such a

lecture in paradise as he did at Delphos,* we had better
known ourselves, nor had we stood in fear to know
him. I know he is wise in all, wonderful in what we
conceive, but far what we comprehend not
more in

for we behold him but asquint, upon reflex or shadow

our understanding is dimmer than Moses' eye, we are
ignorant of the back parts or lower side of his divinity.
Therefore to pry into the maze of his counsels, is not
only folly in-man, but presumption even in angels; like
us, they are his servants not his senators ; he holds no
council but that mystical one of the Trinity, wherein
though there be three Persons, there is but one mind,
that decrees without contradiction ; nor needs he any,
his actions are not begot with deliberation, his wisdom
naturally knows what is best ; his intellect stands ready
fraught with the superlative and purest ideas of good-
ness ; which are two motions
consultation and election,
in us, make but one in him ; from
his actions springing
his power, at the first touch of his will. These are
contemplations metaphysical; my humble speculations
have another method, and are content to trace and dis-
cover those expressions he hath left in his creatures,
and the obvious effects of nature. There is no danger

*TyZ^t visLUTcv. Nosce teipsum.

 — ;;; ;

40 RELIGIO MEDICI.

to profound these mysteries, no sanctum sanctorum in

philosophy ; was made to be inhabited by
the world
beasts, but studied and contemplated by man 'tis the ;

debt of our reason we owe unto God, and the homage

we pay for not being beasts without this the world is
;

still as though it had not been, or as it was before the

sixth day, when as yet there was not a creature that

could conceive or say there was a world. The wisdom
of God receives small honour from those vulgar heads
that rudely stare about, and with a gross rusticity ad-
mire his works ; those highly magnify him, whose judi-
cious inquiry into his acts, and deliberate research into
his creatures, return the duty of a devout and learned
admiration. Therefore

Search while thou wilt, and let thy reason go

To ransom truth e'en to th' abyss below
Rally the scattered causes, and that line
Which nature twists, be able to untwine
It is thy Maker's will, for unto none
But unto reason can he e'er be known.
The devils do know thee, but those damned meteours
Build not thy glory, but confound thy creatures.
Teach my endeavours so thy works to read,
That learning them, in thee I may proceed.
Give thou my reason that instructive flight.

Whose weary wings may on thy hands still light

Teach me to soar aloft, yet ever so,

When near the sun to stoop again below

Thus shall my humble feathers safely hover,
And though near earth, more than the heavens discover.
And then at last, when homeward I shall drive
Rich with the spoils of nature to my hive.
There will I sit like that industrious fly,
Buzzing thy praises, which shall never die
Till death abrupts them, and succeeding glory
Bid me go on in a more lasting story.
 REL GIO MEDICI.
I 41

And this is almost all wherein an humble creature

may endeavour to requite, and some way to retribute

unto his Creator ; for if not he that sayeth, Lord, Lord,

but he that doeth the will of his Father, shall be saved,
certainly our wills must be our performances, and our
intents make out our actions; otherwise our pious
labours shall find anxiety in their graves, and our best
endeavours not hope but fear a resurrection.
XIV. There is but one first cause, and four second
causes of some are without efficient, as God;
all things;
others without matter, as angels some without form, ;

as the first matter ; but every essence created or un-

created, hath its final cause, and some positive end both
of its essence and operation ; this is the cause I grope
after in the works of nature, on this hangs the provi-
dence of God: to raise so beauteous a structure as the
world and the creatures thereof, was but his art, but
their sundry and divided operations with their predesti-
nated ends, are from the treasury of his wisdom, In
the causes, nature, and affections of the eclipses of the

sun and moon, there is most excellent speculation ; but

to profound farther, and to contemplate a reason why
his providence hath so disposed and ordered their mo-
tions in that vast circle, as to conjoin and obscure each
other, is a sweeter piece of reason and a diviner point
of philosophy ; therefore sometimes, and in some things,

there appears to me as much divinity in Galen his

books de usu partium, as in Suarez' metaphysics : had

Aristotle been as curious in the inquiry of this cause as
he was of the other, he had not left behind him an im-
perfect piece of philosophy, but an absolute tract of
divinity.
XV. JVatura nihil agit frustra, is the only indis-
4*
 ;;

42 RELIGIO MEDICI.

putable axiom in philosophy; there are no grotesques

in nature, nor any thing framed to up empty can-
fill

tons, and unnecessary spaces; in the most imperfect

creatures, and such as were not preserved in the ark,
but having their seeds and principles in the womb of
nature, are everywhere where the power of the sun is,
in these is the wisdom of his hand discovered; out of
this rank Solomon chose the object of his admiration

indeed what reason may not go to school to the wis-

dom of bees, ants, and spiders? What wise hand
teacheth them to do what reason cannot teach us?
Ruder heads stand amazed at those prodigious pieces
of nature, whales, elephants, dromedaries and camels
these, I confess, are the colossus and majestick pieces of
her hand but in these narrow engines there is more
;

curious mathematicks, and the civility of these little

citizens more neatly sets forth the wisdom of their
Maker. Who admires not Regio-Montanus his fly be-
yond his eagle? or wonders not more at the operation
of two souls in those little bodies, than but one in the
trunk of a cedar ? I could never content my contem-
plation with those general pieces of wonder, the flux
and reflux of the sea, the increase of Nile, the conver-
sion of the needle to the north; and have studied to
match and parallel those in the more obvious and ne-
glected pieces of nature, which without further travel
I can do in the cosmography of myself. We carry
with us the wonders we seek without us ; there is all

Africa and her prodigies in us ; we are that bold and

adventurous piece of nature, which he that studies,
wisely learns in a compendium what others labour at
in a divided piece and endless volume.
XVI. Thus there are two books from whence I col-
 ;

RELIGIO MEDICI. 43

lect my divinity; besides that written one of God,

another of his servant nature, that universal and publick
manuscript that Hes expansed unto the eyes of all ; those
that never saw him in the one have discovered him in
the other : this was the scripture and theology of the

heathens ; the natural motion of the sun made them

more admire him, than its supernatural station did the
children of Israel ; the ordinary effect of nature wrought
more admiration in them, than in the other all his mira-
cles ; surely the heathens knew better how to join and
read these mystical letters thanwe Christians, who cast
a more careless eye on these common hieroglyphicks,
and disdain to suck divinity from the flowers of nature.
Nor do I so forget God as to adore the name of nature
which I define not with the schools, the principle of
motion and rest, but that straight and regular line, that
settled and constant course the wisdom of God hath
ordained the actions of his creatures, according to their
several kinds. To make a revolution every day is the
nature of the sun, because of that necessary course
which God hath ordained it, from which it cannot
swerve but by a faculty from that voice which first
gave it motion. Now this course of nature God sel-
dom alters or perverts, but like an excellent artist hath
so contrived his work, that with the selfsame instru-
ment, without a new creation, he may effect his ob-
scurest designs. Thus he sweeteneth the water with a
wood ;
preserveth the creatures in the ark, which the
blast of his mouth might have as easily created; for
God is like a skilful geometrician, who when more
easily and with one stroke of his compass he might de-
scribe or divide a right line, had yet rather do this in a
44 REL I GIO MEDICI.

circle or longer way, according to the constituted and

forelaid principles of his art ; yet this rule of his he
doth sometimes pervert, to acquaint the world with his
prerogative, lest the arrogancy of our reason should
question his power and conclude he could not and thus :

I call the effects of nature the works of God, whose

hand and instrument she only is ; and therefore to
ascribe his actions unto her, is to devolve the honour of
the principal agent upon the instrument ; which if with
reason we may do, then let our hammers rise up and
boast they have built our houses, and our pens receive
the honour of our writing. I hold there is a general
beauty in the works of God, and therefore no deformity
in any kind or species of creature whatsoever I can- ;

not tell by what logick we call a toad, a bear, or an ele-

phant ugly they being created in those outward shapes

;

and figures which best expi'ess those actions of their in-

ward forms, and having past that general visitation of
God who saw that all that he had made was good, that
is, conformable to his will, which abhors deformity and

is the rule of order and beauty. There is no deformity

but in monstrosity, wherein notwithstanding there is a
kind of beauty, nature so ingeniously contriving the
irregularparts as they become sometimes more re-
markable than the principal fabrick. To speak yet
more narrowly, there was never any thing ugly or mis-
shapen but the chaos; wherein notwithstanding, to

speak strictly, there was no deformity, because no

form, nor Was it yet impregnate by the voice of God.
Now nature is not at variance with art nor art with
nature, they being both the servants of his providence ;

art is the perfection of nature ; were the world now as

 !

RELIGIO MEDICI. 45

it was in the sixth day, there were yet a chaos nature ;

hath made one world and art another. In brief, all

things are artificial, for nature is the art of God.
XVII. This is the ordinary and open way of his
providence, which art and industry have in a good part
discovered, whose effects we may foretell without an
oracle ; to foreshow these, is not prophecy but prognos-
tication. There is another way full of meanders and
labyrinths,whereof the devil have no exact
and spirits

ephemerides, and that is a more particular and obscure

method of his providence, directing the operations of
individuals and single essences; this we call fortune,

that serpentine and crooked whereby he draws

line

those actions his wisdom intends, in a more unknown

and secret way. This cryptick and involved method of
his providence have I ever admired, nor can I relate

the history of my life, the occurrences of my days, the

escapes of dangers and hits of chance, with a Bezo las
Manos to fortune, or a bare gramercy to my good stars.

Abraham might have thought the ram in the thicket

came thither by accident; human reason would have
said that mere chance conveyed Moses in the ark to
the sight of Pharaoh's daughter; what a labyrinth is
there in the story of Joseph, able to convert a stoick
Surely there are in every man's life certain rubs, dou-
blingsand wrenches, which pass awhile under the effects
of chance, but at the last well examined prove the mere
hand of God, 'Twas not dumb chance, that to dis-
cover the fougade or powder-plot, contriv^ed a miscar-
riage in the letter. I like the victory of 88. the better
for that one occurrence which our enemies imputed to
our dishonour and the partiality of fortune, to wit, the
tempests and contrariety of winds. King Philip did
46 RELIGIO MEDICI.

not detract from the nation when he said he sent his

armado to fight with men, and not to combat with the
winds. Where there is a manifest disproportion be-
tween the powers and forces of two several agents,
upon a maxim of reason we may promise the victory
to the superiour ; but when unexpected accidents slip in

and unthought-of occurrences intervene, these must

proceed from a power that owes no obedience to those
axioms; where, as in the writing upon the wall, we
behold the hand but see not the spring that moves it.
The success of that petty province of Holland (of which
the grand Segniour proudly said that if they should
trouble him as they did the Spaniard he would send his
men with shovels and pickaxes and throw it into the
sea) I cannot altogether ascribe to the ingenuity and
industry of the people, but to the mercy of God that
hath disposed them to such a thriving genius ; and to
the will of his providence that dispenseth her favour to
each country in their preordinate season. All cannot
be happy at once ; for because the glory of one state
depends upon the ruin of another, there is a revolution
and vicissitude of their greatness, which must obey the
swing of that wheel not moved by intelligences, but by
the hand of God, whereby all estates arise to their
zenith and vertical points, according to their predesti-
nated periods. For the lives not only of men, but of
commonweals and the whole world, run not upon an
helix that still enlargeth, but on a circle; where ar-
riving to their meridian, they decline in obscurity and
fall under the horizon again.
XVIII. These must not therefore be named the effects

of fortune, but in a relative way, and as we term the

works of nature. It was the ignorance of man's rea-
 ;;

RELIGIO MEDICI. 47

son that begat this very name, and by a careless term

miscalled the providence of God ; no liberty
for there is
for causes to operate in a loose and straggling v^^ay,
nor any effect whatsoever but hath its warrant from
some universal or superiour cause. 'Tis not a ridicu-
lous devotion to say a prayer before a game at tables

for even in sortilegies and matters of greatest uncer-

tainty, there is a settled and preordered course of
effects. It is we that are blind, not fortune; because
our eye is too dim to discover the mystery of her effects
we foolishly paint her blind, and hoodwink the provi-
dence of the Almighty. I cannot justify that con-
temptible proverb, that fools only are fortunate; or
that insolent paradox, that a wise man is out of the
reach of fortune ; much less those opprobrious epithets
of poets, whore, bawd, and strumpet. 'Tis, I confess,

the common fate of men of singular gifts of mind to be

destitute of those of fortune ; which doth not any way
deject the spirit of wiser judgments, who throughly
understand the justice of this proceeding, and being
enriched with higher donatives cast a more careless
eye on these vulgar parts of felicity. It is a most un-
just ambition to desire to engross the mercies of the
Almighty, nor to be content with the goods of mind
without a possession of those of body or fortune : and
it is an errour worse than heresy to adore these comple-
mental and circumstantial pieces of felicity, and under-
value those perfections and essential points of happiness
wherein we resemble our Maker. To wiser desires it

is satisfaction enough to deserve, though not to enjoy

the favours of fortune ; let providence provide for fools
'tis not partiality but equity in God, who deals with us
but as our natural parents ; those that are able of body
 ;

48 RELIGIO MEDICI.

and mind, he leaves to their deserts ; to those of weaker

merits he imparts a larger portion, and pieces out the
defect of one by the access of the other. Thus have
we no just quarrel with nature for leaving us naked ; or
to envy the horns, hoofs, skins, and furs of other crea-
tures, being provided with reason that can supply them
all. We need not labour with so many arguments to
confute judicial astrology, for if there be a truth therein
it doth not injure divinity ; if to be born under Mercury
disposeth us to be witty, under Jupiter to be wealthy, I
do not owe a knee unto these, but unto that merciful
hand that hath ordered my and uncertain
indifferent
nativity unto such benevolous aspects. Those that
held that all things were governed by fortune, had not
erred, had they not persisted there the Romans that ;

erected a temple to fortune acknowledged therein,

though in a blinder way, somewhat of divinity for in ;

a wise supputation all things begin and end in the

Almighty. There is a nearer way to heaven than
Homer's chain an easy logick may conjoin heaven and
;

earth in one argument, and with less than a sorites re-

solve all For though we christen
things into God.
effects by
most sensible and nearest causes, yet is
their
God the true and infallible cause of all whose con- ;

course though it be general, yet doth it subdivide itself

into the particular actions of every thing, and is that
spirit by which each singular essence not only subsists
but performs its operation.
XIX. The bad construction and perverse comment
on these pair of second causes, or visible hands of God,
have perverted the devotion of many unto atheism
who forgetting the honest advisoes of faith, have
listened unto the conspiracy of passion and reason. I
 RELIGIO MEDICI. 49

have therefore always endeavoured to compose those

feuds and angry dissentions between affection, faith,
and reason ; for there is in our soul a kind of triumvi-
rate, or triple government of three competitors, which
distract, the peace of this our commonwealth not less
than did that other the state of Rome.
As reason is a rebel unto faith, so passion unto rea-
son; as the propositions of faith seem absurd unto
reason, so the theorems of reason unto passion, and
both [reason and passion] unto [faith ;] yet a moderate
and peaceable discretion may so state and order the
matter, that they may be all kings and yet make but

one monarchy, every one exercising his sovereignty

and prerogative in a due time and place, according to
the restraint and limit of circumstance. There is, as
in philosophy, so in divinity, sturdy doubts and boiste-
rous objections, wherewith the unhappiness of our
knowledge too nearly acquainteth us. More of these
no man hath known than myself, which I confess I
conquered, not in a martial posture but on my knees.
For our endeavours are not only to combat with
doubts, but always to dispute with the devil ; the vil-
lany of that spirit takes a hint of infidelity from ouv
studies, and by demonstrating a naturality in one way
makes us mistrust a miracle in another. Thus having
perused the Archidoxis and read the secret sympathies
of things, he would dissuade my belief from the miracle
of the brazen serpent, make me conceit that image
worked by sympathy, and was but an Egyptian trick
to cure their diseases without a miracle. Again, having
seen some experiments of bitumen, and having read far
more of naphtha, he whispered to my curiosity the fire
of the altar might be natural ; and bid me mistrust a
5
 ;

50 RELIGIO MEDICI.

miracle in Elias when he intrenched the altar round

with water ; for that inflammable substance yields not
easily unto water, but flames in the arms of its antago-
nist. And thus would he inveigle my belief to think
the combustion of Sodom might be natural, and that
there was an asphaltick and bituminous nature in that
lake before the fire of Gomorrah. I know that manna
is now plentifully gathered in Calabria, and Josephus
tells me, in his days it was as plentiful in Arabia; the
devil therefore made the query, where was then the
miracle in the days of Moses ? the Israelites saw but
that in his time the natives of those countries behold in
ours. Thus the devil played at chess with me, and
yielding a pawn thought to gain a queen of me, taking
advantage of my honest endeavours ; and whilst I la-

boured to raise the structure of my reason, he strived

to undermine the edifice of my faith.
XX.
Neither had these or any other ever such ad-
vantage of me as to incline me to any point of infidelity
or desperate positions of atheism ; for I have been these
many years of opinion there was never any. Those
that held religion was man from beasts
the difference of
have spoken probably, and proceed upon a principle as
inductive as the other. That doctrine of Epicurus, that
denied the providence of God, was no atheism, but a
magnificent and high-strained conceit of his majesty,
which he deemed too sublime to mind the trivial

actions of those inferior creatures. That fatal neces-

sity of the Stoicks, is nothing but the immutable law of
his will.Those that heretofore denied the divinity of
theHoly Ghost, have been condemned but as hereticks
and those that now deny our Saviour (though more
than hereticks) are not so much as atheists ; for though
 RELIGIO MEDICI. 51

they deny two persons in the Trinity, they hold as we

do, there is but one God.
That villain and secretary of hell that composed that
miscreant piece of the three impostors, though divided
from all religions, and was neither Jew, Turk, nor
Christian, was not a positive atheist. I confess every
country hath its Machiavel, every age its Lucian,
whereof common heads must not hear, nor more ad-
vanced judgments too rashly venture on; it is the rhe-
torick of Satan, and may pervert a loose or prejudicate
belief
XXL I confess I have perused them all, and can dis-

cover nothing that may startle a discreet belief; yet

are there heads carried off with the* wind and breath of
such motives. I remember a doctor of physic in Italy,

who could not perfectly believe the immortality of the

soul, because Galen seemed to make a doubt thereof.
With another 1 was familiarly acquainted in France, a
divine and man of singular parts, that on the same
point was so plunged and gravelled with three lines of

Seneca,* that all our antidotes, drawn from both Scrip-

ture and philosophy, could not expel the poison of his
errour. There are a set of heads that can credit the
relations of mariners, yet question the testimonies of
St. Paul; and peremptorily maintain the traditions of
iEHan or Pliny, yet in histories of Scripture raise
queries and objections, believing no more than they can
parallel in human authors. I confess there are in

* Mors individua est noxia corpori

Nee parceiis animse.
Post mortem nihil est, ipsaque mors nihil.

Tota morimur, nuUaque pars manet

Nostri.
 ;

52 RELIGIO MEDICI.

Scripture stories that do exceed the fable of poets, and

to a captious reader found hke Garagantua or Bevis
search all the legends of times past, and the fabulous
conceits of these present, and 'twill be hard to find one
that deserves to carry the buckler unto Samson ; yet is

all this of an easy possibility, if we conceive a divine

concourse or an influence but from the little finger of
the Almighty. It is impossible that either in the dis-
course of man or in the infallible voice of God, to the
weakness of our apprehensions, there should not appear
irregularities, Contradictions, and antinomies myself ;

could shew a catalogue of doubts never yet imagined

nor questioned, as I know, which are not resolved at
the first hearing ; not fantastick queries or objections of
air, for I cannot hear of atoms in divinity. I can read
the history of the pigeon that was sent out of the ark,
and returned no more, yet not question how she found
out her mate that was left behind that Lazarus was ;

raised from the dead, yet not demand where in the in-
terim his soul aw^aited or raise a law-case, whether
;

his heir might lawfully detain his inheritance be-

queathed unto him by his death ; and he, though re-

stored to life, have no plea or title unto his former pos-

sessions. Whether Eve was framed out of the left side
of Adam, I dispute not; because I stand not yet as-
sured which is the right side of a man, or whether
there be any such distinction in nature ; that she was
edified out of the rib of Adam I believe, yet raise no
question who shall arise with that rib at the resurrec-
tion. Whether Adam was an hermaphrodite, as the
rabbins contend upon the letter of the text ; because it

is contrary to reason there should be an hermaphrodite

before there was a woman, or a composition of two
 ;

REL I GIO MEDICI. 53

natures, before there was a second composed. Like-

wise, whether the world was created in autumn, sum-
mer, or the spring because it was created in them all
;

for whatsoever sign the sun possesseth those four sea-

sons are actually existent ; it is the nature of this lumi-
nary to distinguish the several seasons of the year, all
which it makes at one time in the whole earth, and
successive in any part thereof. There are a bundle of
curiosities, not only in philosophy but in divinity, pro-
posed and discussed bymen of most supposed abilities,
which indeed are not worthy our vacant hours, much
less our serious studies; pieces only fit to be placed
in Pantagruel's Hbrary, or bound up with Tartaretus
de modo cacandi.
XXII. These are niceties that become not those that
peruse so serious a mystery. There are others more
generally questioned and called to the bar, yet methinks
of an easy and possible truth. 'Tis ridiculous to put
off, or drown the general flood of Noah in that particu-

lar inundation of Deucalion ; that there was a deluge

once, seems not to me so great a miracle as that there
is not one always. How all the kinds of. creatures, not
only in their own competency of food
bulks, but with a
and sustenance, might be preserved in one ark, and
within the extent of three hundred cubits, to a reason
that rightly examines it will appear very feasible.
There is another secret, not contained in the Scripture,
which is more hard to comprehend, and put the honest
father to the refuge of a miracle ; and that is, not only
how the distinct pieces of the world and divided islands
should be first planted by men, but inhabited by tigers,
panthers, and bears. How America abounded with
beasts of prey and noxious animals, yet contained not
5*
 ;

54 UEL I GIO MEDICI.

in it that necessary creature, a horse, is very strange.

By what passage those, not only birds, but dangerous
and unwelcome beasts came over how there be crea-;

tures there which are not found in this triple continent

all which must needs be strange unto us, that hold but

one ark, and that the creatures began their progress

from the mountains of Ararat. They who to salve this
would make the deluge particular, proceed upon a
principle that I can no way grant not only upon the ;

negative of Holy Scriptures, but of mine own reason,

whereby I can make it probable that the world was as
well peopled in the time of Noah as in ours and fif- ;

teen hundred years to people the world as full a time

for them as four thousand years since have been to us.
There are other assertions and common tenents drawn
from Scripture, and generally believed as Scripture,
whereunto, notwithstanding, I would never betray the
liberty of my reason. 'Tis a postulate to me, that Me-
thusalem was the longest lived of all the children of
Adam, and no man when from
will be able to prove
it ;

the process of the text can manifest it may be other-

I

wise. That Judas perished by hanging himself, there

is no certainty in Scripture, though in one place it

seems to affirm it, and by a doubtful word hath given

occasion to translate it yet in another place, in a more
;

punctual description, it makes it improbable and seems

to overthrow it. That our fathers, after the flood,
erected the tower of Babel to preserve themselves
against a second deluge is generally opinioned and be-
lieved, yet is there another intention of theirs expressed
in Scripture ; besides, it is improbable from the circum-
stance of the place, that is, a plain in the land of Shinar.
These are no points of faith, and therefore may admit
 KELIGIO MEDICI. 55

a free dispute. There are yet others, and those fami-

harly concluded from the text, wherein (under favour)
I see no consequence. The church of Rome confidently
proves the opinion of tutelary angels from that answer
when Peter knockt at the door, It is not he, but his
angel ; that is, might some say, his messenger or some
body fi'om him ; for so the original signifies, and is as
likely to be the doubtful families meaning. This expo-
once suggested to a young divine that answered
sition I

upon this point to which I remember the Franciscan

;

opponent replied no more but that it was a new and no

authentick interpretation.
XXIII. These are but the conclusions and fallible
discourses of man upon the word of God, for such I do
believe the Holy Scriptures; yet were it of man, I

could not choose but say it was the singularest, and

superlative piece that hath been extant since the crea-
tion ; were I a pagan I should not refrain the lecture of
it ; and cannot but commend the judgment of Ptolemy,
that thought not his library complete without it. The
Alcoran of the Turks (I speak without prejudice) is an
ill-composed piece, containing in it vain and ridiculous
errours in philosophy, impossibilities, fictions, and vani-
ties beyond laughter, maintained by evident and open
sophisms, the policy of ignorance, deposition of univer-
sities, and banishment of learning, that hath gotten foot

by arms and violence this without a blow hath disse-

;

minated itself through the whole earth. It is not un-

remarkable what Philo first observed, that the law of
Moses continued two thousand years without the least
aheration whereas we see the laws of other common-
;

weals do alter with occasions; and even those that

pretended their original from some divinity, to have
 ;

56 RELIGIO MEDICI.

vanished without trace or memory. I believe besides

Zoroaster there were divers that writ before Moses,
who notwithstanding have suffered the common fate of
time. Men's works have an age Hke themselves, and
though they outlive their authors yet have they a stint
and period to their duration ; this only is a work too
hard for the teeth of time, and cannot perish but in the
general flames when all things shall confess their ashes.
XXIV. have heard some with deep sighs lament
I

the lost lines of Cicero others with as many groans

;

deplore the combustion of the library of Alexandria ; for

my own part, I think there be too many in the world,
and could with patience behold the urn and ashes of
the Vatican, could I with a few others recover the

perished leaves of Solomon. I would not omit a copy

of Enoch's pillars, had they many nearer authors than
Josephus, or did somewhat of tjie fable.
not relish
Some men have more than others have spoken
written
Pineda quotes more authors in one work than are
necessary in a whole world.* Of those three great
inventions in Germany two which are not
there are
without their incommodities, and 'tis disputable whe-
ther they exceed not their use and commodities. 'Tis
not a melancholy utinam of mine own, but the desires
of better heads, that there were a general synod not ;

to unite the incompatible difference of rehgion, but for

the benefit of learning ; to reduce it as it lay at first in
a few and solid authors, and to condemn to the fire

those swarms and millions of rhapsodies begotten only

to distract and abuse the weaker judgments of scho-

* Pineda, in his Monarchia Ecclesiastica quotes one thousand and

forty authors.
 ;

RELIGIO MEDICI. 57

lars, and to maintain the trade and mystery of typo-

graphers.
XXV. I cannot but wonder with what exceptions
the Samaritans could confine their beUef to the Penta-
teuch, or five books of Moses. I am ashamed at the

rabbinical interpretation of the Jews upon the Old

Testament, as much as their defection from the New.
And trulybeyond wonder how that contemptible
it is

and degenerate issue of Jacob, once so devoted to

ethnick superstition and so easily seduced to the ido-
latry of their neighbours, should now in such an obsti-
nate and peremptory belief adhere unto their own
doctrine, expect impossibilities, and in the face and eye
of the church persist without the least hope of conver-
sion ; this is a vice in them that were a virtue in us
for obstinacy in a bad cause is but constancy in a good.
And must accuse those of my own religion
herein I

for there is not any of such a fugitive faith, such an

unstable belief, as a Christian; none that do so oft
transform themselves, not unto several shapes of Chris-
tianity and of the same species, but unto more unna-
turaland contrary forms, of Jew and Mahometan that ;

from the name of Saviour can condescend to the bare

term of prophet and from an old belief that he is
;

come, fall to a new expectation of his coming. It is

the promise of Christ to make us all one flock ; but
how and when this union shall be, is as obscure to me
as the last day. Of those four members of religion we
hold a slender proportion; there are,I confess, some

new which accrue to our

additions, yet small to those
adversaries, and those only drawn from the revolt of
pagans, men but of negative impieties, and such as
deny Christ but because they never heard of him;
58 RELIGIO MEDICI.

but the religion of the Jew is expressly against the

Christian, and the Mahometan against both. For the
Turk, in the bulk he now stands, he is beyond all hope
of conversion; if he fall asunder there may be con-
ceived hopes, but not without strong improbabilities.
The Jew is obstinate in all fortunes ; the persecution of
fifteen hundred years hath but confirmed them in their
errour ; they have already endured whatsoever may be
and have suffered, in a bad cause, even to the
inflicted,

condemnation of their enemies. Persecution is a bad

and indirect way to plant religion it hath been the ;

unhappy method of angry devotions, not only to con-

firm honest religion, but wicked heresies and extrava-
gant opinions. It was the first stone and basis of our
faith none can more justly boast of persecutions, and
:

glory in the number and valour of martyrs ; for, to

speak properly, those are true and almost only exam-
ples of fortitude ; those that are fetcht from the field, or
drawn from camp, are not oft-times
the actions of the
so truly precedents of valour as audacity, and at the
best attain but to some bastard piece of fortitude. If
we shall strictly examine the circumstances and requi-
sites which Aristotle requires to true and perfect valour,
we shall find the name only in his master Alexander,
and as little in that Roman worthy Julius Csesar and ;

if any in that easy and active way have done so nobly

as to deserve that name, yet in the passive and more

terrible piece these have surpassed, and in a more
heroical way may claim the honour of that title. 'Tis
not in the power of every honest faith to proceed thus
far, or pass to heaven through the flames ; every one
hath it not in that full measure, nor in so audacious and
resolute a temper, as to endure those terrible tests and
 RELIGIO MEDICI. 59

trials; who way do

notwithstanding in a peaceable
truly adore their Saviour, and have (no doubt) a faith
acceptable in the eyes of God.
XXVI. Now as all that die in the war are not termed
soldiers, so neither can I properly term all those that
suffer in matters of religion, martyrs. The council of
Constance condemns John Huss for an heretick, the
stories of his own party style him a martyr ; he must
needs offend the divinity of both, that says he was
neither the one nor the other. There are many (ques-
tionless) canonized on earth that shall never be saints
in heaven ; and have their names in histories and mar-
tyrologies, who in the eyes of God are not so perfect
martyrs as was that wise heathen Socrates, that suf-

fered on a fundamental point of religion, the unity of

God. I have often pitied the miserable bishop that suf-
fered in the cause of antipodes, yet cannot choose but
accuse him of as much madness for exposing his living
on such a trifle, as those of ignorance and folly that
condemned him. I think my conscience will not give
me the lie, if I say there are not many extant that in a
noble w^ay fear the face of death less than myself; yet
from the moral duty I owe to the commandment of
God, and the natural respects that I tender unto the
conservation of my essence and being, I would not
perish upon a ceremony, politick points, or indiffer-
ency nor is my belief of that untractable temper as
;

not to bow at their obstacles, or connive at matters

wherein there are not manifest impieties. The leaven
therefore and ferment of all, not only civil but religious
actions, is wisdom ; without which, to commit our-
selves to the flames is homicide, and (I fear) but to pass
through one fire into another.
60 RELIGIO MEDICI.

XXVII. That miracles are ceased I can neither

prove nor absolutely deny, much less define the time
and period of their cessation that they survived Christ,
;

is manifest upon the record of Scripture; that they

outlived the apostles also, and were revived at the con-

version of nations many years after, we cannot deny,
if we shall not question those writers whose testimonies
we do not controvert in points that make for our own
opinions. Therefore that may have some truth in it
that is reported by the Jesuits of their miracles in the
Indies ; I could wish it were true, or had any other
testimony than their own pens; they may easily be-
lieve those miracles abroad who daily conceive a
greater at home, the transmutation of those visible ele-
ments into the body and blood of our Saviour ; for the
conversion of water into wine, w^iich he wrought in
Cana, or what the devil would have had him done in
the wilderness, of stones into bread, compared to this
will scarce deserve the name of a miracle : though in-

deed, to speak properly, there is not one miracle greater

than another, they being the extraordinary effect of the
hand of God, to which all things are of an equal facility,
and to create the world as easy as one single creature.
For this is also a miracle, not only to produce effects
against or above nature, but before nature and to ;

create nature, as great a miracle, as to contradict or

transcend her. We do too narrowly define the power
of God, restraining it to our capacities. I hold that
God can do all things ; how he should work contradic-
tions do not understand, yet dare not therefore deny.
I

I cannot see why the angel of God should question

Esdras to recal the time past, if it were beyond his
own power : or that God should pose mortality in that
 RELIGIO MEDICI. 61

which he was not able to perform himself. I will not

sayGod cannot, but he will not perform many things
which we plainly affirm he cannot; this I am sure is

the mannerliest proposition, wherein notwithstanding I

hold no paradox : for strictly, his power is the same

with his will, and they both with all the rest do make
but one God.
XXVIII. Therefore that miracles have been I do be-
lieve ; that they may yet be wrought by the living I do
not deny ; but have no confidence in those which are
fathered on the dead ; and this hath ever made me sus-
pect the efficacy of reliques, to examine the bones,
question the habits and appertenances of saints, and
even of Christ himself. I cannot conceive why the
cross that Helena found, and whereon Christ himself
died, should have power to restore others unto life. I

excuse not Constantine from a fall off his horse, or a

mischief from his enemies, upon the wearing those
nails on which our Saviour bore upon the
his bridle
cross in his hands compute among your pice fraudes,
; I

nor many decrees before consecrated swords and roses,

that which Baldwyn king of Jerusalem returned the
Genovese for their cost and pains in his war, to wit,
the ashes of John the Baptist. Those that hold the
sanctity of their souls doth leave behind a tincture and
sacred facuhy on their bodies, speak naturally of mira-
cles, and do not salve the doubt. Now one reason I
tender so little devotion unto reliques is, I think, the
slender and doubtful respect have always held unto
I

antiquities ; for that indeed which I admire is far before

antiquity, that and that is God himself; who

is eternity^
though he be styled the Ancient of days, cannot re-
ceive the adjunct of antiquity, who was before the
6
 ;

62 K.ELIGIO MEDICI.

world, and shall be after it, yet is not older than it ; for

in his years there is no climacter; his duration is

eternity, andmore venerable than antiquity.

far
XXIX. But above all things I wonder how the curi-

osity of wiser heads could pass that great and indis-

putable miracle, the cessation of oracles and in w^hat ;

swoon their reasons lay, to content themselves and sit

down with such a far-fetcht and ridiculous reason as
Plutarch alledgeth for it. The Jews that can believe
the supernatural solstice of the sun in the days of
Joshua, have yet the impudence to deny the eclipse,
which every pagan confessed, at his death but for this, ;

it is evident beyond all contradiction, the devil himself

confessed it.* Certainly it is not a warrantable curi-

osity to examine the verity of Scripture by the con-
cordance of human history, or seek to confirm the
chronicle of Hester or Daniel, by the authority of
Magasthenes or Herodotus. I confess I have had an
unhappy curiosity this way, till I laughed myself out of
itwith a piece of Justin, where he delivers that the
children of Israel for being scabbed were banished out
of Egypt. And truly since I have understood the oc-
currences of the world, and know in what counterfeit
shapes and deceitful vizards times present represent on
the stage things past, I do believe them little more than
things to come. Some have been of my opinion, and
endeavoured to write the history of their own lives

wherein Moses hath outgone them all, and left not only
the story of his life, but as some will have it, of his
death also.

XXX. It is a riddle to me, how this story of oracles

» In his oracle to Augustus.

 RELIGIO MEDICI. 63

hath not wormed out of the world that doubtful con-

ceit of spirits and witches ; how so many learned heads
should so far forget their metaphysicks and destroy the
ladder and scale of creatures, as to question the exist-
ence of spirits for my part I have ever believed, and
;

do now know, that there are witches they that doubt ;

of these do not only deny them, but spirits and are ;

obliquely and upon consequence a sort, not of infidels,

but atheists. Those that to confute their incredulity
desire to see apparitions, shall questionless never behold
any, nor have the power to be so much as witches ; the
devil hath them already in a heresy as capital as witch-
craft, and to appear to them were but to convert them.
Of all the delusions wherewith he deceives mortality,
there is not any that puzzleth me more than the leger-
demain of changelings ; I do not credit those trans-
formations of reasonable creatures into beasts, or that
the devil hath a power to transpeciate a man into a
horse, who tempted Christ (as a trial of his divinity) to
convert but stones into bread. I could believe that
spirits use with man the act of carnality, and that in
both sexes ; I may assume, steal, or con-
conceive they
trive a body wherein there may be action enough to
content decrepit lust, or passion to satisfy more active
veneries ; yet in both without a possibility of genera-
tion ; and therefore that opinion that Antichrist should
be born of the tribe of Dan by conjunction with the
devil is ridiculous, and a conceit fitter for a rabbin than
a Christian. I hold that the devil doth really possess
some men, the spirit of melancholy others, the spirit of
delusion others ; that as the devil is concealed and de-
nied by some, so God and good angels are pretended
64 KELIGIO MEDICI.

by others, whereof the late detection of the maid of

Germany hath left a pregnant example.
XXXI. Again, I believe that all that use sorceries,
and
incantations, spells are not witches, or as we term
them, magicians ; I conceive there is a traditional ma-
gick, not learned immediately from the devil, but at
second hand from his scholars ; who having once the
secret betrayed, are able, and do empirically practise
without his advice, they both proceeding upon the prin-
ciples of nature, where actives aptly conjoined to dis-
posed passives will under any master produce their
effects. Thus I think at first a great part of philosophy
was witchcraft,which being afterward derived to one
another, proved but philosophy, and was indeed no
more but the honest effects of nature what invented by ;

us is philosophy, learned from him is magick. We do

surely owe the discovery of many secrets to the disco-
very of good and bad angels. I could never pass that
sentence of Paracelsus without an asterisk or annota-
tion;* Ascendens constellatum muUa revelat qucerenti-
hus magnalia natiircp, i. e. oiperi Dei. I do think that
many mysteries ascribed to our own inventions have
been the courteous revelations of spirits, for those noble
essences in heaven bear a friendly regard unto their
fellow natures on earth ; and therefore believe that
those many prodigies and ominous prognosticks which
forerun the ruins of states, princes, and private persons,
are the charitable premonitions of good angels, which
more careless inquiries term but the effects of chance
and nature.
XXXII. Now besides these particular and divided

* Thereby is meant our good angel, appointed us from our nativity.

 ! ;

RELIGIO MEDICI. 65

spirits there may be (for aught I know) an universal

and common spirit to the whole world. It was the
opinion of Plato, and it is yet of the Hermetical philo-
sophers ; if there be a common nature that unites and
ties the scattered and divided individuals into one spe-
cies,why may there not be one that unites them all ?

However, I am sure there is a common spirit that plays

within us, yet makes no part of us and that is the Spirit ;

of God, the and the scintillation of that noble and

fire

mighty essence, which is the Hfe and radical heat of

spirits, and those essences that know not the virtue of
the sun ; a fire quite contrary to the fire of hell. This
is that gentle heat that brooded on the waters, and in

six days hatched the world ; this is that irradiation that

dispels the mists of hell, the clouds of horrour, fear,

sori'ow, despair and preserves the region of the mind
;

in serenity; whosoever feels not the warm gale and

gentle ventilation of this spirit (though I feel his pulse)

I dare not say he lives ; for truly without this, to me

there is no heat under the tropick, nor any light though
I dwelt in the body of the sun.

As when the labouring' sun hath wrought his track

Up to the top of lofty Cancer's back,
The icy ocean cracks, the frozen pole
Thaws with the heat of the celestial coal
So when thy absent beams begin t' impart
Again a solstice on my frozen heart,
My winter's o'er, my drooping spirits sing,
And every part revives into a spring.
But if thy quickening beams a while decline.
And wit!) their light bless not this orb of mine,
A chilly frost surpriseth every member,
And in the midst of June I feel December.
O how this earthly temper doth debase
The noble soul, in this her humble place
6*
 ; ;

66 RELIGIO MEDICI.

Whose wingy nature ever doth aspire

To reach that place whence first it took its fire.

These flames I feel, which in my heart do dwell,

Are not thy beams, but take their fire from hell
O quench them all and let thy light divine
!

Be as the sun to this poor orb of mine,

And to thy sacred Spirit convert those fires,

Whose earthly fumes choke my devout aspires.

XXXIII. Therefore for spirits, I am so far from

denying their existence, that I could easily believe that
not only whole countries, but particular persons have
their tutelary and guardian angels. It is not a new
opinion of the church of Rome, but an old one of
Pythagoras and Plato ; there is no heresy in it, and if

not manifestly defined in Scripture yet it is an opinion

of a good and wholesome use in the course and actions
of a man's life, and would serve as an hypothesis to

salve many doubts whereof common philosophy afford-

eth no solution. Now if you demand my opinion and
metaphysicks of their natures, I confess them very
shallow, most of them in a negative way, like that of

God ; or in a comparative, between ourselvqs and fellow-

creatures ; for there is in this universe a stair or mani-
fest scale of creatures, rising not disorderly or in
confusion, but with a comely method and proportion.
Between creatures of mere existence and things of life,
there is a large disproportion of nature between plants ;

and animals or creatures of sense, a wider difference

between them and man, a far greater and if the pro- ;

portion hold on, between man and angels there should

be yet a greater. We do not comprehend their natures
who retain the first definition of Porphyry, and distin-
guish them from ourselves by immortality for before ;

his fall, man also was immortal; yet must we needs

 ;

RELIGIO MEDICI. 67

affirm that he had a different essence from the angels

having therefore no certain knowledge of their natures,
'tis no bad method of the schools, whatsoever perfection

we find obscurely in ourselves, in a more complete and

absolute way to ascribe unto them.
I believe they have

an extemporary knowledge, and upon the first motion

of their reason do what we cannot without study or
deliberation that they know things by their forms, and
;

define by specifical difference what we describe by

accidents and propertiesand therefore probabilities to
;

us may be demonstrations unto them that they have ;

knowledge not only of the specifical, but numerical

forms of individuals, and understand by what reserved
difference each single hypostasis (besides the relation to
its species) becomes its numerical self That as the
soul hath a power to move the body it informs, so
there's a faculty to move any, though inform none ; ours
upon restraint of time, place, and distance ; but that
invisible hand that conveyed Habakkuk to the lions' den,
or Philip to Azotus, and hath a
infringeth this rule,
secret conveyance wherewith mortality is not ac-
quainted. If they have that intuitive knowledge whereby
as in reflexion they behold the thoughts of one another,
I cannot peremptorily deny but they know a great part

of ours. They that to refute the invocation of saints have

denied that they have any knowledge of our affairs
below, have proceeded too far, and must pardon my
opinion till Ican throughly answer that piece of Scrip-
ture, at the conversion of a sinner the angels in heaven
rejoice. 1 cannot with those in that great father se-

curely interpret the work of the first day, fiat lux, to

the creation of angels, though, I confess, there is not
any creature that hath so near a glimpse of their nature.
68 RELIGIO MEDICI.

as light in the sun and elements ; we style it a bare ac-

cident, but where it subsists alone 'tis a spiritual sub-
stance, may be an angel in brief, conceive light
and ;

invisible,and that is a spirit.

XXXIV. These are certainly the magisterial and
masterpieces of the Creator, the flower or (as we may
say) the best part of nothing, actually existing what we
are but in hopes and probability ; we are only that am-
phibious piece between a corporal and spiritual essence,
that middle form that links those two together, and
makes good the method of God and nature that jumps
not from extremes, but unites the incompatible distances
by some middle and participating natures. That we
are the breath and similitude of God, it is indisputable,
and upon record of Holy Scripture but to call ourselves ;

a microcosm, or little world, I thought it only a pleasant

trope of rhetorick, till my near judgment and second
thoughts told me there was a real truth therein ; for first

we are a rude mass, and in tie rank of creatures which

only are, and have a dull kind of being not privileged
with life, or preferred to sense or reason ; next we live

the life of plants, the life of animals, the life of men, and
at last the life of spirits, running on in one mysterious
nature those five kinds of existences, which compre-
hend the creatures not only of the world, but of the
universe. Thus is man that great and true amphibium,
whose nature is disposed to live not only like other
creatures in divers elements, but in divided and distin-
guished worlds ; for though there be but one to sense

there are two to reason the one visible, the other in-
;

visible, whereof Moses seems to have left description,

and of the other so obscurely that some parts thereof

are yet in controversy. And truly for the first chapters
 ;

RELIGIO MEDICI. 69

of Genesis, I must confess a great deal of obscurity

though divines have to the power of human reason en-
deavoured to make all go in a literal meaning, yet those
allegorical interpretations are also probable, and per-
haps the mystical method of Moses bred up in the
hieroglyphical schools of the Egyptians.
XXXV. Now for that immaterial world, methinks
we need not wander so far as the moveable for
first ;

even in this material fabrick the spirits walk as freely

exempt from the affection of time, place, and motion,
as beyond the extremest circumference do but extract :

from the corpulency of bodies, or resolve things beyond

their first matter, and you discover the habitation of
angels,which if I call the ubiquitary and omnipresent

essence of God, I hope I shall not offend divinity ; for

before the creation of the world God was really all

things. For the angels he created no new world, or

determinate mansion, and therefore they are every
where where is his essence, and do live at a distance
even in himself: that God made all things for man, is

in some seifse true, yet not so far as to subordinate the

creation of those purer creatures unto ours, though as
ministring spirits they do, and are willing to fulfil the
will of God in these lower and sublunary affairs of
man. God made all things for himself, and it is impos-
sible he should make them for any other end than his

own glory it is all he can receive, and all that is with-

;

out himself; for honour being an external adjunct, and

in the honourer rather than in the person honoured, it

was necessary to make a creature from whom he might

receive this homage, and that is in the other world
man which when we neglect, we forget
angels, in this, ;

the very end of our creation, and may justly provoke

70 RELIGIO MEDICI.

God not only to repent that he hath made the world,

but that he hath sworn he would not destroy it. That
there is but one world, is a conclusion of faith. Aristotle
with all his philosophy hath not been able to prove it,

and as weakly that the world was eternal ; that dispute

much troubled the pen of the ancient philosophers, but
Moses decided that question, and all is salved with the
new term of a creation, that is, a production of some-
thing out of nothing ; and what is that 1 Whatsoever
is opposite to something ; or more exactly, that which
is truly contrary unto God for he only is, all others ;

have an existence with dependency, and are something

but by a distinction and herein is divinity conformant
:

unto philosophy, and generation not only founded on

contrarieties, but also creation ; God being all things,

is contrary unto nothing, out of which were made all

things,and so nothing became something, and omneity

informed nullity into an essence.
XXXVI. The whole creation is a mystery, and par-
ticularly that of man ; mouth were
at the blast of his
made, and at his bai^ word they
the rest of the creatures
started out of nothing but in the frame of man (as the
;

text describes it) he played the sensible operator, and

seemed not so much to create, as make him when he ;

had separated the materials of other creatures there

consequently resulted a form and soul; but having
raised the walls of man, he was driven to a second
and harder creation of a substance like himself, an
incorruptible and immortal soul. For these two affec-
tions we have the philosophy and opinion of the
heathens the flat affirmative of Plato, and not a nega-
;

tive from Aristotle. There is another scruple cast in

by divinity (concerning its production) much disputed
 ;

RELIGIO MEDICI. 71

in the German auditories, and with that indifferency

and equaHty of argument as leave the controversy unde-
termined. I am not of Paracelsus' mind, that boldly
delivers a receipt to make a man without conjunction
yet cannot but wonder heads that
at the multitude of

do deny traduction, having no other argument to con-

firm their belief than that rhetorical sentence and anti-
metathesis of Augustine, creawc?o infunditur,infundendo
creatur : enough with
either opinion will consist well
religion ; yet I did not one
should rather incline to this,

objection haunt me, not wrung from speculations and

subtilties but from common sense, and observation not ;

pickt from the leaves of any author, but bred amongst

the w^eeds and tares of mine own brain. And this is a
conclusion from the equivocal and monstrous produc-
tions in the copulation of a man with a beast; for if

the soul of man be not transmitted and transfused in

the seed of the parents, why are not those productions
merely beasts, but have also an impression and tincture
of reason in as high a measure as it can evidence itself
in those improper organs 1 Nor truly can I peremp-
torilydeny that the soul, in this her sublunary estate, is
wholly and in all acceptions inorganical, but that for
the performance of her ordinary actions is required not
only a symmetry and proper disposition of organs, but
a crasis and temper correspondent to its operations:
yet is not this mass of flesh and visible structure the
instrument and proper corps of the soul, but rather of
sense, and that the hand of reason. In our study of
anatomy there is a mass of mysterious philosophy, and
such as reduced the very heathens to divinity : yet
amongst all those rare discoveries and curious pieces I
find in the fabrick of man, I do not so much content
 ;

72 KELIGIO MEDICI.

myself as in that I find not, that is, no organ or instru-

ment for the rational soul ; for in the brain, which we
term the seat of reason, there is not any thing of moment
more than can discover in the crany of a beast and
I ;

this is a sensible and no inconsiderable argument of the

inorganity of the soul, at least in that sense we usually
so receive it. Thus we are men, and we know not
how ; there is something in us that can be without us,

and will be after us, though it is strange that it hath no

history what it was before us, nor cannot tell how it

entered in us.

XXXVII. Now for these walls of flesh, whereih the

soul doth seem to be immured before the resurrection,
it is nothing but an elemental composition, and a fabric
that must fall to ashes. All flesh is grass, is not only
metaphorically but literally true ; for all those creatures
we behold are but the herbs of the field, digested into
flesh in them, or more remotely carnified in ourselves.
Nay further, we are all what we abhor, anthropophagi
and cannibals, devourers not only of men, but of our-
selves and that not in an allegory, but a positive truth
;

for all this mass of flesh which we behold, came in at

our mouths this frame we look upon, hath been upon
;

our trenchers in brief, we have devoured ourselves. I

;

cannot believe the wisdom of Pythagoras did ever posi-

tively, and in a literal sense, aflirm his metempsuchosis,
or impossible transmigration of the souls of men into
beasts :metamorphoses or transmigrations I believe
of all

only one, that is of Lot's wife, for that of Nebuchodo-

nosor proceeded not so far in all other I conceive there ;

is no further verity than is contained in their implicit

sense and morality. I believe that the whole frame of

a beast doth perish, and is left in the same state after

 ;

RELIGIO MEDICI. 73

death as before it was materialled unto life ; that the

souls of men know neither contrary nor corruption ; that
they subsist beyond the body, and outlive death by the
privilege of their proper natures, and without a miracle
that the ^ouls of the faithful, as they leave earth, take
possession of heaven ; that those apparitions and ghosts
of departed persons are not the wandering souls of men,
but the unquiet walks of devils, prompting and suggest-
ing us unto mischief, blood, and villany, instilling, and
stealing into our hearts ; that the blessed spirits are not
at rest in their graves, but wander solicitous of the
affairs of the world :phantasms appear often
that those
and do frequent cemeteries, charnel-houses, and churches,
it is because those are the dormitories of the dead, where
the devil like an insolent champion beholds with pride
the spoils and trophies of his victory in Adam.
XXXVIII. This is that dismal conquest we all
deplore, that makes us so often cry (O) Adam quid
fecisti ! I thank God I have not those strait ligaments,
or narrow obligations to the world, as to dote on life or
be convulst and tremble at the name of death ; not that
I am insensible of the dread and horrour thereof, or by
raking into the bowels of the deceased, continual sight
of anatomies, skeletons, or cadaverous reliques, hke
vespilloes, or grave-makers, I am become stupid, or have
forgot the apprehension of mortality ; but that marshal-
Ung all the horrours, and contemplating the extremities
thereof, I find not any thing therein able to daunt the
courage of a man, much less a well-resolved Christian.
And therefore am not angry at the errour of our first

parents, or unwilling to bear a part of this common

fate, and like the best of them to die, that is, to cease to

breathe, to take a farewell of the elements, to be a kind

7
74 RELIGIO MEDICI.

of nothing for a moment, to be within one instant of a

spirit. When I take a full view and circle of myself,
without this reasonable moderator and equal piece of
justice, death, I do conceive myself the miserablest
person extant ; were there not another life that I hope
for, all the vanities of this world should not in treat a
moment's breath from me; could the devil work my
belief toimagine I could never die, I would not outlive
that very thought I have so abject a conceit of this
;

common way of existence, this retaining to the sun and

elements, I cannot think this is to be a man, or to live

according to the dignity of humanity in expectation of :

a better, I can with patience embrace this life, yet in my

best meditations do often defy death I honour any man ;

that contemns nor can I highly love any that is afraid

it,

of it this makes me naturally love a soldier, and honour

;

those tattered and contemptible regiments that will die

at the command of a sergeant. For a pagan there may
be some motives to be in love with life ; but for a Chris-
tian to be amazed at death, I see not how he can escape
this dilemma, that he is too sensible of this life, or hope-
less of the life to come.
XXXIX. Some divines count Adam thirty years
old at his creation, because they suppose him created in
the perfect age and stature of man. And we are
surely
all out of the computation of our age, and every man is
some months elder than he bethinks him for we live,
;

move, have a being, and are subject to the actions of

the elements and the malice of diseases, in that other
world, the truest microcosm, the womb of our mother.
For besides that general and common existence we are
conceived to hold in our chaos, and whilst we sleep
within the bosom of our causes, we enjoy a being and

J
 ;

RELIGIO MEDICI. 75

life in three distinct worlds, wherein we receive most

manifest graduations. In that obscure world and womb
of our mother, our time is short, computed by the moon ;

yet longer than the days of many creatures that behold

the sun, ourselves being not yet without life, sense, and
reason; though for the manifestation of its actions, it

awaits the opportunity of objects, and seems to live

there but in its root and soul of vegetation ; entering
afterwards upon the scene of the world, we arise up and
become another creature, performing the reasonable
actions of man, and obscurely manifesting that part of
divinity in us, but not in complement and perfection till
we have once more cast our secondine, that is, this
slough of flesh, and are delivered into the last world,
that is, that ineffable place of Paul, that proper uhi of
spirits. The smattering I have of the philosophers'
stone (which is something more than the perfect exalta-
tion of gold) hath taught me a great deal of divinity,
and instructed my belief, how that immortal spirit and
incorruptible substance of my soul may lie obscure, and
sleep a while within this house of flesh. Those strange
and mystical transmigrations that have observed inI

silkworms, turned my philosophy into divinity. There

is in these works of nature, which seem to puzzle

reason, something divine, and hath more in it than the

eye of a common spectator doth discover.
XL. I am naturally bashful, nor hath conversation,

age, or travel, been able to effront, or enharden me

yet I have one part of modesty which I have seldom
discovered in another, that is (to speak truly) I am not
so much afraid of death, as ashamed thereof; 'tis the
very disgrace and ignominy of our natures, that in a
moment can so disfigure us that our nearest friends,
 ; ;

76 RELIGIO MEDICI.

wife, and children stand afraid and start at us. The

birds and beasts of the field, that before in a natural
fear obeyed us, forgetting all allegiance begin to prey
upon us. This very conceit hath in a tempest disposed
and left me willing to be swallowed up in the abyss of
waters wherein I had perished unseen, unpitied, with-
;

out wondering eyes, tears of pity, lectures of mortality,

and none had said, Quantum mutatus ah illo! Not
that I am ashamed of the anatomy of my parts, or can
accuse nature for playing the bungler in any part of me,
or my own vicious life for contracting any shameful
disease upon me whereby I might not call myself as
wholesome a morsel for the worms as any.
XLI. Some, upon the courage of a fruitful issue,
wherein as in the truest chronicle they seem to outlive
themselves, can with greater patience away with death.
This conceit and counterfeit subsisting in our progenies
seems to me a mere fallacy, unworthy the desires of a
man that can but conceive a thought of the next world
who, in a nobler ambition, should desire to live in his sub-

stance in heaven rather than his name and shadow in

the earth. And herefore at my death I mean to take
a total adieu of the world, not caring for a monument,
history, or epitaph, not so much as the bare memory of
my name to be found any where but in the universal

register of God. I am not yet so cynical as to approve

the testament of Diogenes,* nor do I altogether allow
that rodomontado of Lucan,
— Ccelo tegitur, qui non habet urnam.

He that unburied lies wants not his hearse,

For unto him a tomb's the universe

* Who willed his friend not to bury him, but to hang him up with a

staff in his hand to fright away the crows.

 R EL IGIO MEDICI. 77

but commend in my calmer judgment, those ingenuous

intentions that desire to sleep by the urns of their fathers,

and strive to go the neatest way unto corruption. I

do not envy the temper of crows and daws, nor the
numerous and weary days of our fathers before the
flood. If there be any truth in astrology I may outlive
a jubilee as yet I have not seen one revolution of Sa-
;

turn, nor hath my pulse beat thirty years, and yet ex-
cepting one, have seen the ashes and left under ground,
all the kings of Europe have been contemporary to
;

three emperours, four grand signiours, and as many

popes methinks I have outlived myself, and begin to
:

be weary of the sun I have shaked hands with delight

;

in my warm blood and canicular days I perceive I ;

do anticipate the vices of age, the world to me is but

a dream or mock-show, and we all therein but panta-
lones and anticks to my severer contemplations.
XLII. It is not, I confess, an unlawful prayer to

desire to surpass the days of our Saviour, or wish to

outlive that age wherein he thought fittest to die ;

yet if

(as divinity affirms) there shall be no gray hairs in

heaven, but all shall rise in the perfect state of men, we
do but oulive those perfections in this world to be re-
called unto them by a greater miracle in the next, and
run on here but to be retrograde hereafter. Were there
any hopes to outlive vice, or a point to be superannuated
from were worthy our knees to implore the days
sin, it

of Methuselah. But age doth not rectify, but incurvate

our natures, turning bad dispositions into worser habits,
and (like diseases) brings on incurable vices for every ;

day as we grow weaker in age we grow stronger in

sin, and the number of our days doth but make our sins

innumerable. The same vice committed at sixteen, is

7*
 :

78 KELIGIO MEDICI.

not the same, though it agree in all other circum-

stances, as at forty, but swells and doubles from that
circumstance of our ages, wherein, besides the constant
and inexcusable habit of transgressing, the maturity of
our judgment cuts off pretence unto excuse or pardon
every sin, the oftener it is committed the more it

acquireth in the quality of evil ; as it succeeds in time,

so it proceeds in degrees of badness, for as they proceed
they ever multiply, and like figures in arithmetick, the
last stands for more than all that went before it. And
though I think no man can live well once but he that
could live twice, yet for my own part I would not live
over my hours past, or begin again the thread of my
days ; not upon Cicero's ground, because I have lived
them well, but for fear I should live them worse. I find
my growing judgment daily instruct me how to be
better, but my untamed affections and confirmed vitiosity
makes me daily do worse I find in my confirmed age
;

the same sins I discovered in my youth I committed ;

many then because I was a child, and because I

commit them still I am yet an infant. Therefore I per-
ceive a man may be twice a child before the days of
dotage, and stand in need of iEson's bath before three-
score.
XLIII. And truly there goes a great deal of provi-
dence to produce a man's life unto threescore ; there is

more required than an able temper for those years;

though the radical humour contain in it sufficient oil for
seventy, yet I perceive in some it gives no light past
thirty : men assign not all the causes of long life that
write whole books thereof. They that found themselves
on the radical balsam, or vital sulphur of the parts, de-
termine not why Abel lived not so long as Adam. There
 : ;;

RELIGIO MEDICI. 79

is therefore a secret glome or bottom of our days 'twas ;

hiswisdom to determine them, but his perpetual and

waking providence that fulfils and accomplisheththem
wherein the spirits, ourselves, and all the creatures of
God in a secret and disputed
do execute his will. way
Let them not therefore complain of immaturity that die
about thirty they fall but like the whole world, whose
;

solidand well-composed substance must not expect the

duration and period of its constitution when all things ;

are completed in it its age is accomplished, and the last

and general fever may as naturally destroy it before six
thousand, as me before forty ; there is therefore some
other hand that twines the thread of life than that of
nature : we are not only ignorant in antipathies and
occult qualities ; our ends are as obscure as our begin-
nings ; the line of our days is drawn by night, and the
various effects therein by a pencil that is invisible
wherein though we confess our ignorance, I am sure
we do not err if we say hand of God.
it is the
XLIV. I am much taken with two verses of Lucan,
since I have been able not only as we do at school, to
construe, but understand

Victurosque Dei celant, ut vivere durent,

Felix esse mori.

We're all deluded, vainly searching ways

To make us happy by the length of days ;

For cunningly to make 's protract this breath,

The Gods conceal the happiness of death.

There be many excellent strains in that poet, wherewith

his stoical genius hath liberally supplied him ;and truly
there are singular pieces in the philosophy of Zeno, and
doctrine of the stoicks, which, I perceive, delivered in
 ;

80 RELIGIO MEDICI.

a pulpit I pass for current divinity ; yet herein are they

in extremes, that can allow a man to be his own
assassin, and so highly extol the end and suicide of
Cato this is indeed not to fear death, but yet to be
;

afraid of life. It is a brave act of valour to contemn

death but where life is more terrible than death it is

;

then the truest valour to dare to live ; and herein religion

hath taught us a noble example : for all the valiant acts
of Curtius, Sceevola, or Codrus, do not parallel or match
that one of Job ; and sure there is no torture to the rack
of a disease, nor any poniards in death itself, like those
in the way or prologue to it. Emori nolo, sed me esse
mortuum nihil euro ; I would not die, but care not to be
dead. Were I of Caesar's religion, I should be of his
desires, and wish rather to go off at one blow than to
be sawed in pieces by the grating torture of a disease.
Men that look no further than their outsides think health
an appertenance unto life, and quarrel with their consti-
tutions for being sick but I that have examined the
;

parts of man, and know upon what tender filaments that

fabrick hangs, do wonder that we are not always so
and considering the thousand doors that lead to death
do thank my God that we can die but once. 'Tis not
only the mischief of diseases, and the villany of poisons,
that make an end of us we vainly accuse the fury of
;

guns, and the new inventions of death it is in the ;

power of every hand to destroy us, and we are beholding

unto every one we meet he doth not kill us. There is
therefore but one comfort left, that though it be in the
power of the weakest arm to take away life, it is not in
the strongest to deprive us of death; God would not
exempt himself from that, the misery of immortality in
the flesh; he undertook not that was in it immortal.
 KELIGIO MEDICI. 81

Certainly there is no happiness within this circle of

flesh, nor is it in the opticks of these eyes to behold feli-

city ; the first day of our jubilee is death, the devil hath
therefore failed of his desires ; we are happier with death
than we should have been without it there is no misery
:

but in himself where there is no end of misery and so ;

indeed in his own sense, the stoick is in the right. He

forgets that he can die who complains of misery we ;

are in the power of no calamity while death is in our

own.
XLV. Now besides this literal and positive kind of
death, there are others whereof divines make mention,
and those I think, not merely metaphorical, as mortifi-
cation, dying unto sin and the world ; therefore I say,
every man hath a double horoscope, one of his humanity,
his birth ; another of his Christianity, his baptism, and
from compute or calculate my nativity not reck-
this do I ;

oning those horce comhustcB and odd days, or esteeming

myself any thing before I was my Saviour's, and
enrolled in the register of Christ whosoever enjoys not :

this life, I count him but an apparition, though he wear

about him the sensible aifections of flesh. In these

moral acceptions, the way to be immortal is to die
daily ; nor can I think I have the true theory of death
when I contemplate a skull, or behold a skeleton with
those vulgar imaginations it casts upon us ; I have there-
fore enlarged that common memento mori, into a more
Christian memorandum, memento quatuor novissima,
those four inevitable points of us all, death, judgment,
heaven, and hell. Neither did the contemplations of the
heathens rest in their graves, without a further thought
of Rhadamanth or some judicial proceeding after death,
though in another way, and upon suggestion of their
82 RELIGIO MEDICI.

natural reasons. I cannot but marvel from what sibyl I

or oracle they stole the prophecy of the world's destruc-
tion by fire, or whence Lucan learned to say,

Communis mundo superest rogus, ossibus astra

Mixturus.

There yet remains to th' world one common fire,

Wherein our bones with stars shall make one pyre.

I believe the world grows near its end, yet is neither old
nor decayed, nor will ever perish upon the ruins of its

own principles. As the work of creation was above

'

nature, so its adversary, annihilation ; without which the

world hath not its end but its mutation. Now what
force should be able to consume it thus far, without the
breath of God which consuming flame, my
is the truest
philosophy cannot inform me. Some
believe there went
not a minute to the world's creation, nor shall there go
to its destruction those six days so punctually described,
;

make not to them one moment, but rather seem to

manifest the method and idea of the great work in the
intellect of God, than the manner how he proceeded in

its operation. I cannot dream that there should be at

the last day any such judicial proceeding, or calling to

the bar, as indeed the Scripture seems to imply, and the
literal commentators do conceive for unspeakable mys- ;

teries in the Scriptures are often delivered in a vulgar

and illustrative way and ; being written unto man, are
delivered, not as they truly are, but as they may be
understood, wherein, notwithstanding, the different in-
terpretations according to different capacities may stand
firm with our devotion, nor be any way prejudicial to
each single edification. I
XLVI. Now to determine the day and year of this

I
 RELIGIO MEDICI. 83

inevitable time, is not only convincible and statute-mad-

ness, but also manifest impiety ; how shall we interpret
Elias' six thousand years, or imagine the secret com-
municated to a rabbi which God hath denied unto his
angels? It had been an excellent query to have posed
the devil of Delphos, and must needs have forced him to
some strange amphibology; it hath not only mocked
the predictions of sundry astrologers in ages past, but
the prophecies of many melancholy heads in these pre-
sent, who neither understanding reasonably things past
or present pretend a knowledge of things to come;
heads ordained only to manifest the incredible effects of
melancholy, and to fulfil old prophecies* rather than be
the authors of new. In those days there shall come
wars, and rumours of wars, to me seems no prophecy,
but a constant truth, in all things verified since it was
pronounced there shall be signs in the moon and stars;
:

how comes he then like a thief in the night, when he

gives an item of his coming ? That common sign
drawn from the revelation of antichrist is as obscure as
any ; common compute he hath been come these
in our
many years, but for my own part, to speak freely, I am
half of opinion that antichrist is the philosophers' stone
in divinity, for the discovery and invention whereof,
though there be prescribed rules and probable inductions,
yet hath hardly any man attained the perfect discovery
thereof. That general opinion that the world grows
near its end, hath possessed all ages past as nearly as
ours I am afraid that the souls that now depart cannot
;

escape that lingering expostulation of the saints under

the altar, Quousque Domine 1 How long, O Lord ? and
groan in the expectation of the great jubilee.
* la those days there shall come liars and false prophets.
 ;

84 RELIGIO MEDICI.

XLVII. This is the day that must make good that

great attribute of God, his justice ; that must reconcile
those unanswerable doubts that torment the wisest un-
derstandings ; and reduce those seeming inequaHties and
respective distributions in this world, to an equality and
recompensive justice in the next. This that one day
is

that shall include and comprehend all went before it

that
wherein, as in the last scene, all the actors must enter
to complete and make up the catastrophe of this great
piece. This is the day whose memory hath only power
to make us honest in the dark, and to be virtuous with-
out a witness. Ipsa suce pretium virtus sibi, that virtue
is her own reward is but a cold principle, and not able
to maintain our variable resolutions in a constant and
settled way of goodness. I have practised that honest
artifice of Seneca, and in my retired and solitary ima-
ginations, to detain me from the foulness of vice have
fancied to myself the presence of my dear and worthiest
friends, before whom I should lose my head rather than
be vicious ; yet herein I found that there was nought
but moral honesty, and this was not to be virtuous for
his sake who must reward us at the last. I have tried
if I could reach that great resolution of his, to be honest
without a thought of heaven or hell and indeed I found ;

upon a natural inclination and imbred loyalty unto vir-

I
tue, that I could serve her without a livery ;
yet not in
that resolved and venerable way but that the frailty of
my an easy temptation, might be induced
nature, upon
to forget her. The life therefore and spirit of all our
actions, is the resurrection, and a stable apprehension
that our ashes shall enjoy the fruit of our pious endea-
vours ; without this, all religion is a fallacy, and those
impieties of Lucian, Euripides, and Julian, are no bias-
 ;

RELIGIO MEDICI. 85

phemies, but subtle verities, and atheists have been the

only philosophers.
XL VIII. How shall the dead arise, is no question of
my faith ; to believe only possibilities, is not faith, but
mere philosophy many things are true in divinity which
;

are neither inducible by reason, nor confirmable by

sense ;and many things in philosophy confirmable
by sense, yet not inducible by reason. Thus it is im-
possible by any solid or demonstrative reasons to per-
suade a man to believe the conversion of the needle to
the north ; though this be possible, and true, and easily
credible, upon a single experiment unto the sense. I

believe that our estranged and divided ashes shall unite

again ; that our separated dust after so many pilgrimages
and transformations into the parts of minerals, plants,
animals, elements, shall at the voice of God return into
their primitive shapes, and join again tomake up their
primary and predestinate forms. As at the creation
there was a separation of that confused mass into its

species, so at the destruction thereof there shall be a

separation into its distinct individuals. As at the crea-
tion of the world, all the distinct species that we behold
lay involved in one mass, till the fruitful voice of God
separated this united multitude into its several species
so at the last day, when those corrupted reliques shall
be scattered in the wilderness of forms, and seem to
have forgot their proper habits, God by a powerful
voice shall command them back into their proper shapes,
and call them out by their single individuals ; then shall
appear the fertility of Adam, and the magick of that
sperm that hath dilated into so many millions. I have

often beheld as a miracle that artificial resurrection and

revivification of mercury, how being mortified into a
8
 ;

86 RELIGIO MEDICI.

thousand shapes, it assumes again its own, and returns

into its numerical self. Let us speak naturally, and like

philosophers, the forms of alterable bodies in these sen-
sible corruptions perish not we imagine, wholly
; nor, as
quit their mansions, but retire and contract themselves
into their secret and unaccessible parts, where they may
best protect themselves from the action of their antago-
nist. A plant or vegetable consumed to ashes, to a
contemplative and school philosopher seems utterly des-
troyed, and the form to have taken his leave for ever
but to a sensible artist the forms are not perished, but
withdrawn into their incombustible part where they lie

secure from the action of that devouring element. This

is made good by experience, which can from the ashes
of a plant revive the plant, and from its cinders recall
it into its stalk and leaves again. What the art of man
can do in these inferiour pieces, what blasphemy is it
to affirm the finger of God cannot do in these more
perfect and sensible structures ! This is that mystical
philosophy from whence no true scholar becomes an
atheist, but from the visible effects of nature grows up
a real divine and beholds not in a dream, as Ezekiel,
;

but in an ocular and visible object the types of his resur-

rection.
XLIX. Now the necessary mansions of our restored
selves, are those two contrary and incompatible places
we heaven and hell to define them, or strictly to
call ;

determine what and where these are, surpasseth my

divinity. That elegant apostle which seemed to have a
glimpse of heaven, hath left but a negative description
thereof: which neither eye hath seen, nor ear hath
heard, nor can enter into the heart of man he was :

translated out of himself to behold it, but being re-

 RELIGIO MEDICI. 87

turned into himself could not express it. St. John's

description by emeralds, and precious
chrysolites,
stones, is too weak to express the material heaven we
behold. Briefly therefore, where the soul hath the full
measure, and complement of happiness where the ;

boundless appetite of that spirit remains completely satis-

fied, thatcan neither desire addition nor alteration, that
it

I think isheaven and this can only be in the enjoy-

truly ;

ment of that essence, whose infinite goodness is able to

terminate the desires of itself, and the unsatiable wishes
of ours,; wherever God will thus manifest himself, there
is heaven, though within the circle of this sensible world.
Thus the soul of man may be in heaven any where,
even within the limits of his own proper body ; and
when it ceaseth to live in the body may remain in its
it

own soul, that is, its Creator. And thus we may say
that St. Paul, whether in the body or out of the body,
was yet in heaven. To place it in the empyreal, or
beyond the tenth sphere, is to forget the world's destruc-
tion ; for when this sensible world shall be destroyed,
all shall then be here as it is now there, an empyreal
heaven, a quasi vacuity, when to ask where heaven is,

is to demand where the presence of God is, or where

we have the glory of that happy vision. Moses that
was bred up in all the learning of the Egyptians, com-
mitted a gross absurdity in philosophy, when with these
eyes of flesh he desired to see God, and petitioned his
Maker, that is truth itself, to a contradiction. Those
that imagine heaven and hell neighbours, and conceive
a vicinity between those two extremes, upon conse-
quence of the parable, where Dives discoursed with
Lazarus in Abraham's bosom, do too grossly conceive
of those glorified creatures, whose eyes shall easily out-
88 IlELIGIO MEDICI.

see the sun, and behold without a perspective the ex-

tremest distances ; for if there shall be in our glorified
eyes the faculty of sight and reception of objects, I

could think the visible species there to be in as unlimit-

able a vray as novv^ the intellectual. I grant that tw^o
bodies placed beyond the tenth sphere, or in a vacuity,
according to Aristotle's philosophy, could not behold
each other, because there wants a body or medium to
hand and transport the visible rays of the object unto
the sense ; but when there shall be a general defect of
either medium to convey, or light to prepare and dis-
pose that medium, and yet a perfect vision, we must
suspend the rules of our philosophy, and make all good
by a more absolute piece of opticks.
L. I cannot tell how to say that fire is the essence
of hell ; I know not what to make of purgatory, or con-
ceive a flame that can either prey upon, or purify the
substance of a soul ; those flames of sulphur mentioned
in the Scriptures, I take not to be understood of this
present hell, but of that to come, where fire shall make

up the complement of our tortures, and have a body or

subject wherein to manifest its tyranny. Some who
have had the honour to be textuary in divinity, are of
opinion it shall be the same specifical fire with ours.
This is hard to conceive, yet can I make good how
even that may prey upon our bodies, and yet not con-
sume us ; for in this material world there are bodies
that persist invincible in the powerfullest flames, and
though by the action of fire they fall into ignition and
liquation, yet will they never suffer a destruction. I would
gladly know how Moses with an actual fire calcined,
or burnt the golden calf unto powder for that mystical ;

metal of gold, whose solary and celestial nature I

 RELIG.10 MEDICI. 89

admire, exposed unto the violence of fire grows only-

hot and liquifies, but consumeth not : so when the con-

sumable and volatile pieces of our bodies shall be refined
into a more impregnable and fixed temper like gold,

though they suffer from the action of flames they shall

never perish, but lie arms of fire. And

immortal in the
surely if this frame must suffer only by the action of this
element, there will many bodies escape, and not only
heaven, but earth will not be at an end, but rather a
beginning ; for at present it is not earth, but a composi-
tion of fire, water, earth, and air; but at that time,
spoiled of these ingredients, it shall appear in a sub-
stance more like itself, its ashes. Philosophers that
opinioned the world's destruction by fire, did never
dream of annihilation, which is beyond the power of
sublunary causes ; for the last and proper action of that
element is but vitrification, or a reduction of a body
into glass ; and therefore some of our chymicks face-
tiously affirm, that at the last fire all shall be crystallized
and reverberated into glass, which is the utmost action
of that element. Nor need we fear this term, annihila-
tion, or wonder that God will destroy the works of

his creation for man subsisting, who is, and will then
;

truly appear a microcosm, the world cannot be said to

be destroyed. For the eyes of God, and perhaps also
of our glorified selves, shall as really behold and con-
template the world in its epitome or contracted essence,
as now it doth at large and in its dilated substance. In
the seed of a plant, to the eyes of God and to the under-

standing of man, there exists, though in an invisible

way, the perfect leaves, flowers, and fruit thereof; (for

things that are in posse to the sense, are actually exist-

ent to the understanding.) Thus God beholds all things,
8*
90 EELIGIO MEDICI.

who contemplates as fully his works in their epitome as

in their full volume ; and beheld as amply the whole
world in that little compendium of the sixth day as in
the scattered and dilated pieces of those five before.
LI. Men commonly set forth the torments of hellby
fire, and the extremity of corporal afflictions, and
describe hell in the same method that Mahomet doth
heaven. This indeed makes a noise, and drums in
popular ears ; but if this be the terrible piece thereof it

is not worthy to stand in diameter with heaven, whose

happiness consists in that part that is best able to com-
prehend it, that immortal essence, that translated
divinity and colony of God, the soul. Surely though
we place hell under earth, the devil's walk and purlieu
is about it ; men speak too popularly who place it in
those flaming mountains, which to grosser apprehen-
sions represent hell. The heart of man is the place the
devils dwell in ; I feel sometimes a hell within myself,
Lucifer keeps his court in Legion is revived my breast.
in me. There are as many hells, as Anaxagoras con-
ceited worlds there was more than one hell in Magda-
;

lene when there were seven devils for every devil is ;

an hell unto himself; he holds enough of torture in his

own and needs not the misery of circumference to
uhi,
him and thus a distracted conscience here, is a
afflict ;

shadow or introduction unto hell hereafter. Who can

but pity the merciful intention of those hands that do
destroy themselves 1 the devil were it in his power
would do the like, w^hich being impossible his miseries
are endless, and he suffers most in that attribute where-
in he is impassible, his immortality.
LII. I thank God, and with joy I mention it, I was
never afraid of hell, nor never grew pale at the descrip-
 ;

RELIGIO MEDICI. 91

tion of that place ; I have so fixed my contemplations

on heaven that have almost forgot the idea of hell, and
I

am afraid rather to lose the joys of the one than endure

the misery of the other; to be deprived of them is a per-
fect hell, and needs methinks no addition to complete our
afflictions that terrible term hath never detained me
;

from sin, nor do I owe any good action to the name

thereof: I fear God, yet am not afraid of him ; his mer-
cies make me ashamed of my sins, before his judgments
afraid thereof; these are the forced and secondary
method of his wisdom, which he useth but as the last
remedy, and upon provocation a course rather to deter ;

the wicked than incite the virtuous to his worship. I

can hardly think there was ever any scared into

heaven they go the fairest way to heaven that would
;

serve God without a hell ; other mercenaries that crouch

unto him in fear of hell, though they term themselves
the servants, are indeed but the slaves of the Almighty.
LIII. And to be true, and speak my soul, when I
survey the occurrences of my Hfe, and call into account
the finger of God, I can perceive nothing but an abyss
and mass of mercies, either in general to mankind, or in
particular to myself; and whether out of the prejudice of
my affection, or an inverting and partial conceit of his
mercies, I know not, but those which others term
crosses, afflictions, judgments, misfortunes, to me who
inquire farther into them than their visible effects, they
both appear, and in event have ever proved the secret
and dissembled favours of his affection. It is a singular
piece of wisdom to apprehend truly and without passion,
the works of God and so well to distinguish his justice
;

from his mercy as not to miscal those noble attributes

yet it is likewise an honest piece of logick, so to dispute
 ;

92 RELIGIO MEDICI.

and argue the proceedings of God, as to distinguish even

his judgments into mercies. For God is merciful unto
all, because better to the worst than the best deserve
and to say he punisheth none in this world, though it

be a paradox, is no absurdity. To one that hath com-

mitted murder, if the judge should only ordain a fine, it

were a madness to call this a punishment, and to repine

at the sentence rather than admire the clemency of the
judge. Thus our offences being mortal, and deserving
not only death, but damnation, if the goodness of God be
content to traverse and pass them over with a loss, mis-
fortune, or disease, what frenzy were it to term this a
punishment, rather than an extremity of mercy, and to
groan under the rod of his judgments, rather than ad-
mire the sceptre of his mercies ! Therefore to adore,
honour, and admire him, is a debt of gratitude due from
the obligation of our nature, states, and conditions and ;

with these thoughts, he that knows them best will not

deny that I adore him that I obtain heaven, and the
:

and not the intended work

bliss thereof,"is accidental,

of my devotion it being a felicity I can neither think

;

to deserve, nor scarce in modesty to expect. For these

two ends of us all, either as rewards or punishments,
are mercifully ordained and disproportionably disposed
unto our actions the one being so far beyond our deserts,
;

the other so infinitely below our demerits.

LIV. There is no salvation to those that believe not

in Christ, that is, say some, since his nativity, and as

divinity affirmeth, before also ; which makes me much
apprehend the ends of those honest worthies and philo-
sophers which died before his incarnation. It is hard
to place those souls in hell whose worthy lives do teach
us virtue on earth ; methinks amongst those many sub-
 RELIGIO MEDICI. 93

divisions of hell, theremight have been one limbo left

for these what a strange vision will it be to see their
;

poetical fictions converted into verities, and their ima-

gined and fancied furies into real devils how strange !

to them will sound the history of Adam, when they shall

suflSer for him they never heard of; when they who de-

rive their genealogy from the gods, shall know they are
the unhappy issue of sinful man It is an insolent part
!

of reason to controvert the works of God, or question

the justice of his proceedings: could humility teach
other, as it hath instructed me, to contemplate the infinite

and incomprehensible distance betwixt the Creator and

the creature or did we seriously perpend that one simile
;

of St. Paul, shall the vessel say to the potter, why hast
thou made me would prevent these arrogant
thus 1 it

disputes of reason, nor would we argue the definitive

sentence of God, either to heaven or hell. Men that
live according to the right rule and law of reason, live

but in their own kind, as beasts do in theirs who justly ;

obey the prescript of their natures, and therefore cannot

reasonably demand a reward of their actions, as only
obeying the natural dictates of their reason. It will
therefore, and must at last appear, that all salvation is
through Christ ; which verity I fear these great exam-
ples of virtue must confirm, and make it good how the
perfectest actions of earth have no title or claim unto
heaven.
LV. Nor truly do I think the lives of these or of any
other were ever correspondent, or in all points con-
formable unto their doctrines. It is evident that Aristo-
tle transgressed the rule of his own ethicks ; the stoicks
that condemn passion, and command a man to laugh in
Phalaris his bull, could not endure without a groan
 ;
;

94 RELIGIO MEDICI.

a fit of the stone or colick ; the scepticks that affirmed

they knew nothing, even in that opinion confute them-
selves, and thought they knew more than all the world
beside. Diogenes I hold to be the most vain-glorious
man of his time, and more ambitious in refusing all
I
honours, than Alexander in rejecting none. Vice and
the devil put a fallacy upon our reasons, and provoking
us too hastily to run from it, entangle and profound us
deeper in it. The duke of Venice, that weds himself
unto the sea by a ring of gold, I will not argue of prodi-
gality, because it is a solemnity of good use and conse-
quence in the state ; but the philosopher that threw his
money into the sea to avoid avarice, was a notorious
prodigal. There is no road or ready way to virtue, it

is not an easy point of art to disentangle ourselves from

this riddle, or web of sin ; to perfect virtue, as to reli-
gion, there is required a panopUa, or complete armour
that whilst we lie at close ward against one vice, we
lie not open to the venny of another. And indeed wiser
discretions that have the thread of reason to conduct
them, offend without a pardon; whereas under-heads
may stumble without dishonour. There go so many
circumstances to piece up one good action, that it is a
lesson to be good, and we are forced to be virtuous by
the book. Again, the practice of men holds not an
equal pace, yea, and often runs counter to their theory ;

we naturally know what is good, but naturally pursue

what is evil ; the rhetorick wherewith I persuade ano-
ther, cannot persuade myself; there is a depraved ap-
petite in us, that will with patience hear the learned
instructions of reason, but yet perform no farther than
agrees to its own irregular humour. In brief, we are
all monsters, that is, a composition of man and beast

J
 RELIGIO MEDICI. 96

wherein we must endeavour to be as the poets fancy-

that wise man Chiron, that is, to have the region of man
above that of beast, and sense to sit but at the feet of
reason. Lastly, I do desire with God, that all, but yet
affirm with men, that few shall know salvation ; that
the bridge is narrow, the passage straight unto life; yet
those who do confine the church of God, either to par-
ticular nations, churches, or families, have made it far
narrower than our Saviour ever meant it.
LVI. The vulgarity of those judgments that wrap
the church of God and restrain it
in Strabo's cloak,
unto Europe, seem to me
bad geographers as Alex-
as
ander, who thought he had conquered all the world
when he had not subdued the half of any part thereof.
For we cannot deny the church of God both in Asia
and Africa, if we do not forget the peregrinations of the
apostles, the deaths of the martyrs, the sessions of many,
and, even in our reformed judgment, lawful councils,
held in those parts in the minority and nonage of ours.
Nor must a few differences, more remarkable in the
eyes of man than perhaps in the judgment of God, ex-
communicate from heaven one another ; much less
thoseChristians who are in a manner all martyrs,
maintaining their faith in the noble way of persecution,
and serving God in the fire, whereas we honour him
but in the sunshine. 'Tis true, we all hold there is a
number of and many to be saved yet take our
elect, ;

opinions together, and from the confusion thereof there

will be no such thing as salvation, nor shall any one be
saved for first, the church of Rome condemneth us,
:

we likewise them the sub-reformists and sectaries

;

sentence the doctrine of our church as damnable; the

atomist, or familist, reprobates all these, and all these
96 RELIGIO MEDICI.

them again. Thus whilst the mercies of God do promise

us heaven, our conceits and opinions exclude us from
that place. There must be therefore more than one St.
Peter particular churches and sects usurp the gates of
;

heaven, and turn the key against each other and thus ;

we go to heaven against each other's wills, conceits,

and opinions, and with as much uncharity as ignorance
do err I fear, in points not only of our own but one
another's salvation.
LVIL I many are saved who to man seem
believe
reprobated, and many are reprobated who in the opinion
and sentence of man stand elected. There will appear
at the last day strange and unexpected examples, both
of his justice and his mercy, and therefore to define
either, is folly in man, and insolency even in the devils ;

those acute and subtile spirits in all their sagacity can

hardly divine who shall be saved which if they could
;

prognostick, their labour were at an end, nor need they

compass the earth, seeking whom they may devour.
Those who upon a rigid application of the law sentence
Solomon unto damnation, condemn not only him, but
themselves, and the whole world for by the letter, and
;

written word of God, we are without exception in the

state of death ; but there is a prerogative of God, and
an arbitrary pleasure above the letter of his own law,
by which alone we can pretend unto salvation, and
through which Solomon might be as easily saved as
those who condemn him.
LVIII. The number of those who pretend unto salva-
tion, and those infinite swarms who think to pass through
the eye of this needle, have much amazed me. That
name and compellation of little flock' doth not comfort
'

but deject my devotion, especially when I reflect upon

 ;

RELIGIO MEDICI. 1)7

mine own unworthiness, wherein according to my

humble apprehensions, I am below them all. I believe
there shall never be an anarchy in heaven, but as there
are hierarchies amongst the angels, so shall there be
degrees of priority amongst the saints. Yet is it (I pro-
test) beyond my ambition to aspire unto the first ranks
my desires only are, and I shall be happy therein, to be
but the last man, and bring up the rear in heaven.
LIX. Again, I am confident, and fully persuaded,
yet dare not take my oath of my salvation : 1 am as it

were sure, and do believe without all doubt, that there

is such a city as Constantinople ;
yet for me to take my
oath thereon were a kind of perjury, because I hold no
infallible warrant from my own sense to confirm me in

the certainty thereof And truly, though many pretend

to absolute certainty of their salvation, yet when an
humble soul shall contemplate her own unworthiness,
she shall meet with many doubts, and suddenly find how-
little we stand in need of the precept of St. Paul, work
out your salvation with fear and trembling. That which
is the cause of my election, I hold to be the cause of
my salvation, which was the mercy and beneplacit of
God, before I was, or the foundation of the world. Be-
fore Abraham was, I am, is the saying of Christ ; yet
is it true in some sense if I say it of myself; for I was
not only before myself, but Adam, that is, in the idea of
God, and the decree of that synod held from all eternity.
And world was before the crea-
in this sense, I say, the
tion, and at an end before it had a beginning and thus ;

was I dead before I was alive though my grave be ;

England, my dying place was paradise, and Eve mis-

carried of me, before she conceived of Cain.
LX. Insolent zeals that do decry good works and
9
98 RELIGIO MEDICI.

rely only upon faith, take not away merit ; for depend-
ing upon the efficacy of their faith, they enforce the con-
dition of God, and in a more sophistical way do seem to
challenge heaven. It was decreed by God, that only
those that lapt in the water like dogs should have the
honour to destroy the Midianites ; yet could none of those
justly challenge, or imagine he deserved that honour
thereupon. I do not deny but that true faith, and such
as God requires, is not only a mark or token but also a
means of our salvation ; but where to find this, is as ob-
scure to me as my last end. And if our Saviour could
object unto his own disciples and favourites, a faith,

that to the quantity of a grain of mustard-seed is able to

remove mountains surely that which we boast of is
;

not any thing, or at the most but a remove from nothing.

This is the tenour of my belief; wherein, though
there be many things singular, and to the humour of my
irregular self, yet if they square not with maturer judg-
ments I disclaim them, and do no further father them,
than the learned and best judgments shall authorize
them.
 :

THE SECO.ND PART.

I. Now for that other virtue of charity, without

which faith is a mere notion, and of no existence, I have
ever endeavoured to nourish the merciful disposition and
humane incUnation I borrowed from my parents, and
regulate it to the written and prescribed laws of charity
and if I hold the true anatomy of myself, I am deline-
ated and naturally framed to such a piece of virtue. For
I am of a constitution so general, that it consorts and

sympathizeth with all things I have no antipathy, or

;

rather idiosyncrasy, in diet, humour, air, any thing I ;

wonder not at the French for their dishes of frogs,

snails, and toadstools, nor at the Jews for locusts and

grasshoppers but being amongst them, make them my

;

common viands and I find they agree with my stomach

;

as well as theirs. 1 could digest a salad gathered in a

church-yard, as well as in a garden. I cannot start at

the presence of a serpent, scorpion, lizard, or salaman-

der ; at the sight of a toad, or viper, I find in me no
desire to take up a stone to destroy them. I feel not in
myself those common can discover in
antipathies that I

others those national repugnances do not touch me, nor

;

do I behold with prejudice the French, Italian, Spaniard,

or Dutch but where I find their actions in balance with
;

my countrymen's, I honour, love, and embrace them in

the same degree. I was born in the eighth climate, but
 ;
;

100 RELIGIO MEDICI. <i

seem for to be framed and constellated unto all ; I am
no plant that will not prosper out of a garden ; all places,
all airs make unto me one country ; I am in England
every where, and under any meridian. I have been
shipwreckt, yet am not enemy with the sea or winds I ;

can study, play, or sleep, in a tempest. In brief, I am

averse from nothing my conscience would give me the
;

lie if I should say I absolutely detest or hate any essence

but the devil or so at least abhor any thing but that we

;

might come to composition. If there be any among

those common objects of hatred I do contemn and laugh
at, it is that great enemy of reason, virtue, and religion,

the multitude that numerous piece of monstrosity, which

;

taken asunder seem men, and the reasonable creatures

of God, but confused together, make but one great
beast, and a monstrosity more prodigious than hydra
it is no breach of charity to call these fools it is the ;

style all holy writers have afforded them, set down by

Solomon in canonical Scripture, and a point of our
faith to believe so. Neither in the name of multitude
do I only include the base and minor sort of people
there is a rabble even amongst the gentry, a sort of
plebeian heads, whose fancy moves with the same
wheel as these men in the same level with mechanicks,
;

though their fortunes do somewhat gild their infirmities,

and their purses compound for their follies. But as in
casting account, three or four men together come short
in account of one man placed by himself below them ;

so neither are a troop of these ignorant doradoes, of that

true esteem and value as many a forlorn person, whose
condition doth place him below their feet. Let us speak
like politicians, there is a nobility without heraldry, a
natural dignity, whereby one man is ranked with
 RELIGIO MEDICI. 101

another, another filed before him, according to the

quaUty of his desert, and preeminence of his good
parts. Though the corruption of these times, and the
bias of present practice wheel another way, thus it was
and primitive commonwealths, and is yet in
in the first

the integrity and cradle of well-ordered polities, till

•
corruption getteth ground ruder desires labouring
;

after that which wiser considerations contemn every ;

one having a liberty to amass and heap up riches, and

they a license or faculty to do or purchase any thing.
II. This general and indifferent temper of mine, doth

more nearly dispose rae to this noble virtue. It is a

happiness to be born and framed unto virtue, and to
grow up from the seeds of nature, rather than the in-
oculation and forced graffs of education yet if we are ;

directed only by our particular natures, and regulate

our inclinations by no higher rule than that of our
reasons, we are but moralists ; divinity will still call us
heathens. Therefore this great work of charity must
have other motives, ends, and impulsions I give no :

alms to satisfy the hunger of my brother, but to fulfil

and accomplish the will and command of my God I ;

draw not my purse for his sake that demands it, but his
that enjoined it ; I relieve no man upon the rhetorick of
his miseries, nor to content mine own commiserating
disposition for this is still but moral charity, and an
;

act that oweth more to passion than reason. He that

relieves another upon the bare suggestion and bowels
of pity, doth not this so much for his sake as for his
own ;by compassion we make others' misery our
for
own, and so by relieving them, we relieve ourselves
also. It is as erroneous a conceit to redress other
men's misfortunes upon the common considerations of
9*
 ;

102 RELIGIO MEDICI.

merciful natures, that it may be one day our own case

for this is a sinister and politick kind of charity, whereby
we seem to bespeak the pities of men in the like occa-
sions ; and truly I have observed that those professed
eleemosynaries though in a crowd or multitude, do yet
direct and place on a few and selected
their petitions
persons ; there is which those*
surely a physiognomy,
experienced and master mendicants observe, whereby
thiey instantly discover a merciful aspect, and will single

out a face wherein they spy the signatures and marks

of mercy ; for there are mystically in our faces certain
characters which carry in them the motto of our souls,
wherein he that cannot read A. B. C. may read our
natures. I hold moreover that there is a phytognomy,

or physiognomy, not only of men, but of plants and

vegetables and in every one of them some outward
;

figures which hang as signs or bushes of their inward

forms. The finger of God hath left an inscription
upon all his works, not graphical or composed of letters,

but of their several forms, constitutions, parts, and

operations ; which aptly joined together do make one
word that doth express their natures. By these letters
God calls the stars by their names, and by this alphabet
Adam assigned to every creature a name peculiar to its

nature. Now there are besides these characters in our

faces, certain mystical figures in our hands, which I

dare not call mere dashes, strokes d. la volee, or at

random, because delineated by a pencil that never

works in vain and hereof 1 take more particular
;

notice, because I carry that in mine own hand, which I

could never read of, nor discover in another. Aristotle,
I confess, in his acute and singular book of physiog-
nomy, hath made no mention of chiromancy; yet I
 ;

RELIGIO MEDICI. 103

believe the Egyptians, wiio were nearer addicted to

those abtruse and mystical sciences, had a knowledge
therein ; to which those vagabond and counterfeit
Egyptians did after pretend, and perhaps retained a few
corrupted principles, which sometimes might verify
their prognosticks.
It is the common wonder of all men, how among so
many millions of faces there should be none alike now ;

contrary, I wonder much how there should be any.

as
He that shall consider how many thousand several
words have been carelessly and without study com-
posed out of twenty-four letters ; withal how many
hundred lines there are to be drawn in the fabrick of
one man, shall easily find that this variety is necessary ;

and it will be very hard that they shall so concur as to

make one portrait like another. Let a painter carelessly
limn out a million of faces, and you shall find them all

different; him have his copy before him, yet

yea let ^

after all his art there Avill remain a sensible distinction ;

for the pattern or example of every thing is the perfect-

est in that kind, whereof we still come short though we

transcend or go beyond it, because herein it is wide
and agrees not in all points unto its copy. Nor doth the
similitude of creatures disparage the variety of nature,
nor any way confound the works of God for even in
:

things alike there is diversity, and those that do seem

to accord do manifestly disagree. And thus is man
like God, for in the same things that we resemble him
we are utterly difierent from him. There was never
any thing so like another as in all points to concur
there will ever some reserved difference slip in, to pre-
vent the identity ; without M'hich, two several things
would not be alike, but the same, which is impossible.
 ;

104 RELIGIO MEDICI.

III. But to return from philosophy to charity I hold ;

not so narrow a conceit of this virtue as to conceive that

to give alms is only to be charitable, or think a piece of
liberality can comprehend the total of charity. Divinity
many branches,-
hath wisely divided the act thereof into
and hath taught us in this narrow way many paths unto
goodness as many ways as we may do good, so many
;

ways we may be charitable there are infirmities, not

;

only of body, but of soul, and fortunes, which do require

the merciful hand of our abilities. I cannot contemn a
man for ignorance, but behold him with as much pity
as I do Lazarus. no greater charity to clothe his
It is

body, than apparel the nakedness of his soul. It is an

honourable object to see the reasons of other, men wear
our liveries, and their borrowed understandings do
homage to the bounty of ours ; it is the cheapest way of
beneficence, and like the natural charity of the sun illu-

minates another without obscuring itself. To be reserved

and caitift' in this part of goodness, is the sordidest piece
of covetousness, and more contemptible than the pecu-
niary avarice. To this (as calling myself a scholar) I
am obliged by the duty of my condition ; I make not
therefore my
head a grave, but a treasure of knowledge
I intend no monopoly, but a community in learning ; I
study not for my own sake only, but for theirs that
study not for themselves. I envy no man that knows
more than myself, but pity them that know less. I in-

struct no man knowledge, or with

as an exercise of my
an intent rather to nourish and keep it aUve in mine own
head than beget and propagate it in his ; and in the
midst of all my endeavours there is but one thought that
dejects me, that my acquired parts must perish with
myself, nor can be legacied among my honoured friends.

I
 RELIGIO MEDICI. 105

I cannot fall out or contemn a man for an errour, or

conceive why a difierence in opinion should divide an
affection ; and argumenta-
for controversies, disputes,
tions, both in philosophy and in divinity,
if they meet

with discreet and peaceable natures, do not infringe the

laws of charity : in all disputes, so much as there is of
passion, so much there is of nothing to the purpose ; for
then reason, like a bad hound, spends upon a false scent,
and forsakes the question first started. And this is one
reason why controversies are never determined ; for
though they be amply proposed, they are scarce at all
handled, they do so swell with unnecessary digressions,
and the parenthesis on the party is often as large as the
main discourse upon the subject. The foundations of
religion are already established, and the principles of
salvation subscribed unto by all there remain not many;

controversies worth a passion, and yet never -any dis-

puted without, not only in divinity but inferiour arts.

What a ^a-TpaxoiJ^vop^axta, and hot skirmish is betwixt S.

and T. in Lucian. How do grammarians hack and
slash for the genitive case in Jupiter ! how^ do they break
their own pates to salve that of Priscian ! Si foret in
terris, rideret Dcmocritus. Yea even amongst wiser
militants, how many wounds have been given, and credits
slain, for the poor victory of an opinion or beggarly
conquest of a distinction ! Scholars are men of peace,
they bear no arms, but their tongues are sharper than
Actus his razor; their pens carry farther and give a
louder report than thunder ; I had rather stand in the
shock of a basilisco, than in the fury of a merciless pen.
It is not mere zeal to learning, or devotion to the muses,
that wiser princes patron the arts and carry an indul-
gent aspect unto scholars ; but a desire to have their
 : ; ; ;;

106

names eternized by
RELIGIO MEDICI.

memory
1
the of their writings, and a
fear of the revengeful pen of succeeding ages ; for these
are the men, that when they have played and their parts,
had must step out and give the moral of their
their exits,
scenes, and deliver unto posterity an inventory of their
virtues and vices. And surely there goes a great deal
of conscience to the compiling of an history there is no ;

reproach to the scandal of a story; it is such an authen-

tick kind of falsehood that with authority belies our
good names to all nations and posterity.
IV. There is another offence unto charity, which no
author hath ever written of, and few take notice of; and
that's the reproach, not of whole professions, mysteries,
and conditions, but of whole nations wherein by op- ;

probrious epithets we miscal each other, and by an un-

charitable logick, from a disposition in a few conclude
a habit yi all

Le mutin Anglois, et le bravache Escossois

Le Italien, et le fol Frangois ;

Le poultron Romain, le larron de Gascongne

L'Espagnol superbe, ct I'Aleman ivrongne.

St. Paul, that calls the Cretians liars, doth it but indi-
rectly and upon quotation of their own poet. It is as
bloody a thought in one way as Nero's was in another
for by a word we wound a thousand, and at one blow
assassine the honour of a nation. It is as complete a
piece of madness to miscal and rave against the times,
or think to recall men to reason by a fit of passion
Democritus, that thought to laugh the times into good-
ness, seems to me as deeply hypochondriack as Hera-
clitus that bewailed them. It moves not my spleen to
behold the multitude in their proper humours, that is.
 ;

RELIGIO MEDICI. 107

in their fits of folly and madness, as well understanding

that wisdom is not profaned unto the world, and 'tis the
privilege of a few to be virtuous. They that endeavour
to abolish vice destroy also virtue, for contraries, though
they destroy one another, are yet the life of one another.
Thus virtue (abolish vice) is an idea ; again, the com-
munity of sin doth not disparage goodness ; for when
vice gains upon the major part, virtue, in whom it re-

mains becomes more excellent ; and being lost in some,

multiplies its goodness in others which remain untouched,
and persists intire in the general inundation. I can
therefore behold vice without a satire, content only with
an admonition, or instructive reprehension; for noble
natures, and such as are capable of goodness, are railed
into vice, that might as easily be admonished into virtue
and we should be all so far the orators of goodness, as
to protect her from the power of vice, and maintain the
cause of injured truth. No man can justly censure or
condemn another, because indeed no man truly knows
another. This I perceive in myself, for I am in the

dark to all the world, and my nearest friends behold me

but in a cloud ; those that know me but superficially,
think less of me than I do of myself, those of my near
acquaintance think more ; God, who truly knows me,
knows that am nothing
I ; for he only beholds me, and
all the world, who looks not on us through a derived
ray, or a trajection of a sensible species, but beholds the
substance without the helps of accidents, and the forms
of things as we their operations. Further, no man can
judge another, because no man knows himself; for we
censure others but as they disagree from that humour
which we fancy laudable in ourselves, and commend
t>thers but for that wherein they seem to quadrate and
108 RELIGIO MEDICI.

consent with us. So that in conclusion, all is but that

we all condemn, self-love. 'Tis the general complaint
of these times, and perhaps of those past, that charity
grows cold which I perceive most verified in those
;

which most do manifest the fires and flames of zeal for ;

it is a virtue that best agrees with coldest natures, and

such as are complexioned for humility. But how shall
we expect charity towards others when we are un-
charitable to ourselves ? Charity begins at home, is the
voice of the world ;
yet is every man his greatest
enemy, and as it were, his own executioner. A'on occides.
is the commandment of God, yet scarce observed by
any man for I perceive every man is his own Atropos,
;

and lends a hand to cut the thread of his own days.

Cain was not therefore the first murderer, but Adam,
who brought whereof he beheld the practice
in death ;

and example in his own

son Abel, and saw that verified
in the experience of another which faith could not per-
suade him in the theory of himself.
V. There is I think no man that apprehends his own
miseries less than myself, and no man that so nearly
apprehends another's. I could lose an arm without a
tear, and with few groans methinks be quartered into
pieces yet can I weep most seriously at a play, and
;

receive with a true passion the counterfeit griefs of those

known and professed impostures. It is a barbarous part
of inhumanity to add unto any afflicted party's misery,
or endeavour to multiply in any man, a passion whose
single nature is already above his patience ; this was
the greatest affliction of Job, and those oblique expostu-
lations of his friends a deeper injury than the downright
blows of the devil It is not the tears of our own eyes
only, but of our friends also, that do exhaust the current

I
 RELIGIO MEDICI. 109

of our sorrows, which falHng into many streams, runs

more peaceably, and is contented with a narrower
channel. It is an act within the power of charity, to
translate a passion out of one breast into another, and
to divide a sorrow almost out of itself; for an affliction

like a dimension may be so divided, as if not indivisible,

at least to become insensible. Now with my friend I

desire not to share or participate, but to engross his

sorrows, that by making them mine own I may more
easily discuss them for in mine own reason, and within
;

myself, I can command that, which I cannot intreat with-

out myself, and within the circle of another. I have often
thought those noble pairs and examples of friendship
not so truly histories of what had been, as fictions of
what should be but I now perceive nothing in them
;

but possibilities, nor any thing in the heroick examples

of Damon and Pythias, Achilles and Patroclus, which
methinks upon some grounds I could not perform within
the narrow compass of myself. That a man should lay
down his life for his friend, seems strange to vulgar
affections and such as confine themselves within that
worldly principle, charity begins at home. For my
own part, I could never remember the relations that I

held unto myself nor the respect that I owe unto my

own nature, in the cause of God, my country, and my
friends. Next to these three I do embrace myself: I

confess I do not observe that order that the schools or-

dain our affections, to love our parents, wives, children,
and then our friends for excepting the injunctions of
;

religion, I do not find in myself such a necessary and

indissoluble sympathy to all those of my blood. I hope

I do not break the fifth commandment if I conceive I

may love my friend before the nearest of my blood, even

10
 ;

110 RELIGIO MEDICI.

those to whom I owe the principles of life ; I never yet cast

a true affection on a woman, but I have loved my friend
as I do virtue, my soul, my God. From hence methinks
I do conceive how God loves man, what happiness there
is in the love of God. Omitting all other, there are
three most mystical unions ; two natures in one person
three persons in one nature two bodies.
; one soul in
For though indeed they be really divided, yet are they
so united as they seem but one, and make rather a duality
than two distinct souls.
VI. There are wonders in true affection it is a body ;

of enigmas, mysteries, and riddles, wherein two so be-

come one, as they both become two I love my friend :

before myself, and yet methinks I do not love him

enough some few months hence my multiplied affec-
;

tion will make me believe I have not loved him at all

when I am from him I am dead till I be with him,
when I am with him I am not satisfied, but would still
be nearer him. United souls are not satisfied with em-
braces, but desire to be truly each other which being ;

impossible, their desires are infinite, and must proceed

without a possibility of satisfaction. Another misery
there is in affection ; that whom we truly love, like our
own we forget their looks, nor can our memory retain
the idea of their faces ; and it is no wonder, for they
are ourselves, and our affection makes their looks our

own. This noble affection falls not on vulgar and com-

mon constitutions, but on such as are markt for virtue;
he that can love his friend with this noble ardour, will
in a competent degree affect all. Now if we can bring
our affections to look beyond the body, and cast an eye
upon the soul, we have found out the true object, not
only of friendship but charity ; and the greatest happi

1
 RELIGIO MEDICI. Ill

ness that we can bequeath the soul, is that wherein we

all do place our which though it
last felicity, salvation ;

be not in our power to bestow, it is in our charity and

pious invocations to desire, if not procure and further.
I cannot contentedly frame a prayer for myself in par-
ticular, without a catalogue for my friends, nor request
a happiness wherein my sociable disposition doth not
desire the fellowship of my neighbour. I never hear
the toll of a passing-bell, though in my mirth, without
my prayers and best wishes for the departing spirit ; I

cannot go to cure the body of my patient but I forget

my profession and call unto God for his soul ; I cannot
see one say his prayers, but instead of imitating him I

fall into a supplication for him, who perhaps is no more

to me than a common nature ; and if God hath vouch-
safed an ear to my supplications there are surely many
happy that never saw me, and enjoy the blessing of
mine unknown devotions. To pray for enemies, that
is, for their salvation, is no harsh precept, but the prac-
tice of our daily and ordinary devotions. I cannot be-
lieve the story of the Italian ; our bad wishes and un-
charitable desires proceed no further than this life ; it

is the devil,and the uncharitable votes of hell, that de-

sire our misery in the world to come.
VII. To do no injury, nor take none, was a principle
which to my former years and impatient affections
seemed to contain enough of morality; but my more
settled years and Christian constitution have fallen upon
severer resolutions. I can hold there is no such thing

as injury that if there be, there is no such injury as

;

revenge, and no such revenge as the contempt of an

injury; that to hate another, is to malign himself; that
the truest way to love another, is to despise ourselves.
 ;

112 UELIGIO MEDICI.

I were unjust unto mine own conscience if I should say

I am at variance with any thing hke myself; I find
there are many pieces in this one fabrick of man ; this

frame is upon a mass of antipathies I am one

raised ;

methinks but as the world wherein notwithstanding ;

there are a swarm of distinct essences, and in them an-

other world of contrarieties we carry private and do-;

mestick enemies within, publick and more hostile adver-

saries without. The devil that did but buffet St. Paul,
plays methinks at sharp with me ; let me be nothing, if

within the compass of myself I do not find the battle of

Lepanto, passion against reason, reason against faith,

faith against the devil, and my conscience against all.

There is another manangry with me,

within me that's
rebukes, commands, and dastards me. I have no con-

science of marble to resist the hammer of more heavy

offences ; nor yet so soft and waxen as to take the im-
pression of each single peccadillo or scape of infirmity
I am of a strange belief, that it is as easy to be forgiven
some commit some others. For my original
sins, as to

sin, I hold it to be washed away in my baptism for ;

my actual transgressions, I compute and reckon with

God, but from my last repentance, sacrament, or gene-
ral absolution ; and therefore am not terrified with the
sins or madness of my youth. I thank the goodness of
God I have no sins that want a name, I am not singu-
lar in offences, my transgressions are epidemical, and
from the common breath of our corruption. For there
are certain tempers of body, which matcht with an hu-
morous depravity of mind, do hatch and produce vitio-
sities whose newness and monstrosity of nature admits

no name this was the temper of that lecher that car-

;

nailed with a statua, and the constitution of Nero in his

 ;

RELIGIO MEDICI. 113

spintrian recreations. For the heavens are not only

fruitful in new and unheard-of stars, the earth in plants

and animals, but men's minds also in villany and vices

now the dulness of my reason and the vulgarity of my
disposition, never prompted my invention, nor solicited
my affection unto any of these ;
yet even those common
and quotidian infirmities that so necessarily attend me,
and do seem to be my very nature, have so dejected
me, so broken the estimation that I should have other-
wise of myself, that I repute myself the most abjectest
piece of mortality. Divines prescribe a fit of sorrow^
to repentance ; there goes indignation, anger, sorrow,
hatred, into mine ;
passions of a contrary nature, which
neither seem to suit with this action, nor my proper
constitution. no breach of charity to ourselves to
It is

be at variance with our vices nor to abhor that part

;

of us which is an enemy to the ground of charity, our

God ; wherein we do but imitate our great selves the
world, whose divided antipathies and contrary faces do
yet carry a charitable regard unto the whole ; by their
particular discords preserving the common harmony,
and keeping in fetters those powers whose rebellions
once masters might be the ruin of all.
VIII. I thank God, amongst those millions of vices

I do inherit and hold from Adam, I have escaped one,

and that a mortal enemy to charity the first and father-

;

sin, not only of man but of the devil, pride ; a vice

whose name is comprehended in a monosyllable, but in
its nature not circumscribed with a world. I have
escaped it in a condition that can hardly avoid it : those
petty acquisitions and reputed perfections that advance
and elevate the conceits of other men, add no feathers
unto mine I have seen a grammarian tower and plume
:

10*
 1

114 RELIGIO MEDICI.

himself over a single line in Horace, and show more

pride in the construction of one ode than the author in
the composure of the whole book. For my own part,
besides the jargon and patois of several provinces, I

understand no less than six languages ; yet I protest I

have no higher conceit of myself than had our fathers
before the confusion of Babel, when there was but one
language and none to boast himself either _
in the world,
linguist or critick. I have not only seen several coun-

tries, beheld the nature of their climes, the chorography

of their provinces, topography of their cities, but under-

stood their several laws, customs, and policies yet can- ;

not all this persuade the dulness of my spirit unto such

an opinion of myself, as I behold in nimbler and con-
ceited heads that never looked a degree beyond their
nests. know. the names, and somewhat more, of all
I

the constellations in my horizon yet I have seen a ;

prating mariner that could only name

the pointers and
the north star, out-talk me, and conceit himself a whole
sphere above me. I know most of the plants of my
country and of those about me ;
yet methinks I do not
know so many as when I did but know a hundred, and
had scarcely ever simpled further than Cheapside. For
indeed, heads of capacity and such as are not full with
a handful or easy measure of knowledge, think they
know nothing till they know all which being impossi-;

ble, they fall upon the opinion of Socrates, and only

know they know not any thing. I cannot think that

Homer pined away upon the riddle of the fisherman, or
that Aristotle, who understood the uncertainty of know-
ledge, and confessed so often the reason of man too
weak for the works of nature, did ever drown himself
upon the flux and reflux of Euripus. We do but learn

J
 ;

RELIGIO MEDICI. 115

to day, what our better advanced judgments will un-

teach to morrow and Aristotle doth but instruct us as
;

Plato did him, that is, to confute himself. I have run

through all sorts, yet find no rest in any ; though our
first and junior endeavours may style us peripa-
studies
teticks, stoicks, or academicks, yet I perceive the wisest

heads prove at last almost all scepticks, and stand like

Janus in the field of knowledge. I have therefore one
common and authentick philosophy I learned in the
schools, whereby I discourse and satisfy the reason of
other men ; another more reserved, and drawn from ex-
perience, whereby I content mine own. Solomon, that
complained of ignorance in the height of knowledge,
hath not only humbled my conceits but discouraged my
endeavours. There is yet another conceit that hath
sometimes made me shut my books, which tells me it

is a vanity to waste our days in the blind pursuit of

knowledge, it is but attending a little longer, and we
shall enjoy that by instinct and infusion which we endea-
vour at here by labour and inquisition. It is better to sit
down in a modest ignorance, and rest contented with
the natural blessing of our own reasons, than buy the
uncertain knowledge of this life with sweat and vexation
which death gives every fool gratis, and is an accessary
of our glorification.
IX. Iwas never yet once, and commend their reso-
lutions who never marry twice not that I disallow of ;

second marriage ; as neither in all cases of polygamy,

which considering some times and the unequal number
of both sexes, may be also necessary. The whole world
was made for man, but the twelfth part of man for
woman man is the whole world, and the breath of God
;

woman the rib and crooked piece of man. I could be

116 RELIGIO MEDICI.

content that we might procreate hke trees, without con-

junction, or that there were any way to perpetuate the
world without and vulgar way of coition it
this trivial ;

is the foolishest act a wise man commits in all his life,

nor is there any thing that will more deject his cooled
imagination, when he shall consider what an odd and
unworthy piece of folly he hath committed. I speak not
in prejudice, nor am averse from that sweet sex, but
naturally amorous of all that is beautiful I can look a ;

whole day with delight upon a handsome picture,

though it be but of an horse. It is my temper, and I like
it the better, to affect all harmony, and sure there is

musick even in the beauty, and the silent note which

Cupid strikes, far sweeter than the sound of an instru-
ment. For there is a musick wherever there is a har-
mony, order, or proportion and thus far we may
;

maintain the musick. of the spheres; for those well-

ordered motions, and regular paces,- though they give no
sound unto the ear, yet to the understanding they strike
a note most full of harmony. Whatsoever is harmoni-
cally composed, delights harmony which makes me
in ;

much distrust the symmetry of those heads which de-

claim against all church-musick. For myself, not only
from my obedience, but my particular genius, I do
embrace it; for even that vulgar and tavern musick,
which makes one man merry, another mad, strikes in
me a deep fit of devotion, and a profound contemplation
of the First Composer : there is something in it of
divinity more than the ear discovers. It is an hiero-
glyphical and shadowed lesson of the whole world and
creatures of God such
; a melody to the ear as the whole
world, well understood, would afford the understanding.
In brief, it is a sensible fit of that harmony which intel-
 — :

RELIGIO MEDICI. 117

God. I will not say with

lectually sounds in the ears of
Plato, the soul an harmony, but harmonica!, and hath
is

its nearest sympathy unto musick thus some whose ;

temper of body agrees, and humours the constitution of

their souls, are born poets, though indeed all are natu-
rally inclined unto rhythm. This made Tacitus in the
very hne of his story, fall upon a verse ;* and
first

Cicero, the worst of poets, but declaiming for a poet,

falls in the very first sentence upon a perfect hexameter.f

I feel not in me those sordid and unchristian desires of

my profession ; I do not secretly implore and wish for
plagues, rejoice at famines, revolve ephemerides and
almanacks in expectation of malignant aspects, fatal
conjunctions, and eclipses: I rejoice not at unwholesome
springs, nor unseasonable winters ; my prayer goes with
the husbandman's ; I desire every thing in its proper
season, that neither men nor the times be out of temper.
Let me be sick myself, if sometimes the malady of my
patient be not a disease unto me ; I desire rather to cure
his infirmities than my own necessities ; where I do him
no good methinks it is scarce honest gain, though I con-
fess 'tis but the worthy salary of our well-intended en-
deavours. I am not only ashamed, but heartily sorry,
that besides death there are diseases incurable ;
yet not*
for my own sake, or that they be beyond my art, but
for the general cause and sake of humanity, whose
common cause I apprehend as mine own. And to speak
more which all
generally, those three noble professions
civil commonwealths do honour, are raised upon the

fall of Adam and are not exempt from their infirmities

there are not only diseases incurable in physick, but

* Urbem Romam in principio rcges habuere.

t In qua me non inficior mediocriter esse. Pro Archio.

118 RELIGIO MEDICI.

cases indissolvable in laws, vices incorrigible in divinity.

If general councils may err, I
lltv.

do not see why particular

1
courts should be infallible ; their perfectest rules are
raised upon the erroneous reasons of man, and the laws
of one, do but condemn the rules of another; as Aris-
i
totle oft-times the opinions of his predecessors, because,
though agreeable to reason, yet not consonant to his
own rules, and the logick of his proper principles.
Again, to speak nothing of the sin against the Holy
Ghost, whose cure not only but whose nature is un-
known, I can cure the gout or stone in some, sooner
than Divinity pride or avarice in others. I can cure

vices by physick, when they remain incurable by

divinity, and shall obey my pills, when they contemn
their precepts. I boast nothing, but plainly say, we all

labour against our own cure, for death is the cure of all

diseases. There is no catholicon or universal remedy

I know but this, which though nauseous to queasy sto-

machs, yet to prepared appetites is nectar and a plea-

sant potion of immortaHty.
X. For my conversation, it is like the sun's, with all
men; and with a friendly aspect to good and bad.
Methinks there is no man bad, and the worst, best;
that is, while they are kept within the circle of those
qualities wherein they are good there is no man's :

mind of such discordant and jarring a temper to which

a tunable disposition may not strike a harmony. Magna!
virtutes,nee minora vit/'a ; it is the posy of the best
natures, and may be inverted on the worst there are ;

in the most depraved and venemous dispositions, certain'

pieces that remain untoucht, which by an antiperistasis
become more excellent, or by the excellency of their
antipathies are able to preserve themselves from the

1
 RKLIGIO MEDICI. 119

contagion of their enemy vices, and persist entire be-

yond the general corruption. For it is also thus in

natures. The greatest balsams do lie enveloped in the
bodies of most powerful corrosives I say moreover, ;

and I ground upon experience, that poisons contain

within themselves their own antidote, and that which
preserves them from the venom of themselves ; without
which they were not deleterious to others only, but to
themselves also. But it is the corruption that I fear
within me, not the contagion of commerce without me.
'Tis that unruly regiment within me that will destroy
me ; 'tis I that do infect myself, the man without a
navel yet lives in me : I feel that original canker cor-
rode and devour me, and therefore Defenda me Dios de
me, Lord deliver me from myself, is a part of my litany,
and the first voice of my retired imaginations. There
is no man alone, because every man is a microcosm,
and carries the whole world about him nunquam ;

minus solus quam cum solus, though it be the apoph-

thegm of a wise man, is yet true in the mouth of a
fool; for indeed, though in a wilderness, a man is never
alone, not only because he is with himself and his own
thoughts, but because he is with the devil, who ever
consorts with our solitude, and is that unruly rebel that
musters up those disordered motions which accompany
our sequestered imaginations. And to speak more
narrowly, there is no such thing as solitude, nor any
thing that can be said to be alone and by itself, but
God, who is his own circle, and can subsist by himself;
all others, besides their dissimilary and heterogeneous
parts, which in a manner multiply their natures, cannot
subsist without the concourse of God and the society of
that hand which doth uphold their natures. In brief,
 ;

120 RELIGIO MEDICI.

there can be nothing truly alone and by itself, which is

not truly one, and such is only God ; all others do

transcend an unity, and so by consequence are many.
XL Now for my life, it is a miracle of thirty years,
which to relate, were not a history but a piece of poetry,
and would sound to common ears like a fable for the ;

world, I count it not an inn but an hospital, and a place,

not to live but to die in. The world that I regard is
myself, it is the microcosm of my own frame that I
cast mine eye on for the other, I use it but like my
;

globe, and turn it round sometimes for my recreation.

Men that look upon my outside, perusing only my con-
dition and fortunes, do err in my altitude, for I am
above Atlas his shoulders. The earth is a point not
only in respect of the heavens above us, but of that
heavenly and celestial part within us ; that mass of flesh

that circumscribes me, limits not my mind ; that surface

that tells the heavens it hath an end, cannot persuade
me I have any : I take my circle to be above three
hundred and sixty though the number of the arc do
;

measure my body, it comprehendeth not my mind

whilst I study to find how I am a microcosm or little
world, I find myself something more than the great.
There is surely a piece of divinity in us, something
that was before the elements and owes no homage unto
the sun. Nature tells me I am image of God, as
the
well as Scripture ; he that understands not thus much,
hath not his introduction or first lesson, and is yet to
begin the alphabet of man. Let me not injure the feli-

city of others, if I say I am as happy as any ; Ruat

codum,fiat voluntas tua, salveth all so that whatsoever ;

happens, it is but what our daily prayers desire. In

brief, I am content, and what should Providence add

1
 RELIGIO MEDICI. 121

more ? Surely this is it we call happiness, and this do

I enjoy ; with this I am happy in a dream, and as con-
tent to enjoy a happiness in a fancy as others in a more
apparent truth and reality. There is surely a nearer
apprehension of any thing that delights us in our
dreams, than in our waked senses without this I were ;

unhappy, for my awaked judgment discontents me, ever

whispering unto me that I am from my friend, but my
friendly dreams in night requite me, and make me
think I am within his arms. I thank God for my happy
dreams as I do for my good rest, for there is a satisfac-
tion in them unto reasonable desires, and such as can
be content with a fit of happiness and surely it is not ;

a melancholy conceit to think we are all asleep in this

world, and that the conceits of this life are as mere
dreams phantasms of the
to those of the next, as the
night to the conceits of the day. There is an equal
delusion in both, and the one doth but seem to be the
emblem or picture of the other; we are somewhat more
than ourselves in our sleeps, and the slumber of the
body seems to be but the waking of the soul. It is the
ligation of sense, but and our
the liberty of reason,
awaking conceptions do not match the fancies of our
sleeps. At my nativity my ascendant was the watery
sign of Scorpius ; I was born in the planetary hour of
Saturn, and I think I have a piece of that leaden planet in
me. I am no way facetious, nor disposed for the mirth
and galliardize of company ; yet in one dream I can com-
pose a whole comedy, behold the action, apprehend the
jests, and laugh myself awake at the conceits thereof:
were my memory as faithful as my reason is then
would never study but in my dreams, and this
fruitful, I

time also would I choose for my devotions; but our

II
 ;;

122 RELIGIO MEDICI.

grosser memories have then so httle hold of our ab-

stracted understandings, that they forget the story, and
can only relate to our awaked souls a confused and
broken tale of that that hath passed. Aristotle, who
hath written a singular tract of sleep, hath not methinks
throughly defined it, nor yet Galen, though he seem to
have corrected it; for those noctambuloes and night-
walkers, though in their sleep, do yet enjoy the action
of their senses : we must therefore say that there is

something in us that is not in the jurisdiction of Mor-

pheus, and that those abstracted and ecstatick souls do
walk about in their own corps, as spirits with the bodies
they assume wherein they seem to hear, see, and feel,
;

though indeed the organs are destitute of sense, and

their natures of those faculties that should inform them.
Thus it is observed that men sometimes upon the hour
of their departure, do speak and reason above them-
selves ; for then the soul beginning to be freed from the
ligaments of the body, begins to reason like herself, and
to discourse in a strain above mortality.
XII. We term sleep a death, and yet it is waking that
kills us, and destroys those spirits that are the house of
life. 'Tis indeed a part of life that best expresseth death
for man truly lives
every so long as he acts his nature,
or some way makes good the faculties of himself; Ther«j
mistocles therefore that slew his soldier in his sleep, was
a merciful executioner, 'tis a kind of punishment the
mildness of no laws hath invented I wonder the fancy ;

of Lucan and Seneca did not discover it. It is that

death by which we may be literally said to die daily
a death which Adam died before his mortality a death ;

whereby we live a middle and moderating point between

life and death in fine, so like death I dare not trust it
;
 ;

RELIGIO MEDICI. 123

without my prayers, and an half adieu unto the world,

and take my farewell in a colloquy with God.

The night is come, like to the day

Depart not thou great God away I

Let not my sins, black as the night,

Eclipse the lustre of thy light
Keep still in my horizon, for to me
The sun makes not the day, but thee.
Thou whose nature cannot sleep.
On my temples sentry keep ;

Guard me 'gainst those watchful foes.

Whose eyes are open while mine close ;

Let no dreams my head infest,

But such as Jacob's temples blest.

While I do rest, my soul advance,
Make my sleep a holy trance.
That I may, my rest being wrought,
Awake into some holy thought.
And with as active vigour run
My course, as doth the nimble sun.
Sleepis a death, O make me try.

By sleeping, what it is to die ;

And as gently lay my head

On my grave, as now my bed.
Howe'er I rest, great God, let me
Awake again at last with thee :

And thus assured, behold I lie

Securely, or to wake or die.
These are my drowsy days, in vain
I do now wake to sleep again ;

O come that hour when I shall never

Sleep again, but wake for ever I

This is the dormative I take to bedward, I need no other

laudanum than this to make me sleep after which I ;

close mine eyes in security, content to take my leave of

the sun, and sleep unto the resurrection.
XIII. The method I should use in distributive justice.
 ;

124

I often observe in commutative,

RELIGIO MEDICI.

and keep a geometrical

1
proportion in both ; whereby becoming equable to others,
I become unjust to myself, and supererogate in that Ij

common principle, do unto others as thou wouldst be

done unto thyself I was not born unto riches, neither
is it I think my star to be wealthy; or if it were, the Ji
freedom of my mind and frankness of my disposition, '
were able to contradict and cross my fates for to me ;

avarice seems not so much a vice as a deplorable piece

of madness ; to conceive ourselves urinals, or be per-
suaded that we are dead, is not so ridiculous, nor so
many degrees beyond the power of hellebore as this.
The opinions of theory and positions of men are not so
void of reason as their practised conclusions ; some have
held that snow is black, that the earth moves, that the
soul is air, fire water; but all this is philosophy, and
there is no delirium, if we do but speculate the folly and
indisputable dotage of avarice to that subterraneous idol,
and god of the earth. I do confess I am an atheist, I
cannot persuade myself tohonour that the world adores
whatsoever virtue its prepared substance may have
within my body, it hath no influence nor operation with-
out ;would not entertain a base design, or an action
I

that should callme villain, for the Indies and for this ;

only do I love and honour my own soul, and have me-

thinks two arms too few to embrace myself Aristotle is
too severe, that will not allow us to be truly liberal with-
out wealth, and the bountiful hand of fortune ; if this be
true, I must confess I am charitable only in my liberal

intentions,and bountiful well-wishes. But if the exam-

ple of the mite be not only an act of wonder, but an ex-
ample of the noblest charity, surely poor men may also
build hospitals, and the rich alone have not erected

I
 ;

RELIGIO MEDICI. 125

cathedrals. I have a private method which others ob-

serve not ; I take the opportunity of myself to do good,
I borrow occasion of charity from mine own necessities,

and supply tiie wants of others when I am in most need

myself; for it is an honest stratagem to take advantage
of ourselves, and so to .husband the acts of virtue, that
where they are defective in one circumstance, they may
I'epay their want and multiply their goodness in another.
I have not Peru in my desires, but a competence, and
ability to perform those good works to which the Al-
mighty hath inclined my nature. He is rich who hath
enough to be charitable, and it is hard to be so poor that
a noble mind may not find a way to this piece of good-
ness. He Lord
that giveth to the poor lendeth to the
there more rhetorick in that one sentence than in a
is

library of sermons and indeed if those sentences were

;

understood by the reader with the same emphasis as

they are delivered by the author, we needed not those
volumes of instructions, but might be honest by an epi-
tome. Upon this motive only I cannot behold a beggar
without relieving his necessities w^ith my purse, or his
soul with my prayers ; these scenical and accidental
differences between us cannot make me forget that
common and untoucht part of us bothis under ; there
these centoes and miserable outsides, these mutilate and
semi-bodies, a soul of the same alloy with our own,
whose genealogy is God as well as ours, and in as fair
a way to salvation as ourselves. Statists that labour to
contrive a commonwealth without poverty, take away
the object of charity, not understanding only the com-
monweahh of a Christian, but forgetting the prophecy
of Christ.
XIV. Now there is another part of charity, which is

11*
 :

126 RELIGIO MEDICI.

the basis and pillar of this, and that is the love of God,
for whom we love our neighbour; for this I think charity,
to love God and our neighbour for God.
for himself,
All that is God, or as it were a divided
truly amiable is

piece of him, that retains a reflex or shadow of himself. 1

Nor is it strange that we s^ioiild- place affection on that
which is invisible all that we truly love is thus what
; ;

we adore under affection of our senses deserves not the

honour of so pure a title. Thus we adore virtue, though
to the eyes of sense she is invisible-; thus that part of
our noble friends that we love, is not that part that we
embrace, but that insensible part that our arms cannot
embrace. God being all goodness, can love nothing
but himself; he loves us but for that part which is as it

were himself, and the traduction of his Holy Spirit.

Let us call to assize the loves of our parents, the affec-

tion of our wives and children, and they are all dumb
shows and dreams, without reality, truth, or constancy
for first, there is a strong bond of afl^ection between us
and our parents yet how easily dissolved We betake
;
!

ourselves to a woman, forget our mother in a wife, and

the womb that bare us in that that shall bear our image.
This woman blessing us with children, our affection
leaves the level it held before, and sinks from our bed
unto our issue and picture of posterity, where affection
holds no steady mansion. They, growing up in years,
desire our ends, or applying themselves to a woman,
take a lawful way to love another better than ourselves.
Thus I perceive a man maybe buried alive, and behold
his grave in his own issue.
XV. I conclude therefore and say, there is no happi- m^
ness under (or as Copernicus will have it, above) the
sun, nor any crambe in that repeated verity and burthen

1
 RELIGIO MEDICI. 127

of all the wisdom of Solomon, all is vanity and vexation

of spirit ; there is no felicity in that the world adores.
Aristotle whilst he labours to refute the ideas of Plato,
upon one himself; for his summum bonum is a chi-
falls

mera, and thereis no such thing as his felicity. That

wherein God himself is happy, the holy angels are
happy, in whose defect the devils are unhappy, that dare
I call happiness ; whatsoever conduceth unto this, may
with an easy metaphor deserve that name ; whatsoever
else the world terms happiness, is to me a story out of
Pliny, an apparition or neat delusion, wherein there is

no more of happiness than the name. Bless me in this

life with but the peace of my conscience, command of

my aflections, the love of thyself and my dearest friends,

and I shall be happy enough to pity Csesar.
These are
Lord the humble desires of my most reasonable am-
bition, and all I dare call happiness on earth wherein ;

1 set no rule or limit to thy hand or providence dispose ;

of meaccording to the wisdom of thy pleasure. Thy

will be done, though in my own undoing.

FINIS.
c!ll)ri6tian illorab.
I
 TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE

DAVID EARL OF BUCHAN,

VISCOUNT AUCHTERHOUSE, LORD CARDROSS
AND GLENDOVACHIE.ONE OF THE LORDS COMMISSIONERS OF POLICE, AND LORD
LIEUTENANT OF THE COUNTIES OF STIRLING AND CLACKMANNAN
IN NORTH BRITAIN.

My Lord,
The honour you have done our family obhgeth us to
make all just acknowledgments of it and there is no
;

form of acknowledgment in our power, more worthy of

your lordship's acceptance, than this dedication of the
last work of our honoured and learned Father. Encou-
raged hereunto by the knowledge we have of your lord-
ship's judicious relish of universal learning, and sublime
virtue, we beg the favour of your acceptance of it,

which will much oblige

very our family in general, and
her in particular who is,
My Lord,
Your lordship's most humble servant,
Elizabeth Littleton.
 THE PREFACE.

If any one, after he has read RELreio medici and thai

ensuing discourse, can make doubt whether the same
J
person was the author of them both, he may be assured]
by the testimony of Mrs. Littleton, Sir Thomas
Browne's daughter, who hved with her father when it
was composed by him and who, at the time, read it''
;

written by his own hand and also by the testimony of

:

others (of whom I am one), who read the manuscript of

the author immediately after his death, and who have
since read the same from which
; it hath been faithfully
and exactly transcribed for the press. The reason why
itwas not printed sooner is, because it was unhappily
lost,by being mislaid among other manuscripts for

which search was lately made in the presence of the

Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, of which his Grace by j

letter informed Mrs. Littleton when he sent the manu-

script to her. There is nothing printed in the discourse,]
or in the short notes, but what is found in the original j

manuscript of the author, except only where an over-

sight had made the addition or transposition of so/ne|
words necessary.
John Jeffery,
Archdeacon of Norwich.
 ;;

CHRISTIAN MORALS.

I. Tread softly and circumspectly

in this funambu-
latory track andnarrow path of goodness pursue virtue ;

virtuously leaven not good actions, nor render virtues

;

disputable. Stain not fair acts with foul intentions

maim not uprightness by halting concomitances, nor
circumstantially deprave substantial goodness.
Consider whereabout thou art in Cebes's table, oi
that old philosophical pinax of the life of man whether
;

thou art yet in the road of uncertainties ; whether thou

hast yet entered the narrow gate, got up the hill and

asperous way, which leadeth unto the house of sanity

or taken that purifying potion from the hand of sincere
erudition, which may send thee clear and pure away
unto a virtuous and happy life.

In this virtuous voyage of thy life hull not about like

the ark without the use of rudder, mast, or sail, and

bound for no port. Let not disappointment cause
despondency, nor Think not that you
difficulty despair.
are sailing from Lima to Manillia, when you may fasten
up the rudder, and sleep before the wind but expect ;

rough seas, flaws, and contrary blasts, and 'tis well if by

many cross tacks and veerings you arrive at the port;
12
134 CHRISTIAN MORALS.

for we sleep in lions' skins in our progress unto virtue,

and we slide not, but climb unto it.

Sit not down in the popular forms and common level*

of virtues. Offer not only peace-offerings but holocausts
unto God : where all is due make no reserve, and cut
not a cummin-seed with the Almighty ; to serve him
singly to serve ourselves were too partial a piece of
piety, not like to place us in the illustrious mansions of
glory.
II. Rest not in an ovation* but a triumph over thy
passions.Let anger walk hanging down the head let ;

malice go manacled, and envy fettered after thee.

Behold within thee the long train of thy trophies, not
without thee. Make the quarrelling Lapithytes sleep,
and Centaurs within lie quiet. Chain up the unruly
legion of thy breast. Lead thine own captivity captive,
and be Casar wdthin thyself
III. He that is chaste and continent, not to impair
his strength, or honest for fear of contagion, will hardly
be heroically virtuous. Adjourn not this virtue until _
that temper when Cato could lend out his wife, and im-B
potent satyrs write satires upon lust ; but be chaste in
thy flaming days, when Alexander dared not trust his
eyes upon the fair sisters of Darius, and when so many
think there is no other way but Origen's. 1
IV. Show thy art in honesty, and lose not thy virtue
by bad managery of it. Be temperate and sober,
the
not topreserve your body in an ability for wanton
ends, not to avoid the infamy of common transgressors
that way, and thereby to hope to expiate or palliate
obscure or closer vices, not to spare your purse, nor

* Ovation, a petty find minor kind of triumph.

1
 ;

CHEISTIAN MORALS. 135

simply to enjoy health but in one word that thereby

;

you may truly serve God, which every sickness will tell
you you cannot well do without health. The sick man's
sacrifice is but a lame oblation. Pious treasures laid
up in healthful days plead for sick non-performances
without which we must needs look back with anxiety
upon the lost opportunities of health, and may have
cause rather to envy than pity the ends of penitent
publick sufferers, who go with healthful prayers unto
the last scene of their lives, and in the integrity of their

faculties return their spirit unto God that gave it.

V. Be charitable before wealth make thee covetous,
and lose not the glory of the mite. If riches increase,

let thy mind hold pace with them, and think it not
enough to be liberal, but munificent. Though a cup of
cold water from some hand may not be without its

reward, yet stick not thou for wine and oil for the
wounds of the distressed, and treat the poor as our
Saviour did the multitude, to the reliques of some
baskets. Difllise thy beneficence early, and while thy
treasures call thee master be an Atropos of
: there may
thy fortunes before that of thy and thy wealth cut
life,

off before that hour, when all men shall be poor for ;

the justice of death looks equally upon the dead, and

Charon expects no more from Alexander than from
Irus.
VI. Give not only unto seven, but also unto eight,*
that is more than many. Though to give unto
unto
every one that askethf may seem severe advice, yet
give thou also before asking that is, where want is
;

silently clamorous, and men's necessities, not their

* Ecclesiasticus xi. 2. t Luke vi, 30.

136 CHRISTIAN MORALS.

torn do loudly call for thy mercies. For though

sometimes necessitousness be dumb, or misery speak
not out, yet true charity is sagacious, and will find out
hints for beneficence. Acquaint thyself with the phy-
siognomy of want, and let the dead colours and first
lines of necessity suffice to tell thee thereis an object

for thy bounty. Spare not where thou canst not easily
be prodigal, and fear not to be undone by mercy. For
since he who hath pity on the poor lendeth unto the
Almighty re warder, who observes no ides but every
day for his payments, charity becomes pious usury.
Christian liberality the most thriving industry, and what
we adventure in a cockboat may return in a carrack
unto us. He who thus casts his bread upon the water
shall surely find it again ; for though it falleth to the
bottom, it sinks but like the axe of the prophet, to rise
again unto him.
VII. If avarice be thy vice, yet make it not thy
punishment. Miserable men commiserate not them-
selves, bowelless unto others, and merciless unto their
own bowels. Let the fruition of things bless the pos-
session of them, and think it more satisfaction to live
richly than die rich. For since thy good works, not
thy goods, will follow thee ; since wealth
is an apperte-

nance of life, and no dead man is rich to famish in ;

plenty, and live poorly to die rich, were a multiplying

improvement in madness, and use upon use in folly.
VIII. Trust not to the omnipotency of gold, and say
not unto it thou art my confidence. Kiss not thy hand
to that terrestrial sun, nor bore thy ear unto its servi-
tude. A slave unto mammon makes no servant unto
God. Covetousness cracks the sinews of faith; numbs
the apprehension of any thing above sense, and only

i
 CHRISTIAN MORALS. 137

affected with the certainty of things present, makes a

peradventure of things to come ; Hves but unto one
world, nor hopes but fears another; makes their own
death sweet unto others, bitter unto themselves ; brings
formal sadness, scenical mourning, and no wet eyes at
the grave.
IX. Persons lightly dipt, not grained in generous
honesty, are but pale in goodness, and faint-hued in
integrity. But be thou what thou virtuously art, and let
not the ocean wash away thy tincture. Stand mag-
netically upon that axis, when prudent simplicity hath
fixt thereand let no attraction invert the poles of thy
;

honesty.. That vice may be uneasy and even monstrous

unto thee, let iterated good acts and long confirmed
habits make virtue almost natural, or a second nature
in thee. Since virtuous superstructions have commonly
generous foundations, dive into thy inclinations, and early
discover what nature bids thee to be, or tells thee thou
mayest be. They who thus timely descend into them-
selves, and cultivate the good seeds which nature hath
set in them, prove not shrubs but cedars in their gene-
ration. And to be in the form of the best of the bad,
or the worst of the good,* will be no satisfaction unto
them.
X. Make not the consequence of virtue the ends
thereof Be not beneficent for a name or cymbal of
applause, nor exact and just in commerce for the ad-
vantages of trust and credit, which attend the reputa-
tion of true and punctual dealing. For these rewards,
though unsought for, plain virtue will bring with her.
To have other by-ends in good actions sours laudable

* Optimi malorum pessimi bonorum.

12*
138 CHRISTIAN MORALS.

performances, which must have deeper roots, motives,

and instigations, to give them the stamp of virtues.
XI. Let not the law of thy country be the non ultra
of thy honesty ; nor think that always good enough
which the law will make good. Narrow not the law
of charity, equity, mercy. Join gospel righteousness
with legal right. Be not a mere Gamaliel in the faith,
but let the sermon in the mount be thy targum unto the
law of Sinai.
XII. Liveby old ethicks and the classical rules of
honesty. Put no new names or notions upon authentick
virtues and vices. Think not that morality is ambula-
tory ; that vices in one age arejiot vices in another; or
that virtues, which are under the everlasting seal of
right reason, may be stamped by opinion. And there-
fore though vicious times invert the opinions of things,
and set up new ethicks against virtue, yet hold thou
unto old morality and rather than follow a multitude
;

to do evil, stand like Pompey's pillar conspicuous by

thyself, and single in integrity. And since the worst
of times afford imitable examples of virtue ; since no
deluge of vice is like to be so general but more than
eight will escape ; eye well those heroes who have held
I
their heads above water, who have touched pitch and
not been defiled, and in the common contagion have re-
mained uncorrupted.
XIII. Let age not envy draw wrinkles on thy cheeks,
be content to be envied, but envy not. Emulation may
be plausible and indignation allowable, but admit no
treaty with that passion which no circumstance can
make good. A displacency at the good of others be-
cause they enjoy it, though not unworthy of it, is an
absurd depravity, sticking fast unto corrupted nature.
 CHRISTIANMORALS. 139

and often too hard for humility and charity, the great
suppressors of envy. This surely is a lion not to be
strangled but by Hercules himself, or the highest stress
of our minds, and an atom of that power which sub-
dueth all things unto itself.

XIV. Owe not thy humility unto humiliation from

adversity, but look humbly down in that state when
others look upwards upon thee. Think not thy own
shadow longer than, that of others, nor delight to take
the altitude of thyself. Be patient in the age of pride,
when men by short intervals of reason under the
live

dominion of humour and passion, when it's in the

power of every one to transform thee out of thyself,
and run thee into the short madness. If you cannot
imitate Job, yet come not short of Socrates, and those
patient pagans who tired the tongues of their enemies,

while they perceived they spit their malice at brazen

walls and statues.
XV. Let not the sun in Capricorn* go down upon
thy wrath, but write thy wrongs in ashes. Draw the
curtain of night upon injuries, shut tower them up in the

of oblivion,! ^^^ 1®^ them be as though they had not

been. To forgive our enemies, yet hope that God will
punish them, is not to forgive enough. To forgive
them ourselves, and not to pray God to forgive them,
is a partial piece of charity. Forgive thine enemies
totally, and without any reserve, that however, God
will revenge thee.

* Even v/hen the days are shortest.

t Alluding unto the tower of oblivion mentioned by Procopius, which
was the name of a tower of imprisonment among tiie Persians : who-
ever was put therein was as it were buried alive, and it was death for

any but to name him.

140 CHRISTIAN MORALS.

XVI. While thou so hotly disclaimest the devil, be

not guilty of diabolism. Fall not into one name with
that unclean spirit, nor act his nature whom thou so
much abhorrest ; that is, to accuse, calumniate, back-
bite, whisper, detract, or sinistrously interpret others.
Degenerous depravities, and narrow-minded vices not !

only below St. Paul's noble Christian but Aristotle's

true gentleman.* Trust not with some that the epistle
of St. James is apocryphal, and so read with less fear

that stabbing truth, that in company with this vice thy

religion is Moses broke the tables, without
in vain.
breaking of the law but where charity is broke, the
;

law itself is shattered, which cannot be whole without

love, which is the fulfilling of it. Look humbly upon
thy virtues ; and though thou art rich in some, yet
think thyself poor and naked without that crowning
grace, which thinketh no evil, wiiich envieth not, which
beareth, hopeth, believeth, endureth all things. With
these sure graces, while busy tongues are crying out
for a drop of cold water, mutes may be in happiness,
and sing the Trisagionf in heaven.
XVII. However thy understanding may waver in
the theories of true and false, yet fasten the rudder of
thy will, steer straight unto good and fall not foul on
evil. Imagination is apt to rove, and conjecture to
keep no bounds. Some have run out so far, as to fancy
the stars might be but the light of the crystalline heaven
shot through perforations on the bodies of the orbs.
Others more ingeniously doubt whether there hath not
been a vast tract of land in the Atlantick ocean, which
earthquakes and violent causes have long ago devoured.

* See Aristotle's Ethics, chapter of Magnanimity,

t Holy, holy, lioly.
 CHRISTIAN MORALS. 141

Speculative misapprehensions may be innocuous, but

immorality pernicious ; theorical mistakes and physical
deviations may condemn our judgments, not lead us
into judgment. But perversity of
will, immoral and

sinful enormities walk with Adraste and Nemesis at

their backs, pursue us unto judgment, and leave us
viciously miserable.
XVIir. Bid early defiance unto those vices which
are of thine inward family, and having a root in thy
temper plead a right and propriety in thee. Raise
timely batteries against those strong holds built upon
the rock of nature, and make this a great part of the
militia of thy
life. Delude not thyself into iniquities
from participation or community, which abate the
sense but not the obliquity of them. To conceive sins
less, or less of sins, because others also transgress,
were morally to commit that natural fallacy of man, to
take comfort from society, and think adversities less
because others also suffer them. The politick nature
of vice must be opposed by policy; and therefore wiser
honesties project and plot against it. Wherein not-
withstanding we are not to rest in generals, or the trite

stratagems of That may succeed with one which

art.

may prove successless with another.

There is no com-
munity or commonweal of virtue every man must ;

study his own economy, and adapt such rules unto the
figure of himself
XIX. Be substantially great in thyself, and more
than thou appearest unto others ; and let the world be
deceived in thee, as they are in the lights of heaven.
Hang early plummets upon the heels of pride, and let

ambition have but an epicycle and narrow circuit in

thee. Measure not thyself by thy morning shadow, but
142 CHRISTIAN MORALS.

by the extent of thy grave, and reckon thyself above

the earth by the Hne thou must be contented with under
it. Spread not into boundless expansions either of de-
signs or desires. Think not that mankind hveth but!
for a few,and that the rest are born but to serve those
ambitions which make but flies of men, and wilder-
nesses of whole nations. Swell not into vehement
actions which embroil and confound the earth but be ;

one of those violent ones which force the kingdom of

heaven.* If thou must needs rule, be Zeno's king, and
enjoy that empire which every man gives himself He
who is thus his own monarch contentedly sways the
sceptre of himself, not envying the glory of crowned
heads and Elohims of the earth. Could the world unite
in the practice of that despised train of virtues which
the divine ethicks of our Saviour hath so inculcated unto
us, the furious face of things must disappear; Eden

would be yet to be found, and the angels might look

down, not with pity, but joy upon us.
XX. Though the quickness of thine ear were able to
reach the noise of the moon, which some think it maketh
in its rapid revolution though the number of thy ears
;

should equal Argus his eyes yet stop them all with
;

the wise man's w^ax, and be deaf unto the suggestions

of tale-bearers, calumniators, pickthank or malevolent
delators, who, while quiet men sleep, sowing the tares
of discord and division distract the tranquillity of cha-
rity and all friendly society. These are the tongues i

that set the world on fire, cankers of reputation, and,.j

like that of Jonas his gourd, wither a good name in ai

night. Evil spirits may sit still, while these spirits walk]

* Matthew xi.
 ;

CHRISTIAN MORALS. 143

about and perform the business of hell. To speak more

strictly, our corrupted hearts are the factories of the
devil,which may be at work without his presence.
For when that circumventing spirit hath drawn malice,
envy, and all unrighteousness, unto well-rooted habits
goes on upon its own legs,
in his disciples, iniquity then
and if the gate of hell were shut up for a time, vice
would still be fertile and produce the fruits of hell.
Thus when God forsakes us, Satan also leaves us ; for
such offenders he looks upon as sure and sealed up, and
his temptations then needless unto them.
XXI. Annihilate not the mercies of God by the ob-
livion of ingratitude. For oblivion is a kind of annihi-
lation, and for things to be as though they had not been,
is like unto never being. Make not thy head a grave, but
a repository of God's mercies. Though thou hadst the
memory of Seneca, or Simonides, and conscience, the
punctual memorist within us, yet trust not to thy re-
membrance in things which need phylacteries. Register
not only strange, but merciful occurrences ; let ephe-
merides not olympiads give thee account of his mercies.
Let thy diaries stand thick with dutiful mementoes and
asterisks of acknowledgment. And to be complete and
forget nothing, date not his mercy from thy nativity
look beyond the world, and before the era of Adam.
XXII. Paint not the sepulchre of thyself, and strive
not to beautify thy corruption. Be not an advocate for
thy vices, nor call for many hour-glasses to justify thy
imperfections. Think not that always good which thou
thinkest thou canst always make good, nor that concealed
which the sun doth not behold. That which the sun doth
not now see, will be visible when the sun
is out and the

stars are fallen from heaven. Meanwhile there is no dark-

 144 CHRISTIAN MORALS.

ness unto conscience, which can see without light, and

in the deepest obscurity give a clear draught of things
which the cloud of dissimulation hath concealed from
all eyes. There is a natural standing court within us,
examining, acquitting, and condemning at the tribunal
of ourselves, wherein iniquities have their natural thetas,
and no nocent is absolved by the verdict of himself
And therefore although our transgressions shall be tried
at the last bar, the process need not be long for the ;

Judge of all and every man will nakedly

knoweth all,

know himself. And when so few are like to plead not

guilty, the assize must soon have an end.
XXIII. Comply with some humours, bear with others,
but serve none. Civil complacency consists with decent
honesty ; flattery is a juggler, and no kin unto sincerity.
But while thou maintainest the plain path, and scornest
and become
to flatter others, fall not into self-adulation,
not thine own parasite. Be deaf unto thyself,and be
not betrayed at home. Self-credulity, pride, and levity
lead unto self-idolatry. There is no Damocles like unto
self-opinion, nor any Siren to our own fawning concep-
tions. To magnify our minor things, or hug ourselves
in our apparitions ; to affbrd a credulous ear unto the
clawing suggestions of fancy to pass our days in painted
;

mistakes of ourselves and though we behold our own

;

blood, to think ourselves the sons of Jupiter,* are bland-

ishments of self-love worse than outward delusion. By
this imposture wise men sometimes are mistaken in their
elevation, and look above themselves. And fools, which
are antipodes unto the wise, conceive themselves to be
but their perioeci, and in the same parallel with them.

• As Alexander the Great did.

 CHRISTIAN MORALS. 145

XXIV. Be not a Hercules furens abroad, and a pol-

tron within thyself. To chase our enemies out of the
field,and be led captive by our vices to beat down our
;

foes, and fall down to our concupiscences are solecisms

;

in moral schools, and no laurel attends them. To well

manage our affections, and wild horses of Plato, are the
highest Circenses and the noblest digladiation is in the
;

theatre of ourselves ; for therein our inward antagonists,

not only like common gladiators, with ordinary weapons
and downright blows make at us, but also like retiary
and laqueary combatants, with nets, frauds, and en-
tanglements, fall upon us. Weapons for such combats
are not to be forged at Lipara Vulcan's art doth no-
;

thing in this internal militia wherein not the armour

;

of Achilles, but the armature of St. Paul, gives the glo-

rious day, and triumphs not leading up into capitols,
but up into the highest heavens. And therefore while
so many think it the only valour to command and master
others, study thou the dominion of thyself, and quiet
thine own commotions. Let right reason be thy Lycur-
gus, and lift up thy hand unto the law of it move by ;

the intelligences of the superiour faculties, not by the

rapt of passion, nor merely by that of temper and con-
stitution. They who are merely carried on by the
wheel of such inclinations, without the hand and gui-
dance of sovereign reason, are but the automatons part
of mankind, rather lived than Hving, or at least under-
living themselves.
XXV. Let not fortune, which hath no name in
Scripture, have any in thy divinity. Let Providence,
not chance, have the honour of thy acknowledgments,
and be thy QEdipus in contingencies. Mark well the
paths and winding ways thereof; but be not too wise in
13
 146 CHRISTIAN MORALS.

the construction, or sadden in the appHcation. The hand

of Providence writes often by abbreviatures, hierogly-
phicks, or short characters, which, Hke the laconism on
the wall, are not to be made out but by a hint or key
from that Spirit which indited them. Leave future
occurrences to their uncertainties, think that which is

present thy own; and since 'tis easier to foretel an

eclipse, than a foul day at some distance, look for little

regular below. Attend with patience the uncertainty of

things, and what lieth yet unexerted in the chaos of
futurity.The uncertainty and ignorance of things to
come makes the world new unto us by unexpected
emergencies whereby we pass not our days in the trite
;

road of affairs affording no novity for the novellizing

;

spirit of man lives by variety, and the new faces of

things,
XXVI. Though a contented mind enlargeth the
dimension of little things, and unto some 'tis wealth

enough not to be poor, and others are well content, if

they be but rich enough to be honest, and to give every

man his due ; yet fall not into that obsolete affectation
of bravery to throw away thy money, and to reject all

honours or honourable stations in and splen-

this courtly

did world. Old generosity is superannuated, and such

contempt of the world out of date. No man is now like
I
to refuse the favour of great ones, or be content to say
unto princes, stand out of my sun. And if any there be
of such antiquated resolutions, they are not like to be
tempted out of them by great ones ; and 'tis fair if they
escape the name of hypochondriacks from the genius of
latter times,unto whom contempt of the world is the
most contemptible opinion, and to be able, like Bias, to
carry all they have about them were to be the eighth
 CHRISTIAN MORALS. 147

wise man. However, the old tetrick philosophers

looked always with indignation upon such a face of
things, and observing the unnatural current of riches,
power, and honour in the world, and withal the imper-
fection and demerit of persons often advanced unto
them, were tempted unto angry opinions, that affairs
wereordei'ed more by stars than reason, and that things
went on rather by lottery than election.
XXVII. ocean of
If thy vessel be but small in the
this world,meanness of possessions be th}^ allotment
if

upon earth, forgot not those virtues which the great

Disposer of all bids thee to entertain from thy quality
and condition, that is, submission, humility, content of
mind, and industry. Content may dvv^ell in all stations.
To be low, but above contempt, may be high enough to
be happy. But many of low degree may be higher than
computed, and some cubits above the common commen-
suration ; for in all states virtue gives qualifications, and
allowances, which make out defects. Rough diamonds
are sometimes mistaken for pebbles, and meanness may
be rich in accomplishments which riches in vain desire.
If our merits be above our stations, if our intrinsecal
value be greater than what we go for, or our value than
our valuation, and we stand higher
if in God's, than in
the censor's book it may make some
; equitable balance
in the inequalities of this world, and there may be no
such vast chasm or gulph between disparities as
common measures determine. The divine eye looks
upon high and low from that of man. They
differently
who seem upon Olympus, and high mounted
to stand
unto our eyes, may be but in the valleys, and low-
ground unto his for he looks upon those as highest who
;

nearest approach his divinity, and upon those as lowest

who are farthest from it.
148 CHRISTIAN MORALS.

XXVIII. When thou lookest upon the imperfections

of others, allow one eye for what is laudable in them, and
the balance they have from some excellency, which may
render them considerable. While we look with fear or
hatred upon the teeth of the viper, we may behold his
eye with love. In venemous natures something may
be amiable : poisons afford antipoisons ; nothing is

totally, or altogether uselessly bad. Notable virtues are

sometimes dashed with notorious vices, and in some
vicious tempers have been found illustrious acts of vir-
tue ; which makes such observable worth in some
actions of king Demetrius, Antonius, and Ahab, as are
not to be found in the same kind in Aristides, Numa, or
David. Constancy, generosity, clemency, and liberality,
have been highly conspicuous in some persons not
markt out in other concerns for example or imitation.
But since goodness is exemplary in all, if others have
not our virtues, let us not be wanting in theirs, nor
scorning them for their vices whereof we are free, be
condemned by their virtues wherein we are deficient.
There is dross, alloy, and embasement, in all human
tempers, and he flieth without wings, who thinks to find
ophir or pure metal in any. For perfection is not, like
light, centered in any one body, but like the dispersed
seminalities of vegetables at the creation, scattered
through the whole mass of the earth, no place producing
all, and almost all some. So that 'tis well, if a perfect
man can be made out of many men, and to the perfect
eye of God even out of mankind. Time, which perfects
some things, imperfects also others. Could we intimately
apprehend the ideated man, and as he stood in the
intellect of God upon the first exertion by creation, we

might more narrowly comprehend our present degene-

 CHRISTIAN MORAL S. 149

ration, and how widely we are fallen from the pure

exemplar and idea of our nature for after this corrup-
:

tive elongation from a primitive and pure creation, we

are almost lost in degeneration ; and Adam hath not
only fallen from his Creator, but we ourselves from
Adam, our Tycho and primary generator.
XXIX. Quarrel not rashly with adversities not yet
understood ; and overlook not the mercies often bound
up in them. For we consider not sufficiently the good
of evils, nor fairly compute the mercies of Providence
in things afflictive at first hand. The famous Andreas
Doria being invited to a feast by Aloysio Fieschi with
design to kill him, just the night before fell mercifully
into a fit of the gout, and so escaped that mischief.
When Cato intended to kill himself, from a blow which
he gave his servant who would not reach his sword
unto him, his hand so swelled that he had much ado to
effect his design.Hereby any one but a resolved stoick
might have taken a fair hint of consideration, and that
some merciful genius would have contrived his preser-
vation. To be sagacious in such intercurrences is not
superstition, but wary and pious discretion, and to con-
temn such hints were to be deaf unto the speaking hand
of God, wherein Socrates and Cardan would hardly
have been mistaken.
XXX. Break not open the gate of destruction, and
make no haste or bustle unto ruin. Post not heedlessly
on unto the non ultra of folly, or precipice of perdition.
Let vicious ways have their tropicks and deflexions ;

and swim in the waters of sin but as in the Asphaltick

lake, though smeared and defiled, not to sink to the

bottom. If thou hast dipt thy foot in the brink, yet

venture not over Rubicon. Run not into extremities
13*
150 CHRISTIAN MORALS.

from whence there is no regression. In the vicious

ways of the world it mercifully falleth out that we be-
come not extempore wicked, but it taketh some time
and pains to undo ourselves. We fall not from virtue,
like Vulcan from heaven, in a day. Bad dispositions
require some time to grow into bad habits, bad habits
must undermine good, and often repeated acts make us
by gradual depravations, and
habitually evil; so that
while we are but staggeringly evil, we are not left

without parentheses of consideration, thoughtful re-

bukes, and merciful interventions, to recal us unto our-

selves. For the wisdom of God hath methodized the
course of things unto the best advantage of goodness,
and thinking considerators overlook not the tract
thereof.
XXXI. Since men and women have their proper
virtues and vices, and even twins of different sexes
have not only distinct coverings in the womb, but differ-
ing qualities and virtuous habits after transplace not ;

their proprieties and confound not their distinctions.

Let masculine and feminine accomplishments shine in
their proper orbs, and adorn their respective subjects.
However unite not the vices of both sexes in one ; be
not monstrous in iniquity, nor hermaphroditically
vicious.
XXXII. If generous honesty, valour, and plain
dealing, be the cognizance of thy family, or character-
istick of thy country, hold fast such inclinations suckt in

with thy first breath, and which lay in the cradle with
thee. Fall not into transforming degenerations, which
under the old name create a new nation. Be not an alien
in thine own nation ; bring not Orontes into Tiber ; learn
the virtues not the vices of thy foreign neighbours, and

n
 ;

CHRISTIAN MORALS. 151

make thy imitation by discretion not contagion. Feel

something of thyself in the noble acts of thy ancestors,
and find in thine own genius that of thy predecessors.
Rest not under the expired methods of others, shine by
those of thy own. Flame not like the central fire which
enlighteneth no eyes, which no man seeth, and most
men think there's no such thing to be seen. Add one
ray unto the common add not only to the
lustre ;

number but the note of thy generation and prove not ;

a cloud but an asterisk in thy region,

XXXIII. Since thou hast an alarum in thy breast,
which tells thee thou hast a living spirit in thee above
two thousand times in an hour; dull not away thy days
in slothful supinity and the tediousness of doing nothing.
To strenuous minds there is an inquietude in overquiet-

ness, and no laboriousness in labour; and to tread a

mile after the slow pace of a snail, or the heavy mea-
sures of the lazy of Brazilia, were a most tiring penance,
and worse than a race of some furlongs at the Olym-
picks. The rapid courses of the heavenly bodies are
rather imitable by our thoughts, than our corporeal
motions ;
yet the solemn motions of our lives amount
unto a greater measure than is commonly apprehended.
Some few men have surrounded the globe of the earth
yet many in the set locomotions and movements of their
days have measured the circuit of it, and twenty thou-
sand miles have been exceeded by them. Move cir-

cumspectly not meticulously, and rather carefully

solicitous than anxiously solicitudinous. Think not
there is a lion in the way, nor walk with leaden sandals
in the paths of goodness ; but in all virtuous motions let

prudence determine thy measures. Strive not to run

like Hercules, a furlong in a breath ; festination may
 152 CHRISTIAN MORALS.

prove precipitation; deliberating delay may be wise

cunctation, and slowness no slothfulness.
XXXIV. Since virtuous actions have their own
trumpets, and without any noise from thyself will have
their resound abroad, busy not thy best member in the
encomium of thyself Praise is a debtwe owe unto the
virtues of others, and due unto our own from all, whom
malice hath not made mutes, or envy struck dumb. Fall
not however into the common prevaricating way of
self-commendation and boasting, by denoting the imper-
fections of others. He who discommendeth others,
obliquely commendeth himself He who whispers their
infirmities proclaims his own exemption from them, and
consequently says, I am not as this publican, or hie
niger, whom I talk of Open ostentation and loud vain-
glory is more tolerable than this obliquity, as but con-
taining some froth, no ink; as but consisting of a
personal piece of folly,nor complicated with unchari-
tableness. Superfluously we seek a precarious applause
abroad ; every good man hath his plaudite within him-
self, and though his tongue be silent is not without loud
cymbals in his breast. Conscience will become his
panegyrist, and never forget to crown and extol him
unto himself
XXXV. Bless not thyself only that thou wert born
in Athens ;* but among thy multiplied acknowledgments I
lift up one hand unto heaven that thouwert born of
honest parents, that modesty, humility, patience, and
veracity, lay in the same egg, and came into the world
with thee. From such foundations thou may'st be
happy in a virtuous precocity, and make an early and

* As Socrates did. Athens a place of learning and civility.

 ;

CHRISTIAN MORALS. 153

long walk in goodness ; so may'st thou more naturally

feel the contrariety of vice unto nature, and resist some
by the antidote of thy temper. As charity covers, so
modesty preventeth a multitude of sins withholding ;

from noonday vices and brazen-browed iniquities, from

sinning on the house-top, and painting our follies with
the rays of the sun. Where this virtue reigneth, though
vice may show its head it cannot be in its glory : where
shame of sin sets, look not for virtue to arise for when ;

modesty taketh wing Astraea goes soon after.*

XXXVI. The heroical vein of mankind runs much
in the soldiery, and courageous part of the world and ;

in that form we oftenest find men above men. History-

is full of the gallantry of that tribe and when we read
;

their notable acts, we

what a difference there
easily find
is between a life in Plutarch and in Laertius. Where
true fortitude dwells, loyalty, bounty, friendship, and
fidelity, may be found. A man may confide in persons
constituted for noble ends, who dare do and suffer, and
who have a hand to burn for their country and their
friend. Small and creeping things are the product of
petty souls. He is like to be mistaken, who makes
choice of a covetous man for a friend, or relieth upon
the reed of narrow and poltron friendship. Pitiful things

are only to be found in the cottages of such breasts

but bright thoughts, clear deeds, constancy, fidelity,

bounty, and generous honesty, are the gems of noble

minds ; wherein, to derogate from none, the true heroick
English gentleman hath no peer.

* Astreea goddess of justice, and consequently of all virtue.

 THE SECOND PART.

I. Punish not thyself with pleasure ;

glut not thy
sense with palative delights ; nor revenge the contempt
of temperance by the penalty of satiety. Were there
an age of delight or any pleasure durable, who would
not honour Volupia? but the race of delight is short,
and pleasures have mutable faces. The pleasures of
one age are not pleasures in another, and their lives fall
short of our own. Even in our sensual days the strength
of delight is in its seldomness or rarity, and sting in its
satiety modiocrity is its life, and immoderacy its con-
;

fusion. The luxurious emperours of old inconsider-

ately satiated themselves with the dainties of sea and
land, till, wearied through all varieties, their refections
became a study unto them, and they were fain to feed
by invention. Novices in true Epicurism which by !

mediocrity, paucity, quick and healthful appetite, makes

delights smartly acceptable whereby Epicurus himself
;

found Jupiter's brain* in a piece Cytheridian cheese,

and the tongues of nightingales in a dish of onions.B
Hereby healthful and temperate poverty hath the start
of nauseating luxury unto whose clear and naked ap-
;

petite every meal is a feast, and in one single dish the]

* Cerebrum Jovis, for a delicious bit.

 —

CHRISTIAN MORALS. 155

first course of Metellas ;* "who are cheaply hungry, and

never lose their hunger, or advantage of a craving ap-
petite, because obvious food contents it; while Nerof

half famished could not feed upon a piece of bread, and

lingering after his snowed water, hardly got down an
ordinary cup of Calda.J By such circumspections of
pleasure the contemned philosophers reserved unto
themselves the secret of delight, which the helluos of
those days lost in their exorbitances. In vain we study
delight: it is at the command of every sober mind, and in
every sense born with us ; but nature, who teacheth us
the rule of pleasure, instructeth also in the bounds there-
of, and where its line expireth. And therefore tempe-
rate minds, not pressing their pleasures until the sting
appeareth, enjoy their contentations contentedly and
without regret, and so escape the folly of excess, to be
pleased unto displacency.
II. Bring candid eyes unto the perusal of men's
works, and let not Zoilism or detraction blast well-in-
tended labours. He that endureth no faults in men's
writings must only read his own, wherein for the most
part all appeareth white. Quotation mistakes, inadver-
tency, expedition, and human lapses, may make not
only moles but warts in learned authors, who notwith-
standing being judged by the capital matter admit not
of disparagement. I should unwillingly affirm that Ci-
cero was Homer, because in his
but slightly versed in
work de Gloria, he ascribed those verses unto Ajax
which were delivered by Hector. What if Plautus in

* Metellus his riotous pontificial supper, the great variety whereat is

to be seen in Macrobius.

t Nero in his flight. Sueton.

t Caldae gelidaBque minister.
156 CHRISTIAN MORALS.

the account of Hercules mistaketh nativity for concep-

tion ? Who would have mean thoughts of Apollinaris
Sidonius, vv^ho seems to mistake the river Tigris for
Euphrates ? and though a good historian and learned
bishop of Auvergne had the misfortune to be out in the
story of David, making mention of him when the ark
was back by the PhiUstines upon a cart; which
sent
was before his time. Though I have no great opinion
of Machiavel's learning, yet I shall not presently say,
that he was but a novice in Roman history, because he
was mistaken in placing Commodus after the emperour
Severus. Capital truths are to be narrowly eyed, col-
lateral lapses and circumstantial deliveries not to be too
strictly sifted. And if the substantial subject be well
forged out, we need not examine the sparks which irre-
gularly fly from it.

III. Let well-weighed considerations, not stiff and

peremptory assumptions, guide thy discourses, pen, and

actions. To begin or continue our works like Trisme-
gistus of old,* verum certe verum atque verissimum est,
would sound arrogantly unto present ears in this strict
inquiring age, wherein for the most part, probably, and
perhaps, will hardly serve to mollify the spirit of cap-
tious contradictors. If Cardan saith that a parrot is

a beautiful bird, Scaliger will set his wits o'work to

prove it a deformed animal. The compage of all phy-
sical truths is not so closely jointed, but opposition may
find intrusion; nor always so closely maintained, as
not to suffer attrition. Many positions seem quodlibeti-
cally constituted, and like a Delphian blade will cut on
both sides. Some truths seem almost falsehoods, and

• In Tabula Smaragdina.
 CHRISTIAN MORALS. 157

some falsehoods almost truths wherein falsehood and

;

truthseem almost equilibriously stated, and but a few

grains of distinction to bear down the balance. Some
have digged deep, yet glanced by the royal vein and ;

a man may come unto the pericardium, but not the

heart of truth. Besides, many things are known, as
some are seen, that is by parallaxis, or at some distance
from their true and proper beings, the superficial regard
of things having a different aspect from their true and
central natures. And this moves sober pens unto sus-
pensory and timorous assertions, nor presently to ob-
trude them as Sibyl's leaves, which after-considerations
may find to be but folious appearances, and not the
central and vital interiours of truth.

IV. Value the judicious, and let not mere acquests in

minor parts of learning gain thy pre-existimation. 'Tis
an unjust way of compute to magnify a weak head for
some Latin abilities, and to undervalue a solid judg-
ment, because he knows not the genealogy of Hector.
When that notable king of France* would have his son
to know but one sentence in Latin, had it been a good
one perhaps it had been enough. Natural parts and
good judgments rule the world. States are not governed
by ergotisms. Many have ruled well who could not,
perhaps, define a commonwealth, and they who under-
stand not the globe of the earth command a great
part of it. Where natural logick prevails not, artificial
too often faileth. Where nature fills the sails, the
vessel goes smoothly on, and when judgment is the
pilot, the ensurance need not be high. When industry
builds upon nature, we may expect pyramids; where

* Lewis the Eleventh. Qui nescit dissimulare nescit regnare.

14
 — ;

158 CHRISTIAN MORALS.

that foundation is wanting, the structure must be low.

They do most by books, who could do much without
them, and he that chiefly owes himself unto himself, is

the substantial man.

V. Let thy studies be free as thy thoughts and con-
templations, but fly not only upon the wings of imagina-
tion ; join sense unto reason, and experiment unto specu-
lation, and so give life unto embryon truths, and verities
yet in their chaos. There is nothing more acceptable
unto the ingenious world, than this noble eluctation of
truth; wherein, against the tenacity of prejudice and
prescription, this century now prevaileth. What libra-

ries of new volumes after-times will behold, and in

what a new world of knowledge the eyes of our pos-
terity may be happy, a few ages may joyfully declare
and is but a cold thought unto those, who cannot hope
to behold this exantlation of truth, or that obscured
virgin half out of the pit. Which might make some
content with a commutation of the time of their lives,
and to commend the fancy of the Pythagorean metemp-
suchosis ; whereby they might hope to enjoy this hap-

piness in their third or fourth selves, and behold that in

Pythagoras, which they now but foresee in Euphorbus.*
The world, which took but six days to make, is like to
take six thousand to make out meanwhile old truths :

voted down begin to resume their places, and new ones

I
arise upon us ; wherein there is no comfort in the hap-
piness of TuUy's Elysium,t or any satisfaction from the
ghosts of the ancients, who knew so little of what is

• Ipse ego, nam memini, Trojani tempore belli

Panthoides Euphorbus eram. Ovid.

t Who comforted himself that he should there converse with the old
philosophers.
 CHRISTIAN MORALS. 150

now well known. Men disparage not antiquity who

prudently exalt new inquiries, and make not them the
judges of truth, who were but fellow inquirers of it.
Who can but magnify the endeavours of Aristotle, and
the noble start which learning had under him or less ;

than pity the slender progression made upon such

advantages 1 while many centuries were lost in repeti-
tions and transcriptions sealing up the book of know-
ledge. And therefore rather than to swell the leaves of
learning by fruitless repetitions, to sing the same song
in all ages, nor adventure at essays beyond the attempt
of others, many would be content that some would
write like Helmont or Paracelsus ; and be willing to
endure the monstrosity of some opinions, for divers
singular notions requiting such aberrations.
VI. Despise not the obliquities of younger ways, nor
despair of better things whereof there is yet no pros-
pect. Who would imagine that Diogenes, who in his

younger days was a falsifier of money, should in the

after-course of his life be so great a contemner of
metal ? Some negroes, who believe the resurrection,
think that they shall rise white.* Even in this life re-

generation may imitate resurrection, our black and

vicious tinctures may wear off, and goodness clothe us
with candour. Good admonitions knock not always in

vain. There will be signal examples of God's mercy,

and the angels must not want their charitable rejoices
for the conversion of lost sinners. Figures of most
angles do nearest approach unto circles, which have no
angles at all. Some may be near unto goodness, who
are conceived far from it, and hi any things happen, not

* Mandelslo.
160 CHRISTIAN MORALS.

likely to ensue from any promises of antecedencies.

Culpable beginnings have found commendable conclu-
sions, and infamous courses pious retractions. Detes-
table sinners have proved exemplary converts on earth,
and may be glorious in the apartment of Mary Mag-
dalene in heaven. Men are not the same through all
divisions of their ages. Time, experience, self-reflec-
tions, and God's mercies, make in some well-tempered

minds a kind of translation before death, and men to

differ from themselves as well as from other persons.
Hereof the old world afforded many examples, to the
infamy of latter ages, wherein men too often live by
the rule of their inclinations ; so that, without any
astral prediction, the first day gives the last.* Men
are commonly as they were, or rather, as bad disposi-
tions run into worser habits, the evening doth not
crown, but sourly conclude the day.
VII. If the Almighty will not spare us according to
his merciful capitulation at Sodom if his goodness
;

please not to pass over a great deal of bad for a small

pittance of good, or to look upon us in the lump ; there
is slender hope for mercy, or sound presumption of ful-
filhng half his will, either in persons or nations ; they
who excel in some virtues being so often defective in
others ; few men driving at the extent and amplitude of
goodness, but computing themselves by their best parts,
and others by their worst, are content to rest in those
virtues which others commonly want. Which makes
this speckled face of honesty in the world and which ;

was the imperfection of the old philosophers and great

pretenders unto virtue, who well declining the gaping

* Primusque dies dedjt extremuin.

 CHRISTIAN MORALS. 161

vices of incontinency, violence, and

intemperance,
oppression, were yet blindly peccant in iniquities of
closer faces; were envious, malicious, contemners,
scoffers, censurers, and stufft with vizard vices, no less
depraving the ethereal particle and diviner portion of
man. For envy, malice, hatred, are the quahties of
Satan, close and dark like himself; and where such
brands smoke, the soul cannot be white. Vice may be
had at all prices expensive and costly iniquities, which
;

make the noise, cannot be every man's sins : but the soul
may be foully inquinated at a very low rate, and a man
may be cheaply vicious, to the perdition of himself
VIII. Opinion rides upon the neck of reason, and men
are happy, wise, or learned, according as that empress
shall set them down in the register of reputation. How-
ever weigh not thyself in the scales of thy own opinion,
but let the judgment of the judicious be the standard of
thy merit. Self-estimation is a flatterer too readily
intitling us unto knowledge and abilities, which others
solicitously labour after, and doubtfully think they
attain. Surely such confident tempers do pass their
days in best tranquillity, who, resting in the opinion of
their own abilities, are happily gulled by such conten-
tation ; wherein pride, self-conceit, confidence, and
opiniatrity, will hardly suffer any to complain of imper-
fection. To think themselves in the right, or all that
right, or only that, which they do or think, is a fallacy
of high content; though others laugh in their sleeves,
and look upon them as in a deluded state of judgment:
wherein notwithstanding 'twere but a civil piece of com-
placency to suffer them to sleep who would not wake,
to let them rest in their securities, nor by dissent or
opposition to stagger their contentments.
14*
 ;

162 CHRISTIAN MORALS. 1

IX. Since the brow speaks often true, since eyes
and noses have tongues, and the countenance proclaims
the heart and inchnations let observation so far instruct
;

thee in physiognomical lines, as to be some rule for thy

distinction,and guide for thy affection unto such as loojc
most like men. Mankind, methinks, is comprehended in
a few faces, if we exclude all visages which any way
participate of symmetries and schemes of look common
unto other animals. For as though man were the
extract of the world, in whom all were in coagulato,
which in their forms were in soluio and at extension

we often observe that men do most act those creatures,

whose constitution, parts, and complexion, do most pre-
dominate in their mixtures. This is a corner-stone in i
physiognomy, and holds some truth not only in particu-
lar persons but also in whole nations. There are, there-
fore, provincial faces, national lips and noses, which
testify not only the natures of those countries, but of
those which have them elsewhere. Thus we may make
England the whole earth, dividing it not only into
Europe, Asia, Africa, but the particular regions thereof,
and may in some latitude affirm, that there are Egyp-
tians, Scythians, Indians, among us ; who though born
in England, yet carry the faces and air of those coun-
tries, and are also agreeable and correspondent unto
their natures. Faces look uniformly unto our eyes ; how
they appear unto some animals of a more piercing or
differing sight, who are able to discover the inequalities,
rubs, and hairiness of the skin, is not without good
doubt and therefore in reference unto man, Cupid is
;

said to be blind. Affection should not be too sharp-eyed, §

and love is not to be made by magnifying glasses. If
things were seen as they truly are, the beauty of bodies
 CHRISTIAN MORALS. 163

would be much abridged. And therefore, the wise Con-

triver hath drawn the pictures and outsides of things
softly and amiably unto the natural edge of our eyes,
not leaving them able to discover those uncomely aspe-
rities which make oyster-shells in good faces, and
hedgehogs even in Venus's moles.
X. Court not felicity too far, and weary not the
favourable hand of fortune. Glorious actions have their
times, extent, and non ultras. To put no end unto
attempts were to make prescription of successes, and to
bespeak unhappiness at the last. For the line of our
lives is drawn with white and black vicissitudes, wherein
the extremes hold seldom one complexion. That Pompey
should obtain the surname of great at twenty- five years,
that men in their young and active day should be fortu-

nate and perform notable things, is no observation of

deep wonder, they having the strength of their fates
before them, nor yet acted their parts in the world, for
which they were brought into it whereas men of years,
:

matured for counsels and designs, seem to be beyond

the vigour of their active fortunes, and high exploits of
life, providentially ordained unto ages best agreeable
unto them. And, therefore, many brave men finding
their fortune grow faint, and feeling its declination, have
timely withdrawn themselves from great attempts, and
so escaped the ends of mighty men, disproportionable to
their beginnings. But magnanimous thoughts have so
dimmed the eyes of many, that forgetting the very
essence of fortune, and the vicissitude of good and evil,
they apprehend no bottom in felicity and so have been ;

tempted on unto mighty actions, reserved for their de-

still

structions. For fortune lays the plot of our adversities

in the foundation of our felicities, blessing us in the first
 ;

164 CHRISTIAN MORALS. 1

quadrate to blast us more sharply in the last. And since
in the highest felicities there lieth a capacity of the
lowest miseries, she hath this advantage from our hap-
piness to make us truly miserable. For to become
acutely miserable we are to be first happy. Affliction
smarts most in the most happy state, as having some-
what in it of Belisarius at beggars' bush, or Bajazet in
the grate. And this the fallen angels severely under-
stand, who having acted their first part in heaven, are
made sharply miserable by transition, and more afflic-

tively feel the contrary state of hell.

XI. Carry no careless eye upon the unexpected scenes
of things ; but ponder the acts of Providence in the pub-
lick ends of great and notable men, set out unto the view
of no common memorandums. The tragical exits
all for

and unexpected periods of some eminent persons cannot

but amuse considerate observators wherein notwith-;

standing, most men seem to see by extramission, without

reception or self-reflection, and conceive themselves un-
concerned by the fallacy of their own exemption:
whereas the mercy of God hath singled out but few to
be the signals of his justice, leaving the generality of
mankind to the pedagogy of example. But the inadver-
tency of our natures not well apprehending this favour-

able method and merciful decimation, and that he sheweth

in some what others also deserve, they entertain no sense
of his hand beyond the stroke of themselves. Whereupon
the whole becomes necessarily punished, and the con-
tracted hand of God extended unto universal judgments
from whence nevertheless, the stupidity of our tempers
receives but faint impressions, and in the most tragical
state of times holds but starts of good motions. So that

to continue us in goodness there must be iterated returns

 CHRISTIAN MORALS. 165

of misery, and a circulation in afflictions is necessary.

And since we cannot be wise by warnings, since plagues
are insignificant, except we be personally plagued, since
also we cannot be punished unto amendment by proxy
or commutation, nor by vicinity, but contaction ; there
is an unhappy necessity that we must smart in our own
skins, and the provoked arm of the Almighty must fall
upon ourselves. The capital sufferings of others are
rather our monitions than acquitments. There is but
one who died salvifically for us, and able to say unto
death, hitherto shalt thou go and no further ; only one
enlivening death, which makes gardens of graves, and
that which was sowed in corruption to arise and flourish
in glory when death itself shall die, and living shall have
;

no period, when the damned shall mourn at the funeral

of death, when life not death shall be the wages of sin,
when the second death shall prove a miserable life, and
destruction shall be courted.
XII. Although their thoughts may seem too severe,
who think that few ill-natured men go to heaven ; yet
it may be acknowledged that good-natured persons are
best founded for that place who enter the world with
;

good dispositions, and natural graces, more ready to be

advanced by impressions from above, and christianized
unto pieties who carry about them plain and down-
;

right-dealing minds, humility, mercy, charity, and vir-

tues acceptable to God and man. But whatever success
they may have as to heaven, they are the acceptable
men on earth, and happy is he who hath his quiver full
of them for his friends. These are not the dens wherein
falsehood lurks, and hypocrisy hides its head, wherein
frowardness makes its nest, or where malice, hard-
heartedness, and oppression love to dwell not those by
;
 ;
; '

166 CHRISTIAN MORALS. 1

whom the poor get little, and the rich sometime lose all

men not of retracted looks, but who carry their hearts I

in their faces, and need not to be looked upon with per-
spectives ; not sordidly or mischievously ingrateful
who cannot learn to ride upon the neck of the afflicted,

nor load the heavy laden, but who keep the temple of
Janus shut by peaceable and quiet tempers ; who make
not only the best friends, but the best enemies as easier
to forgive than offend, and ready to pass by the second
offence before they avenge the first ; who make natural
royalists, obedient subjects, kind and merciful princes,
verified in ourown, one of the best-natured kings of this
throne. Of the old Roman emperours the best were the
best natured though they made but a small number,
;

and might be writ in a ring. Many of the rest were as

bad men as princes humourists rather than of good
;

humours and of good natural parts rather than of good

;

natures which did but arm their bad inclinations, and

;

make them wittily wicked.

XIII. With what shift and pains we come into the
world, we remember not but 'tis commonly found no
;

easy matter to get out of it. Many have studied to ex-

asperate the ways of death, but fewer hours have been
spent to soften that necessity. That the smoothest way
unto the grave is made by bleeding, as common opinion
presumeth, beside the sick and fainting languors, which
accompany that effusion, the experiment in Lucan and,
Seneca will make us doubt ; under which the noble
stoick so deeply laboured, that to conceal his affliction
he was fain to retire from the sight of his wife, and not
ashamed to implore the merciful hand of his physician
to shorten his misery therein. Ovid,* the old heroes,

* Demito naufragium, mors mihi miinus erit.

 ;

CHRISTIAN MORALS. 167

and the stoicks, who were so afraid of drowning, as

dreading thereby the extinction of their soul, which they
conceived to be a fire, stood probably in fear of an
easier way of death ; wherein the water, entering the
possessions of air, makes a temperate suffocation, and

kills as it were without a fever. Surely many, who

have had the spirit to destroy themselves, have not been
ingenious in the contrivance thereof 'Twas a dull way
practised by Themistocles* to overwhelm himself with
bulls-blood, who, being an Athenian, might have held
an easier theory of death from the state-potion of his
country ; from which Socrates in Plato seemed not to
suffer much more than from the fit of an ague. Cato
is much to be pitied, who mangled himself with poniards

and Hannibal seems more subtle, who carried his de-

livery not in the point, but the pummel of his sword.f
The Egyptians were merciful contrivers, who de-
stroyed their malefactors by asps, charming their senses
into an invincible sleep, and killing as it were with
Hermes his rod. The Turkish emperourj odious for
other cruelty, was herein a remarkable master of mercy,
and sending him from
killing his favourite in his sleep,
the shade into the house of darkness. He who had been
thus destroyed would hardly have bled at the presence
of his destroyer when men are already dead by meta-
;

phor, and pass but from one sleep unto another, wanting
herein the eminent part of severity, to feel themselves
to die, and escaping the sharpest attendant of death, the
lively apprehension thereof But to learn to die, is better

* Plutarch.

t Pummel, wherein he is said to have carried something whereby

upon a struggle or despair he might deliver himself from all misfortunes.
t Solyman. — Turkish History,
168 CHRISTIAN MORALS.

than to study the ways of dying. Death will find some

ways to untie or cut the most gordian knots of life, and
make men's miseries as mortal as themselves whereas
:

undying substances, are unseparable from

evil spirits, as

their calamities and therefore they everlastingly strug-

; I
gle under their angustias, and bound up with immor-
tality can never get out of themselves.
 THE THIRD PART.

I. 'Tis hard to find a whole age to imitate, or what

century to propose for example. Some have been far
more approvable than others ; but virtue and vice,
panegyricks and satires, scatteringly to be found in all.

History sets down not only things laudable, but abomi-

nable; things which should never have been or never
have been known; so that noble patterns must be fetcht
here and there from single persons rather than whole
nations, and from all nations rather than any one. The
world was early bad, and the first sin the most deplo-
rable of any. The younger world afforded the oldest
men, and perhaps the best and the worst, when length
of days made virtuous habits heroical and immovable,
vicious, inveterate and irreclaimable. And since 'tis

said that the imaginations of their hearts were evil,

only and continually evil, it may be feared that

evil,

their sins heldpace with their lives and their longevity

;

swelling their impieties, the longanimity of God would

no longer endure such vivacious abominations. Their
impieties were surely of a deep dye, which required the
whole element of water to wash them away, and over-
whelmed their memories with themselves and so shut ;

up the first windows of time, leaving no histories of

those longevous generations, when men might have
been properly historians, when Adam might have read
15
170 CHRISTIAN MORALS.

long lectures unto Methuselah, and Methuselah unto

Noah. For had we been happy in just historical
accounts of that unparalleled world, we might have
been acquainted with wonders, and have understood
not alittle of the acts and undertakings of Moses his

mighty men, and men of renown of old which might ;

have enlarged our thoughts, and made the world older

unto us. For the unknown part of time shortens the
estimation, if not the compute of it. What hath escaped
our knowledge falls not under our consideration, and
what is and will be latent is little better than non-
existent.
II. Some things are dictated for our instruction, some
acted for our imitation, wherein 'tis best to ascend unto
the highest conformity, and to the honour of the ex-
emplar. He God who imitates him. For
honours
what we we approve and admire;
virtuously imitate
and since we delight not to imitate inferiours, we
aggrandize and magnify those we imitate since also ;

we are most apt to imitate those we love, we testify

our affection in our imitation of the inimitable. To
affect to be like, may be no imitation to act, and not to :

be what we pretend to imitate, is but a mimical confor-

mation, and carrieth no virtue in it. Lucifer imitated
not God when he said he would be like the Highest,
and he imitated not Jupiter who counterfeited thunder.
Where imitation can go no farther, let admiration step
on, whereof there is no end in the wisest form of men.
Even angels and spirits have enough to admire in their
sublimer natures, admiration being the act of the crea-
ture, and not of God, who doth not admire himself.
Created natures allow of swelling hyperboles ; nothing
can be said hyperbolically of God, nor will his attri-
 CHRISTIAN MORALS. 171

butes admit of expressions above their own exuperances.

Trismegistus his circle, whose centre is everywhere,

and circumference nowhere, was no hyperbole. Words

cannot exceed, where they cannot express enough.
Even the most winged thoughts fall at the setting out,
and reach not the portal of Divinity.
III. In bivious theorems and Janus-faced doctrines let

virtuous considerations state the determination. Look

upon opinions as thou dost upon the moon, and choose
not the dark hemisphere for thy contemplation. Em-
brace not the opacous and blind side of opinions, but
that which looks most luciferously or influentially unto
goodness. 'Tis better to think that there are guardian
spirits, than that there are no spirits to guard us ; that
vicious persons are slaves, than that there is any servi-
tude in virtue ; that times past have been better than
times present, than that times were always bad ; and
that to be men it sufRceth to be no better than men in

all ages, and so promiscuously to swim down the turbid

stream, and make up the grand confusion. Sow not
thy understanding with opinions which make nothing
of iniquities, and fallaciously extenuate transgressions.
Look upon vices and vicious objects, with hyperbohcal
eyes, and rather enlarge their dimensions, that their
unseen deformities may not escape thy sense, and their
poisonous parts and stings may appear massy and
monstrous unto thee ; for the undiscerned particles and
atoms of evil deceive us, and we are undone by the in-

visibles of seeming goodness. We are only deceived

in what is not discerned, and to err is but to be blind

or dimsighted as to some perceptions.

IV. To be honest in a right line* and virtuous by
* Liiica recta brevissima.
172 CHRISTIAN MORALS.

epitome, be firm unto such principles of goodness, as

carry in them volumes of instruction and may abridge
thy labour. And since instructions are many, hold
close unto those whereon the rest depend. So may we
have all in a few, and the law and the prophets in a

rule ; the sacred writ in stenography, and the Scripture

in a nutshell. To pursue the osseous and solid part of
goodness, which gives stability and rectitude to all the
rest ; to settle and bid early de-
on fundamental virtues,
fiance unto mother-vices, which carry in their bowels
the seminals of other iniquities, makes a short cut in
goodness, and strikes not off an head but the whole
neck of hydra. For we are carried into the dark lake,
like the Egyptian river into the sea, by seven principal
ostiaries ; the mother-sins of that number are the deadly
engines of evil spirits that undo us, and even evil spirits

themselves, and he who is under the chains thereof is

not without a possession. Mary Magdalene had more

than seven devils, if these with their imps were in her,

and he who is thus possessed may literally be named

Legion. Where such plants grow and prosper, look
for no champian or region void of thorns, but produc-
tions like the tree of Goa* and forests of abomination.
V. Guide not the hand of God, nor order the finger
of the Almighty, unto thy will and pleasure; but sit

quiet in the soft showers of providence, and favourable

distributions in this world, either to thyself or others.
And since not only judgments have their errands, but
mercies their commissions, snatch not at every favour,
nor think thyself passed by, if they fall upon thy neigh-

* Arbor Goa de Ruyz, or Ficus Tndlca, whose branches send down

shoots which root in the g^round, from whence there successively rise

others, till one tree becomes a wood.

1
 CHRISTIAN MORALS. 173

hour. Rake not up envious displacences at things suc-

cessful unto others, which the wise Disposer of all

thinks not fit for thyself. Reconcile the events of things

unto both beings, that is, of this world and the next ; so
will there not seem so many riddles in providence, nor
various inequalities in the dispensation of things below.
If thou dost not anoint thy face, yet put not on sack-
Repining at the good
cloth at the felicities of others.
draws on rejoicing at the evils of others, and so falls
into that inhuman vice for which so few languages
have a name.* The blessed spirits above rejoice at
our happiness below but to be glad at the evils of one
;

another is beyond the malignity of hell, and falls not on

evil spirits, who, though they rejoice at our unhappi-

ness, take no pleasure at the afflictions of their own

society or of their fellow natures. Degenerous heads !

who must be fain to learn from such examples, and to

be taught from the school of hell.

VI. Grain not thy vicious stains, nor deepen those

swart tinctures, which temper, infirmity, or ill habits
have upon thee and fix not, by iterated deprava-
set ;

tions, what time might efface or virtuous washes ex-

punge. He who thus still advanceth in iniquity, deepen-

eth his deformed hue, turns a shadow into night, and
makes himself a negro in the black jaundice and so ;

becomes one of those lost ones, the disproportionate

pores of whose brains afford no entrance unto good
motions, but reflect and frustrate all counsels, deaf unto
the thunder of the laws, and rocks unto the cries of
charitable commiserators. He who hath had the pa-
tience of Diogenes, to make orations unto statues, may

* 'RT/lt3t//J6KlX(-t.

15*
174 CHRISTIAN MORALS.

more sensibly apprehend how

words fall to the
all

ground, spent upon such a surd and earless generation

of men, stupid unto all instruction, and rather requiring
an exorcist than an orator for their conversion.
VII. Burden not the back of Aries, Leo, or Taurus,
with thy faults, nor make Saturn, Mars, or Venus,
guilty of thy follies. Think not to fasten thy imperfec-

tions on the stars, and so despairingly conceive thyself

under a fatality of being evil. Calculate thyself within,
seek not thyself in the moon, but in thine own orb or
microcosmical circumference. Let celestial aspects
admonish and advertise, not conclude and determine
thy ways. For since good and bad stars moralize not
our actions, and neither excuse or commend, acquit or
condemn our good or bad deeds at the present or last
bar, since some are astrologically well disposed who
are morally highly vicious ; not celestial figures, but
virtuous schemes must denominate and state our
actions. If we rightly understood the names whereby
God calleth the stars, if we knew his name for the
dogstar, or by what appellation Jupiter, Mars, and
Saturn, obey his will, it might be a welcome acces-
sion unto astrology, which speaks great and
things,
is fain to make use of appellations from Greek and
barbarick systems. Whatever influences, impulsions,
or inclinations there be from the lights above, it were a

piece of wisdom to make one of those wise men* who

overrule their stars, and with their own militia contend
with the host of heaven. Unto which attempt there
want no auxiliaries from the whole strength of morality*
supplies from Christian ethicks, influences also and illu-

Sapiens dominabitur astris.

 CHRISTIAN MORALS. 175

ininations from above, more powerful than the Hghts of

heaven.
VIII. Confound not the distinctions of thy life which
nature hath divided ; that is, youth, adolescence, man-
hood, and old age ; nor in these divided periods, wherein
thou art in a manner four, conceive thyself but one.
Let every division be happy in its proper virtues, nor
one vice run through all. Let each distinction have its

salutary transition, and criticalUy deliver thee from the

imperfections of the former ; so ordering the whole,
that prudence and virtue may have the largest section.
Do as a child but when thou art a child, and ride not
on a reed at twenty. He who hath not taken leave of
the follies of his youth, and in his maturer state scarce
got out of that division, disproportionately dividetK his
days, crowds up the latter part of his life, and leaves
too narrow a corner for the age of wisdom, and so
hath room to be a man scarce longer than he hath
been a youth. Rather than to make this confusion,
anticipate the virtues of age, and live long without the
infirmities of it. So may'st thou count up thy days as
some do Adam's,* that is by anticipation so may'st ;

thou be coetaneous unto thy elders, and a father unto

thy contemporaries.
IX. While others are curious in the choice of good
air, and chiefly solicitous for healthful habitations, study
thou conversation, and be critical in thy consortion.
The aspects, conjunctions, and configurations of the
stars, which mutually diversify, intend, or qualify their
influences, are but the varieties of their nearer or farther
conversation with one another, and like the consor-

* Adam, thought to be created in the state of man, about thirty

years old.
176 CHRISTIAN MORALS.

tion of men, whereby they become better or worse, and

even exchange their natures. Since men live by ex-
amples, and will be imitating something, order thy imita-
tion to thy improvement, not thy ruin. Look not for
roses in Attalus his garden,* or wholesome flowers in a
venemous plantation. And since there is scarce any
one bad, but some others are the worse for him, tempt
not contagion by proximity, and hazard not thyself in
the shadow of corruption. He who hath not early
sufl'ered this shipwreck, and in his younger days escaped
this Charybdis may make a happy voyage, and not come
in with black sails into the port. Self-conversation, or
to be alone, is better than such consortion. Some
schoolmen tell us, that he is properly alone, with whom
in the same place there is no other of the same species.
Nabuchodonozor was alone, though among the beasts
of the field and a wise man may be tolerably said to
;

be alone, though with a rabble of people little better

than beasts about him. Unthinking heads, w^ho have
not learned to be alone, are in a prison to themselves,
if they be not also with others ; w^hereas, on the con-
trary, they whose thoughts are and hurryin a fair,

within, are sometimes company,

fain to retire into
to
be out of the crowd of themselves. He who must
needs have company, must needs have sometimes bad
company. Be able to be alone. Lose not the advan-
tage of solitude, and the society of thyself, nor be only
content, but delight to be alone and single with Omni-
presency. He who is thus prepared, the day is not
uneasy nor the night black unto him. Darkness may
bound his eyes, not his imagination. In his bed he may

* Attains made a garden which contained only venemous plants.

 CHRISTIAN MORALS. 177

lie, like Pompey and his sons,* in all quarters of the

earth ; may speculate the universe, and enjoy the whole
world in the hermitage of himself. Thus the old
ascetick Christians found a paradise in a desert, and
with little converse on earth held a conversation in
heaven ; thus they astronomized in caves, and though
they beheld not the stars, had the glory of heaven
l)efore them.
X. Let the characters of good things stand indelibly
in thy mind, and thy thoughts be active on them. Trust
not too much unto from reminiscential
suggestions
amulets, or artificial memorandums. Let the morti-
tying Janus of Covarrubias be in thy daily thoughts, not
only on thy hand and signets.f Rely not alone upon
silent and dumb remembrances. Behold not deaths'-
lieads till thou dost not see them, nor look upon morti-
iying objects till thou overlookest them. Forget not
liow assuefaction unto any thing minorates the passion
from it, how constant objects lose their hints, and steal
an inadvertisement upon us. There is no excuse to

forget what every thing prompts unto us. To thought-

tul observators, the whole world is a phylactery, and
every thing we see an item of the wisdom, power,
or goodness of God. Happy are they who verify their
amulets, and make their phylacteries speak in their lives
and actions. To run on in despight of the revulsions
and pull-backs of such remoras, aggravates our trans-
gressions. When deaths'-heads on our hands have no
* Pompeios Juvenes Asia atque Eiiropa, sed ipsum terra tegit Libyes.

t Don Sebastian de Covarrubias, writ three centuries of moral emblems

in Spanish. In the Sfth of the second century he sets down two fact s

avers^e, and conjoined Janus-like ; the one a gnllanl beautiful face, the
other a death's-head face, with this motto out of Ovid's Metamorphosis,

Quid fuerim,quid simquc, vide.

178 CHRISTIAN MORALS. 4
influence upon our heads, and fleshless cadavers abate
not the exorbitances of the flesh upon ; when crucifixes
men's hearts suppress not their bad commotions, and
his image who was murdered for us withholds not from
blood and murder ;
phylacteries prove but formalities,
and their despised hints sharpen our condemnations.
XL Look not for whales in the Euxine sea, or expect
great matters where they are not to be found. Seek
not for profundity in shallowness, or fertility in a wilder-
ness. Place not the expectation of great happiness here
below, or think to find heaven on earth wherein we ;

must be content with embryon-felicities, and fruitions of

doubtless faces. For the circle of our felicities makes
but short arches. In every clime we are in a periscian
state, and with our light our shadow and darkness walk
about us. Our contentments stand upon the tops of
pyramids ready to fall off", and the insecurity of their
enjoyments abrupteth our tranquillities. What we mag-
nify is magnificent, but, like to the colossus, noble with-
out, with rubbidge and coarse metal within. Even
stuflft

the sun, whose glorious outside we behold, may have

dark and smoky entrails. In vain we admire the lustre
of any thing seen that which is truly glorious is invi-
;

sible. Paradise was but a part of the earth, lost not

only to our fruition but our knowledge. And if, accord-
ing to old dictates, no man can be said to be happy be- I
fore death, the happiness of this life goes for nothing
before it be over, and while we think ourselves happy
we do but usurp that name. Certainly true beatitude
groweth not on earth, nor hath this w^orld in it the ex-
pectations we have of it. He swims in oil, and can
hardly avoid sinking, who hath such light foundations
to support him. 'Tis therefore happy that we have two
 — ;

CHRISTIAN MORALS. 179

worlds to hold on. To enjoy true happiness we must

travel into a very far country, and even out of ourselves ;

for the pearl we seek for is not to be found in the Indian,

but in the empyrean ocean.
XII. Answer not the spur of fury, and be not prodi-
gal or prodigious in revenge. Make not one in the
Historia horribilis ;* slay not thy servant for a broken
glass, nor pound him in a mortar who ofFendeth thee
supererogate not in the worst sense, and overdo not the
necessities of evil; humour not the injustice of revenge.
Be not stoically mistaken in the equality of sins, nor
commutatively iniquous in the valuation of transgres-
sions ; but weigh them in the scales of heaven, and by
the weights of righteous reason. Think that revenge
too high, which is but level with the offence. Let thy
arrows of revenge fly short, or be aimed like those of
Jonathan, to fall beside the mark. Too many there be
to whom a dead enemy smells well, and who find musk
and amber in revenge. The ferity of such minds holds
no rule in retaliations, requiring too often a head for a
tooth, and the supreme revenge which a
for trespasses
night's rest should obliterate. But patient meekness
takes injuries like pills, not chewing but swallowing them
down, laconically suffering, and silently passing them
over while angered pride makes a noise, like Homeri-
;

can Mars,f at every scratch of offences. Since women

do most delight in revenge, it may seem but feminine
manhood to be vindicative. If thou must needs have
thy revenge of thine enemy, with a soft tongue break

* A book so itititlcd, wherein are sundry horrid accounts,

i Tu miser cxclarnas, ut Slentora vincere possis,
Vol potius quantum Gradivus Homericus. Juv.
 —

180 CHRISTIAN MORALS.

his bones,* heap coals of fire on his head, forgive him

and enjoy it. To forgive our enemies is a charming
way of revenge, and a short Caesarian conquest, over-
coming without a blow laying our enemies at our feet,
;

under sorrow, shame, and repentance leaving our foes ;

our friends, and solicitously inclined to grateful retalia-

tions. Thus upon our adversaries is a healing
to return
way of revenge and to do good for evil a soft and
;

melting ultion, a method taught from heaven to keep all

smooth on earth. Common forcible ways make not an
end of evil, but leave hatred and malice behind them.
An enemy thus reconciled is little to be trusted, as want-
ing the foundation of love and charity, and but for a
time restrained by disadvantage or inability. If thou
hast not mercy for others, yet be not cruel unto thyself I
To ruminate upon evils, to make critical notes upon in-

juries, and be too acute in their apprehensions, is to add

unto our own tortures, to feather the arrows of our ene-

mies, to lash ourselves with the scorpions of our foes,
and to resolve to sleep no more. For injuries long
I
dreamt on take away at last all rest ; and he sleeps but
like Regulus, who busieth his head about them.
XIII. Amuse not thyself about the riddles of future
things. Study prophecies when they are become histo- II

ries, and past hovering in their causes. Eye well things

past and present, and let conjectural sagacity suffice for
things to come. There is a sober latitude for prescience
in contingences of discoverable tempers, whereby dis-

cerning heads see sometimes beyond their eyes, and

wise men become prophetical Leave cloudy predic-
tions to their periods, and let appointed seasons have the

* A soft tongue breaketh the bones. Prov. xxv. 15.

 CHRISTIAN MORALS. 181

lot of their accomplishments. 'Tis too early to study

such prophecies before they have been long made, before
some train of their causes have already taken fire, laying
open in part what lay obscure and before buried unto
us. For the voice of prophecies is Hke that of whisper-
ing-places ; they who are near or at a little distance hear
nothing, those at the farthest extremity will understand
all. But a retrograde cognition of times past, and things
which have already been, is more satisfactory than a
suspended knowledge of what is yet unexistent. And
the greatest part of time being already wrapt up in
things behind us, it's now somewhat late to bait after
things before us for futurity still shortens, and time
;

present sucks in time to come. What is prophetical in

one age proves historical and so must hold
in another,
on unto the last of time, where there will be no room for
prediction when Janus shall lose one face, and the long
;

beard of time shall look like those of David's servants,

shorn away upon one and when, if the expected
side,

Elias should appear, he might say much of what is past,

not much of what's to come.
XIV. Live unto the dignity of thy nature, and leave
it not disputable at last, whether thou hast been a man ;

or since thou art a composition of man and beast, how

thou hast predominantly passed thy days, to state the
denomination. Unman not therefore thyself by a bestial
transformation, nor realize old fables. Expose not thy-
selfby four-footed manners unto monstrous draughts, and
caricatura representations. Think not after the old Pytha-
gorean conceit, what beast thou may'st be after death.
Be not under any brutal metempsuchosis while thou
livest, and walkest about erectly under the scheme of
man. In thine own circumference, as in that of the
16
 ;

182 CHRISTIANMORALS.

earth, let the rational horizon be larger than the sensi-

ble, and the circle of reason than of sense. Let the divine
part be upward, and the region of beast below. Other-
wise, 'tis but to live invertedly, and with thy head unto
the heels of thy antipodes. Desert not thy title to a
divine particle and union with invisibles. Let true know-
ledge and virtue tell the lower world thou art a part of
the higher. Let thy thoughts be of things which have
not entered into the hearts of beasts ; think of things
long past, and long to come ; acquaint thyself with the
choragium of the stars, and consider the vast expansion
beyond them. Let intellectual tubes give thee a glance
of things which visive organs reach not. Have a glimpse
of incomprehensibles and thoughts of things which
;

thoughts but tenderly touch. Lodge immaterials in thy

head ; ascend unto invisibles ; fill thy spirit with spiritu-

als, with the mysteries of faith, the magnalities of reli-

gion, and thy life with the honour of God Avithout ;

which, though giants in wealth and dignity, we are but

dwarfs and pygmies in humanity, and may hold a pitiful
rank in that triple division of mankind into heroes, men,
and beasts. For though human souls are said to be
equal, yet is there no small inequality in their operations
some maintain the allowable station of men, many are
far below it; and some have been so divine, as to
approach the apogeum of their natures, and to be in the
confinium of spirits.

XV. Behold thyself by inward opticks and the crys-

talline of thy soul. Strange it is that in the most perfect
sense there should be so many fallacies, that we are fain
to make a doctrine, and often to see by art. But the
greatest imperfection is in our inward sight, that is, to

be ghosts unto our own eyes, and while we are so sharp-

 ;

CHRISTIAN MORALS. 183

sighted as to look through others, to be invisible unto

ourselves; for the inward eyes are more fallacious than
the outward. The vices we scoff at in others Jauerh at
us within ourselves. Avarice, pride, falshood, lie undis-
cerned and blindly in us, even to the age of blindness ;

and therefore, to see ourselves interiourly we are fain to

borrow other men's eyes; wherein true friends are good
informers, and censurers no bad friends. Conscience
only, that can see without light, sits in the areopagy and
dark tribunal of our hearts, surveying our thoughts and
condemning their obliquities. Happy is that state of
vision that can see without light, though all should look
as before the creation, when there was not an eye to
see, or light to actuate a vision wherein notwithstand-
:

ing, obscurity is only imaginable respectively unto eyes

for unto God there was none, eternal light was ever
created light was for the creation, not himself, and as
he saw before the sun, may still also see without it. In
the city of the new Jerusalem there is neither sun nor
moon where
; glorified eyes must see by the archetypal
sun, or the light of God, able to illuminate intellectual
eyes, and make unknown visions. Intuitive perceptions
in spiritual beings may perhaps hold some analogy unto
vision ; but yet how they see us, or one another, what
eye, what light, or what perception is required unto their
intuition, is yet dark unto our apprehension and even ;

how they see God, or how unto our glorified eyes the
beatifical vision will be celebrated, another world must
tell us, when perceptions will be new and we may hope
to behold invisibles.
XVI. When all looks fair about, and thou seest not a
cloud so big as a hand to threaten thee, forget not the
wheel of things ; think of sullen vicissitudes, but beat not
184 CHRISTIAN MORALS.

thy brains to foreknow them. Be armed against such

obscurities rather by submission than fore-knowledge.
The knowledge of future evils mortifies present felici-

ties, and there is more content in the uncertainty or

ignorance of them. This favour our Savour vouchsafed
unto Peter, when he foretold not his death in plain terms,
and so by an ambiguous and cloudy delivery dampt not
the spirit of his disciples. But in the assured fore-
knowledge of the deluge Noah lived many years under
the affliction of a flood, and Jerusalem was taken, unto
Jeremy, before it was besieged. And therefore the
wisdom of astrologers, who speak of future things, hath
wisely softened the severity of their doctrines ; and even
m their sad predictions, while they tell us of inclination
not coaction from the stars, they kill us not with Stygian
oaths and merciless necessity, but leave us hopes of
evasion.
XVII. If thou hast the brow to endure the name of
traitor, perjured, or oppressor, yet cover thy face when
ingratitude is thrown at thee. If that degenerous vice
j)ossess thee, hide thyself in the shadow of thy shame,
and pollute not noble society. Grateful ingenuities are
content to be obliged within some compass of retribu-
tion, and being depressed by the weight of iterated
favours, may so labour under their inabilities of requital,
as to abate the content from kindnesses. But narrow
self-ended souls make prescription of good offices, and
obliged by often favours think others still due unto
them ; whereas, if they but once fail, they prove so per-
versely ungrateful, as to make nothing of former
courtesies, and to bury all that's past. Such tempers
pervert the generous course of things ; for they dis-
courage the inclinations of noble minds, and make bene-

i
 CHRISTIAN MORALS. 185

ficiency cool unto acts of obligation, whereby the

grateful world should subsist, and have their consola-
tion. Common gratitude must be kept alive by the
additionary fuel of new courtesies ; but generous grati-
tudes, though but once well obliged, without quickening
repetitions or expectation of new favours, have thankful
minds for ever ; for they write not their obligations in
sandy but marble memories, which wear not out but
with themselves.
XVIII. Think not silence the wisdom of fools, but, if
rightly timed, the honour of wise men, who have not
the infirmity, but the virtue of taciturnity, and speak
not out of the abundance, but the well-weighed thoughts
of their hearts. Such silence may be eloquence, and
speak thy worth above the power of words. Make
such a one thy friend, in whom princes may be happy,
and great counsels successful. Let him have the key
of thy heart, who hath the lock of his own, which no
temptation can open where thy secrets may lastingly
;

lie, hke the lamp in Olybius his urn,* alive and light,
but close and invisible.
XIX. Let thy oaths be sacred, and promises be made
upon the altar of thy heart. Call not Jove to witness
with a stone in one hand, and a straw in another,! and
so make chaff and stubble of thy vows. Worldly
spirits, whose interest is their belief, make cobwebs of

obligations, and, if they can find ways to elude the urn

of the praetor, will trust the thunderbolt of Jupiter and ;

therefore if they should as deeply swear as Osman to

* Which after many hundred years was found burning under ground
and went out as soon as the air came to it.

t Jovcm lipidem jurare.

16*
 —

186 CHRISTIAN MORALS.

Bethlem Gabor,* yet whether they would be bound by

those chains, and not find ways to cut such Gordian
knots, we could have no just assurance. But honest
men's words are Stygian oaths, and promises inviolable.
These are not the men for whom the fetters of law w-ere
first forged they needed not the solemness of oaths ;t
;

by keeping their faith they swear, and evacuate such

confirmations.
XX. Though the world be histrionical, and most men
live ironically, yet be thou what thou singly art, and

personate only thyself. Swim smoothly in the stream

of thy nature, and live but one man. To single hearts
doubling is discruciating ; such tempers must sweat to

dissemble, and prove but hypocritical hypocrites. Si-

mulation must be short ; men do not easily continue a

counterfeiting life, or dissemble unto death. He who
counterfeiteth, acts a part, and is as it were out of him-
self; w^hich, if long, proves so irksome that men arc
glad to pull off their vizards, and resume themselves
again ; no practice being able to naturalize such unna-
turals, or make a man rest content not to be himself.
And therefore since sincerity is thy temper, let veracity
be thy virtue, in words, manners, and actions. To ofl!er

which have so little foundations in thee,

at iniquities,
were to be vicious up-hill, and strain for thy condemna-
tion. Persons viciously inclined want no wheels to
make them actively vicious, as having the elater and
spring of their own natures to facilitate their iniquities.
And therefore so many who are sinistrous unto good

* See t!ie oath of Sultan Osnian in his life, in the addition to KnoUes
his Turkish History.
t Colendo fidem jurant. Curtius.
 CHRISTIAN MORALS. 187

actions, are ambi-dexterous unto bad, and Vulcans in

virtuous paths, Achilleses in vicious motions.
XXI. Rest not in the high-strained paradoxes of old
philosophy, supported by naked reason and the reward
of mortal fehcity, but labour in the ethicks of faith,
built upon heavenly assistance and the happiness of
both beings. Understand the rules, but swear not unto
the doctrines of Zeno or Epicurus. Look beyond An-
toninus, and terminate not thy morals in Seneca or
Epictetus. Let not the twelve, but the two tables be
thy law let Pythagoras be thy remembrancer, not
;

thy textuary and final instructor and learn the vanity

;

of the world rather from Solomon than Phocylydes.

Sleep not in the dogmas of the Peripatus, Academy, or
Porticus. Be a moralist of the mount, an Epictetus in
and christianize thy notions.
the faith,
XXII. In seventy or eighty years a man may have a
deep gust of the world, know what what it can
it is,

afford, and what 'tis to have been a man. Such a lati-

tude of years may hold a considerable corner in the
general map of time, and a man may have a curt
epitome of the whole course thereof in the days of his
own life ; may clearly see he hath but acted over his
forefathers, what it was to live in ages past, and what
living will be in all ages to come.
He is like to be the best judge of time who hath lived
to see about the sixtieth part thereof. Persons of short
times may know what 'tia to live, but not the life of
man, who, having little behind them, are but Januses of
one face, and know not singularities enough to raise
axioms of this world but such a compass of years will
;

shev/ new examples of old things, parallelisms of occur-

rences through the whole course of time, and nothing
188 .

be monstrous unto him,

CHRISTIAN MORALS.

who may in that time

stand not only the varieties of men, but the variation of

under
1
himself, and how many men he hath been in that extent
of time.
He may have a close apprehension what it is to be
forgotten, while he hath lived to find none who could
remember his father, or scarce the friends of his youth,
and may sensibly see with what a face in no long time
oblivion will look upon himself His progeny may never
be his posterity he may go out of the world less related
;

than he came into it; and considering the frequent mor-

tality in friends and relations, in such a term of time he

may pass away divers years in sorrow and black habits,

and leave none to mourn for himself; orbity may be
his inheritance, and riches his repentance.

In such a thread of time, and long observation of men,

he may acquire a physiognomical intuitive knowledge ;

judge the interiours by the outside, and raise conjectures

at first sight and knowing what men have been, what
;

they are, what children probably will be, may in the pre-
sent age behold agood part and the temper of the next;
and since so many live by the rules of constitution, and
so few overcome their temperamental inclinations, make
no improbable predictions.
Such a portion of time will afford a large prospect
backward, and authentick reflections how far he hath
I
performed the great intention of his being, in the honour
of his Maker whether he hath made good the princi-
;

ples of his nature, and what he was made to be what ;

characteristick and special mark he hath left, to be

observable in his generation ; whether he hath lived to

purpose or in vain, and what he hath added, acted, or

performed, that might considerably speak him a man.
 CHRISTIAN MORALS. 189

In such an age delights will be undelightful and plea-

sures grow stale unto him ; antiquated theorems will
revive, and Solomon's maxims be demonstrations unto
him ; hopes or presumptions be over, and despair grow
up of any satisfaction below. And having been long
tossed in the ocean of this world, he will by that time
feel the in-draught of another, unto which this seems but
preparatory, and without it of no high value. He will ex-
perimentally find the emptiness of all things, and the
nothing of what is past ; and wisely grounding upon
true Christian expectations, finding so much past, will
wholly fix upon what is to come. He will long for
perpetuity, and live as though he made haste to be
happy. The last may prove the prime part of his life,

and those his best days which he lived nearest heaven.

XXIII. Live happy in the Elysium of a virtuously
composed mind, and let intellectual contents exceed the
delights wherein mere pleasurists place their paradise.
Bear not too slack reins upon pleasure, nor let complexion
or contagion betray thee unto the exorbitancy of delight.
Make pleasure thy recreation or intermissive relaxation,
not thy Diana, life and profession. Voluptuousness is

as insatiable as covetousness. Tranquillity is better than

jollity, and to appease pain than to invent pleasure.
Our hard entrance into the world, our miserable going
out of it, our sicknesses, disturbances, and sad ren-
counters in it, do clamorously tell us we come not into
the world to run a race of delight, but to perform the
sober acts and serious purposes ofman which to omit ;

were foully to miscarry in the advantage of humanity,

to play away an uniterable life, and to have lived in
vain. Forget not the capital end, and frustrate not the
opportunity of once living. Dream not of any kind of
 ;

190 CHRISTIAN MORALS.

metempsuchosis or transanimation, but into thine own

body, and that after a long time, and then also unto wail
or bliss, according to thy first and fundamental life. Upon

a curricle in this world depends a long course of the

next, and upon a narrow scene here an endless expan-
sion hereafter. In vain some think to have an end of
their beings with their lives. Things cannot get out of
their natures, or be or not be in despight of their con-
stitutions. Rational existences in heaven perish not all,

and but partially on earth ; that which is thus once will

in some way be always ; the first living human soul is

still alive, and all Adam hath found no period.

XXIV. Since the stars of heaven do differ in glory
since it hath pleased the Almighty hand to honour the
north pole with lights above the south ; since there are
some stars so bright that they can hardly be looked on,
some so dim that they can scarce be seen, and vast
numbers not to be seen at all, even by artificial eyes ;

read thou the earth in heaven, and things below from

above. Look contentedly upon the scattered difference
of things, and expect not equality, in lustre, dignity, or
perfection, in regions or persons below ; where nume-'
rous numbers must be content to stand like lacteous or
nebulous stars, taken notice of, or dim in their
little

generations. which may be contentedly allowable

All
in the aflfairs and ends of this world, and in suspension
unto what will be in the order of things hereafter, and
the new system of mankind which will be in the world
to come when the last may be the first and the first
;

the last when Lazarus may sit above Caesar, and the
;

just obscure on earth shall shine like the sun in heaven ; A

when personations shall cease, and histrionism of happi-

m
 —

CHEISTIAN MORALS. 191

ness be over ; when reality shall rule, and all shall be

as they shall be for ever.
XXV. When the stoick said that life v^ould not be
accepted, were
if it offered unto such as knew it,* he
spoke too meanly of that state of being which placeth
us in the form of men. It more depreciates the value
of this life, that men would not live it over again ; for
although they would few or none can
still live on, yet

endure to think of being twice the same men upon earth,

and some had rather never have lived than to tread
over their days once more. Cicero in a prosperous
state had not the patience to think of beginning in a
cradle again. Job would not only curse the day of his
nativity, but also of his renascency, if he were to act
over his disasters, and the miseries of the dunghill.
But the greatest underweening of this life is to under-
value that, unto which this is but exordial or a passage
leading unto it. The great advantage of this mean life

is thereby to stand in a capacity of a better ; for the

colonies of heaven must be drawn from earth, and the
sons of the first Adam are only heirs unto the second.
Thus Adam came into this world with the power also
of another nor only to replenish the earth, but the ever-
lasting mansions of heaven. Where we w^ere when the
foundations of the earth w^ere laid, when the morning
stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for

joy,f he must answer who asked it, who understands

entities of preordination, and beings yet unbeing who ;

hath in his intellect the ideal existences of things, and

entities before their extances. Though it looks but hke
an imaginary kind of existency to be before w^e are, yet

* Vitam nemo accipcrct, si d iretur scientibus. Seneca,

* Job xxxviii. 17.
192 CHRISTIAN MORALS.

since we are under the decree or prescience of a sure

and omnipotent Power, it may be somewhat more than
a non-entity to be in that mind unto which all things
are present.
XXVI. If the end of the world shall have the same
foregoing signs, as the period of empires, states, and
dominions in it, that is, corruption of manners, inhuman
degenerations, and deluge of iniquities it may be ;

doubted whether that final time be so far off, of whose

day and hour there can be no prescience. But while
all men doubt and none can determine how long the

world shall last, some may wonder that it hath spun

out so long and unto our days. For if the Almighty
had not determined a fixed duration unto it, according
to his mighty and merciful designments in it ; if he had
not said unto it, as he did unto a part of it, hitherto

shalt thou go and no further ; if we consider the inces-

sant and cutting provocations from the earth, it is not
without amazement how his patience hath permitted so

long a continuance unto it; how he who cursed the

earth in the first days of the first man, and drowned it

in the tenth generation after, should thus lastingly con-

tend with flesh and yet defer the last flames. For since
he sharply provoked every moment, yet punisheth to
is

pardon, and forgives to forgive again what patience ;

could be content to act over such vicissitudes, or accept

of repentances which must have after-penitences, his

goodness can only tell us. And surely if the patience
of heaven were not proportionable unto the provoca-
tionsfrom earth, there needed an intercessor not only
for the sins, but the duration of this world, and to lead

it up unto the present computation. Without such a

merciful longanimity, the heavens would never be so
 ;

CHRISTIAN MORALS. 193

aged as to grow old like a garment it were in vain to

;

infer from the doctrine of the sphere, that the time-

might come when Capella, a noble northern star, would
have its motion in the equator that the northern
;

zodiacal signs would at length be the southern, the

southern the northern, and Capricorn become our
Cancer. However therefore the wisdom of the Creator
hath ordered the duration of the world, yet since the end
thereof brings the accomplishment of our happiness,
since some would be content that it should have no
end, since evil men and spirits do fear it may be too
short, since good men hope it may not be too long ; the
prayer of the saints under the altar will be the supplica-
tion of the righteous world ; that his mercy would
abridge their languishing expectation and hasten the
accomplishment of their happy state to come.
XXVII. Though good men are often taken away
from the evil to come, though some in evil days have
been glad that they were old, nor long to behold the
iniquities of a wicked world, or judgments threatened
by them yet is it no small satisfaction unto honest
;

minds to leave the world in virtuous well-tempered

times, under a prospect of good to come, and continua-
tion of worthy ways acceptable unto God and man.
Men who die in deplorable days, which they regretfully
behold, have not their eyes closed with the like content
while they cannot avoid the thoughts of proceeding or
growing enormities, displeasing unto that Spirit unto
whom they arc then going, whose honour they desire
in all times and throughout all generations. If Lucifer

could be freed from his dismal place, he would little

care though the rest were left behind. Too many there
17
 ;

194 CHRISTIAN MORALS.

may be of Nero's mind, who if their own turn were

served would not regard what became of others, and,
when they die themselves, care not if all perish. But
good men's wishes extend beyond their lives, for the
happiness of times to come and never to be known unto
them. And therefore while so many question prayers
for the dead, they charitably pray for those who are
not yet alive ; they are not so enviously ambitious to go
to heaven by themselves they cannot but humbly wish,
;

that the little flock might be greater, the narrow gate

wider, and that, as many are called, so not a few might
be chosen.
XXVIII. That a greater number of angels remained
in heaven than fell from it, the schoolmen will tell us
that the number of blessed souls will not come short of
that vast number of fallen spirits, we have the favour-
able calculation of others. What
age or century hath
sent most souls unto heaven, he can tell who vouch-
safeth that honour unto them. Though the number of
the blessed must be complete before the world can pass
away, yet since the world itself seems in the wane, and
we have no such comfortable prognosticks of latter times,
since a greater part of time is spun than is to come,
and the blessed roll already much replenished happy ;

are those pieties which solicitously look about and

hasten to make one of that already much filled and
abbreviated list to come.
XXIX. Think not thy time short in this world, since
the world itself is not long. The created world is but
a small parenthesis in eternity, and a short interposi-
tion, for a time, between such a state of duration as

was before it and may be after it. And if we should

 ;

CHUISTIAN MORALS. 195

allow of the old tradition that the world should last six
thousand years, it could scarce have the name of old,
since the first man and
lived near a sixth part thereof,
seven Methuselahs would exceed whole duration. its

However to palliate the shortness of our lives, and

somewhat to compensate our brief term in this world,
it's good to know as much as we can of it, and also, so

far as possibly in us lieth, to hold such a theory of times

past, as though we had seen the same. He who hath
thus considered the world, as also how therein things
long past have been answered by things present, how-
matters in one age have been acted over in another,
and how there is nothing new under the sun, may con-
ceive himself in some manner to have lived from the
beginning, and to be as old as the world ; and if he
should still live on, 'twould be but the same thing.
XXX. Lastly, if length of days be thy portion, make
it not thy expectation. Reckon not upon long life;

think every day the last, and live always beyond thy
account. He that so often surviveth his expectation
lives many lives, and will scarce complain of the short-
ness of his days. Time past is gone like a shadow
make time to come present. Approximate thy latter
times by present apprehensions of them; be like a
neighbour unto the grave, and think there is but little

to come. And since there is something of us that will

still live on, join both lives together, and live in one but
for the other. He who thus ordereth the purposes of
this life will never be far from the next, and is in some
manner already in it, by a happy conformity, and close
apprehension of it. And if, as we have elsewhere de-
clared, any have been so happy as personally to under-
196 CHRISTIAN MORALS.

stand Christian annihilation, ecstasy, exohition, trans-

formation, the kiss of the spouse, and ingression into the
divine shadow, according to mystical' theology ; they
have already had an handsome anticipation of heaven,
the world is in a manner over, and the earth in ashes
unto them.

FINIS.
 RESEMBLANT PASSAGES

RELIGIO MEDICI, AND THE TASK.

 The Author of the task was not one of those un-
affectionate beings who have neither bosom-friends nor
favourite pocket-companions. AUhough the fact is no-
where recorded I am persuaded that religio medici
was one of his darhng books. They who hesitate to
adopt this conclusion may yet be glad to have the pas-
sages brought together on which it is founded, for it

cannot be undelightful to see the unanimity of thinking

which existed between two of the purest minds that
have adorned our country.
Will it be thought that I mean to disparage dear
Cowper by bringing forward these analogies ? Far
from it they make me love him the more. There are
!

but few books in the world, worth reading, which do

not disclose their authors' acquaintance with the wis-
dom to be found in other books that were written before
them.
J. P.
200 SIR T. BROWNE.

There is no church whose every part so squares unto

my conscience as this church of England, to whose

faith I am a sworn subject.

Reiigio Medici, page 28.

The world was made to be inhabited by beasts, but

studied and contemplated by man ; 'tis the debt of our
reason we owe unto God, and the homage we pay for
not being beasts.
The wisdom of God receives small honour from those
vulgar heads that rudely stare about, and with a gross
rusticity admire his works. Those highly magnify him,
whose judicious inquiry into his acts, and deliberate
research into his creatures, return the duty of a devout
and learned admiration.
Teach my endeavours so thy works to read,
That learning them, in Thee I may proceed.
Rel. Med. p. 40.

What reason may not go to school to the wisdom of

bees, ants, and spiders ? Ruder heads stand amazed at
those prodigious pieces of nature, whales, elephants,
dromedaries, and camels ; these, I confess, are the co-
lossus and majestic pieces of his hand; but in these
narrow engines there is more curious mathematicks,
and the civility of these little citizens more neatly sets
forth the wisdom of their maker.
Rel Med. p. 42.

Thus there are two books from whence I collect my

divinity; besides that written one of God, another of
his servant Nature, that universal and publick manu-
script that lies expansed unto the eyes of all.

This was the scripture and theology of the heathens ;

 !

W. COWPER. 201

England ! with all thy faults I love thee still,

My country
The Tash, book ii. line 206.

Brutes graze the mountain tops with faces prone

And eyes intent upon the scanty herb
It them or recumbent on its brow
yields ;

Ruminate, heedless of the scene outspread ....

Man views it and admires, but rests content

With what he views ; the landscape has his praise

But not its author ....
Not so the mind that has been touched from heaven,
And in the school of sacred wisdom taught
To read his wonders.
Task. v. 785.

The soul discerns

A ray of heavenly light gilding all forms
Terrestrial, in the vast and the minute
The unambiguous footsteps of the God
Who gives its lustre to an insect's wing,
And wheels his throne upon the rolling worlds.
Task. V. 810.

Familiar with the effect we slight the cause,

And constancy of Nature's course,

in the
See nought to wonder at. Should God again,
As once in Gibeon, interrupt the race
Of the undeviating and punctual sun
202 SIR T. BROWNE.

the natural motion of the sun made them more admire

him, than its supernatural station did the children of
Israel ; the ordinary effect of nature wrought more ad-
miration in them, than in the other all his miracles.
Rel Med. p. 42.

We disdain to suck divinity from the flowers of na-

ture.
Rel Med. p. 43.

Nor do I so forget God, as to adore the name of

Nature.
Rel. Med. p. 43.

God hath so contrived his work, that with the self-

same instrument, without a new creation, he may effect

his obscurest designs. Thus he sweeteneth the water
with a wood preserveth the creatures in the ark, which
;

the blast of his mouth might have as easily created for ;

God is like a skilful geometrician, who when more easily

and with one stroke of his compass he might describe
or divide a right line, had yet rather do this in a circle
or longer way, according to the constituted and forelaid
principles of his art.
Rel. Med. p. 43.

Thus I call the effects of Nature works of God, the

whose hand and instrument she only and therefore to is,

ascribe his actions unto her is to devolve the honour of

the principal agent upon the instrument which if with ;

reason we may do, then let our hammers rise up and

boast they haf e built our houses, and our pens receive
the honour of pur writing.
Rel. Med. p. 44.
j
 W. cow PER. 203

How would the world admire but speaks it ! less

An agency divine, to make him know

His moment when to sink and when to rise
Age after age, than to arrest his course 1

Tash vi. 121.

Not a flower
But shows some touch, in freckle, streak, or stain.

Of his unrivalled pencil.

Task. vi. 240.

Nature is but a name for an effect

Whose cause is God.

Task. vi. 223.

Thou fool ! will thy discovery of the cause

Suspend the effect, or heal it ? Has not God
Still wrought by means since first he made the world,

And did he not of old employ his means

To drown it ? What is his creation less

Than a capacious reservoir of means

Formed for his use, and ready at his will '?

Task. ii. 196.

The mind enlightened from above

Views Him in all : ascribes to the grand cause
The grand effect.
This truth philosophy, though eagle-eyed
In nature's tendencies, oft overlooks.
And having found his instrument, forgets
Or disregards, or more presumptuous still.

Denies the power that wields it.

Tash iii. 225. ii. 174.

204 SIR T. BROWNE.

These must not therefore be named the effects of For-

way and as we term the works of
tune but in a relative
nature. It was the ignorance of man's reason that begat
this very name, and by a careless term miscalled the

Providence of God for there is no liberty for causes to

;

operate in a loose and straggling way, nor any effect

whatsoever but hath its warrant from some universal or
superiour cause.
Rel Med. p. 46.

The doctrine of Epicurus that denied the providence

of God, was no atheism, but a magnificent and high-
strained conceit of his majesty, which he deemed too
sublime to mind the trivial actions of those inferiour
creatures. That fatal necessity of the stoicks, is no-
thing but the immutable law of his will.
Rel. Med. p. 50.

That there was a deluge once, seems not to me so

great a miracle as that there is not one always.
Rel. Med. p. 53.

Men's works have an age alike themselves ; and

though they outlive their authors, yet have they a stint

and period to their duration.

Rel. Med. p. 56.

Who from the name of Saviour can condescend to

the bare term of prophet.

Rel. Med. p. 57. (see knee in Index.)

Persecution was the first stone and basis of our faith.

None can more justly boast of persecutions, and glory in
the number and valour of martyrs ; for to speak properly,
those are true and almost only examples of fortitude.
 ;

W. cow PER. 205

We give to Chance, blind Chance, ourselves as blind,

The glory of thy work.
But Chance is not, or is not where thou reign'st
Thy Providence power
forbids that fickle
power she be that works but to confound)
(If

To mix her wild vagaries with thy laws.

Task. V. 865.

Thus dream they, and contrive to save a God

The encumbrance of his own concerns, and spare
The great Artificer of all that moves
The stress of a continual act, the pain
Of unremitted vigilance and care.
Task. vi. 205.

What prodigies can power divine perform

More grand than it produces year by year 1
Task. vi. 118.

We turn to dust, and all our mightiest works

Die too. The deep foundations that we lay
Time ploughs them up, and not a trace remains.
Task. V. 531.

Who knee
Thy name, adoring, and then preach thee man.
Task. vi. 886.

Patriots have toiled, arid in their country's cause

Bled nobly, and their deeds, as they deserve.
Received proud recompence ....
But fairer wreaths are due, though never paid,
18
206 SIR T. BROWNE.

Those that are fetcht from the field, or drawn from the
actions of the camp, are not oft-times so truly precedents
of valour as of audacity, and at the best attain but to
some bastard piece of fortitude If any, in that
easy and active way, have done so nobly as to deserve
that name, yet in the passive and more terrible piece
these have surpassed, and in a more heroical way may
claim the honour of that title.
Rel Med. p. 58.

To speak properly, there is not one miracle greater

than another, they being the extraordinary effect of the
hand of God, to which all things are of an equal facility,
and to create the world as easy as one single creature.
For this is also a miracle, not only to produce effects
against or above nature, but before nature; and to
create nature as great a miracle as to contradict or
transcend her.
Rel. Med. p. 60.

Since I have understood the occurrences of the

world, and know what counterfeit shapes and
in
deceitful vizards times present represent on the stage
things past, I do believe them little more than things to
come.
Rel. Med. p. 62.

I believe that those many prodigies and ominous

prognosticks which fore-run the ruins of states, princes,
and private persons, are the charitable premonitions of
good angels, which more careless enquiries term but
the effects of chance and nature.
Rel Med. p. 64.
 ! !

W. COWPER. 207

To those who posted at the shrine of truth

Have fallen in her defence. A patriot's blood,
Well spent in such a strife, may earn indeed
And for a time insure to his loved land,
The sweets of liberty and equal laws ;

But martyrs struggle for a brighter prize,

And win it with more pain. . . They lived unknown
Till persecution dragged them into fame
And chased them up to heaven.
Tash v. 704.

All we behold is miracle, but seen

So duly, all is miracle in vain ...
What prodigies can power divine perform
More grand, than it produces year by year ?
And all in sight of inattentive man
Tash. vi. 118.

Some write a narrative of wars and feats

Of heroes little known, and call the rant
An history
Tash. iii. 139.

Meteors from above

Portentous, unexampled, unexplained.
Have kindled beacons in the skies ....
Frowning signals, which bespeak
Displeasure in his breast who smites the earth
Or heals it, makes it languish or rejoice.
Task. ii. 57.
208 SIR T. BROWN E.
There may be (for aught I know) an universal and
common spirit to the whole world. I am sure there . .

is a common spirit that plays within us, yet makes no

part of us ; and that is the Spirit of God, the fire and

scintillation of that noble and mighty essence which is
the life and radical heat of spirits.

Rel Med. p. 65.

There are singular pieces in the philosophy of Zeno

and doctrine of the stoicks which, I perceive, delivered
in a pulpit pass for current divinity.

Rel. Med. p. 79.

To perfect virtue, as to religion, there is required a

panoplia, or complete armour.
Rel. Med. p. 94.

I wa§ not only before myself, but Adam ; that, is in

the idea of God and the decree of that synod held from
all eternity. And in this sense I say, the world was
before the creation, and at an end before it had a
beginning.
Rel Med. p. 97.

In the cradle of well-ordered polities.

Rel. Med. p. 101.

I draw not my purse for his sake that demands it,

but His that enjoined it.

Rel. Med. p. 101.

I hold that there is a physiognomy, not only of men,

but of plants and vegetables. The finger of God hath
 W. COWPER. 209

One Spirit (his

Who bore the platted thorns with bleeding brows)
Rules universal nature ....
There lives and w^orks
A soul in all things, and that soul is God . . .

The Lord of all, himself through all diffused,

Sustains and is the life of all that lives.

He feeds the secret fire
By which the mighty process is maintained.
Task. vi. 184. 221. 238.

How oft, when Paul has served us with a text.

Has Epictetus, Plato, TuUy, preached !

Task. ii. 539.

Armed in panoply complete

Of heavenly temper.
Task. ii. 345.

In whose thought the world,

Fair as it is, existed ere it was.
Task. V. 798.

In the cradled weakness of the world.

Task. V. 286.

Notfor its own sake merely, but for His

Much more who fashioned it, he gives it praise.
Task. V. 800.

Not a flower
But shows some touch, in freckle, streak, or stain,
18*
210 SIR T. BROWNE.

left an inscription upon all his works, not graphical or

composed of letters. . . . Delineated by a pencil that
never works in vain.
Rel Med. p. 102.

There was never any thing so like another as in all

points to concur ; some reserved differ-
there will ever
ence slip in to prevent the identity without which two;

several things would not be alike, but the same, which

is impossible.
Rel Med. p. 103.

I have not only seen several countries, beheld the na-

ture of their climes, the chorography of their provinces,
topography of their cities, but understood their several
laws, customs, and policies ; yet cannot all this persuade
the dulness of my spirit unto such an opinion of myself,
as I behold in nimbler and conceited heads, that never
looked a degree beyond their nests.
Rel. Med. p. 114.

The world that I regard is myself, it is the micro-

cosm of my own frame that I cast my eye on ; for the
other, I use it but like my globe, and turn it round some-
times for my recreation.
Rel. Med. p. 120.

There is surely a piece of divinity in us, something

that was before the elements and owes no homage unto
the sun.
Rel. Med. p. 120.
 , ; ;

W. COWPER. 211

Of his unrivall'd pencil.

Nature, enclianting nature, in whose form
And hneaments divine I trace a hand
That errs not.
Task. vi. 240. iii. 721.

Th' Almighty Maker has throughout

Discriminated each from each, by strokes
And touches of his hand with so much art

Diversified, that two were never found

Twins at all points.
Task. iv. 734.

He travels and expatiates, as the bee

From flower to flower, so he from land to land
The manners, customs, policy of all

Pay contribution to the store he gleans.

He sucks intelligence in every clime.

Task. iv. 107.

[Where men of judgment creep and feel their way

The positive pronounce without dismay
Where others toil with philosophic force,
Their nimble nonsense takes a shorter course.
Conversation. Southey^s Cowper, v. 8. p. 258.]

Surveying thus at ease

The globe and its concerns, I seem advanced

To some secure and more than mortal height,

That liberates and exempts me from them all

It turns, submitted to my view, turns round
With all its generations.
Task. iv. 94.

There lives and works

A soul in all things, and that soul is God.
Task. vi. 184.
212 SIR T. BROWNE.

Let me not injure the felicity of others, if I say I am

as happy as any ,-
ruat coelum, fiat voluntas tua, salveth
all ; so that whatsoever happens it is but what our daily
prayers desire.
Rel Med. p. 120.

Lastly, let us compare the trustful passage at the close

of this noble work with the peroration of the fifth hook
of the Task, andthus part with these two kindred spirits
at a moment ivhen they both {to use the language of a
third) proclaim.
The deep, deep joy, of a confiding thought.*

These are, O Lord, the humble desires of my most

reasonable ambition, and all I dare call happiness on
earth, wherein 1 set no rule or limit to thy hand or pro-
vidence ; dispose of me according to the wisdom of thy
pleasure. Thy will be done, though in my own un-
doing !

Rel. Med. p. 127.

* Wordsworth.
 ! : !

W. COWPER. 213

Happy the man who sees a God employed

In all the good and ill that chequer life

Resolving all events, with their ettects

And manifold results, into the will

And arbitration wise of the Supreme.

Task. ii. 161.

But oh, thou bounteous Giver of all good,

Thou art of all thy gifts thyself the crown
Give what thou canst, without thee we are poor,
And with thee rich, take what thou wilt away
Task. V. 903.
3nba.
 INDEX.
A. Apparel (verb) 104.
Apparitions (appearances) 144.
Abbreviatures 146. Apprehend (fear) 92, 108, 163.
Abjectest (most abjectest) 113. Apprehend (understand) 121, 148.
Abrupt (verb) 40, 178. Appro vable 169.
Abyss of mercies 91. Archetypal sun 183.
Acceptions 71, 81. Areopagy of our hearts 183.
Access (fit) 28. Argue the proceedings, &c. 92, 93.
Access (addition or increase) 48. Argue of prodigality 94.
Acquests 157. Armature of St. Paul 145.
Acquitments 165. Arriving to 46.
Additionary 185. Arrogancy 44.
Admonished into 107. Asperous 133.
Adventurous 42. Aspires (subs.) 66.
Adumbration 35. Asquint 28, 39.
Advertise (forewarn) 174. Assassine (verb) 106.
Advisees 48. Assize 126, 144.
Affections (qualities) 70. Assuefaction, 177.
Afflictive 149. Asterisk 64, 143, 151.
Afflictively 1G4. Astral prediction 160.
After (afterward) 1 03. Astronomized 177.
After-penitences 192. Atheist to the world's god 124.
Agrees to 94. Atropos (man his own) 108.
Alarum 32, 151. Atropos of fortunes 135.
Alphabet of man 120. Attrition 157.
Ambidexterous 187. Averse from 100.
Ambulatory (morality not) 138. Automatons part of mankind 145.
Amphibium (man) 68. Awaked souls 122.
Amphibology 83. Awaked judgment 121.
Amuse (engage) 164.
Angry devotions 58.
Angustias (agonies) 168. B.
Antecedencies 160.
Anthropophagi 72. Badness 78.
Anticipatively Preface.]
[ Bastard fortitude 58.
Antimetathesis of Aug. 71. Beatifical 183.
Antinomies 52. Bedward dormative 123.
Antiperistasis 118. Beholding (beholden) 80.
Antipodes to the wise 144. Beneficiency 184-5.
Antipoisons 148. Beneplacit of God 97.
Apogeum 182. Benevolous aspects 48.
19
218 INDEX.

Bethinks 74. Combustion 56,

Better-advanced 115. Commiserators 173.
Bivious theorems 171. Commonweal 46, 55, 141.
Borrowed understandings 104. Commonwealth 49, 125, 15T.
Bowelless 136. Commutative justice 124.
Bravery 146. Commntatively iniquous 179*
Brazen-browed 153. Compage of truth 156,
Bushes (signs) 102. Compellation 96,
Compensate our brief lenn 195,
Complacency 144.
Complement of happiness 87.
Complement of tortores 88.
Cadavers 178. Complemental (adscititious) 47^
Cadaverous 73, Com plexionably prepense 33.
Cassarian conquest 180, Complexioned for humility 108.
Caitiff (adj.) 104. Complicated with 152.
Calculate thyself 174. Composure 114.
Canicular days 77. Comprehend (fathom) 37, 39,
Cankers of reputation 142. Comprehend (include) 120.
Cantons 42. Compute (subs.) 170.
Capitulation (merciful) 160. Concordance of history 63.
Caricatura 181. Conceit (verb) 49, 114.
Carnified 72. Concluded (drawn) 55.
Carrack 136. Concourse (divine) 48, 52, 119'.
Catholicon 118. Confinium of spirits 182.
Ceased (miracles are) 60. Confirmable by sense 85.
Cenotaph 35. Conformant 70.
Centoes 125, Consequence (upon consequence)
Central natures 157. 33, 63.
Central fire 151, Considerators 150.
Central interiours 157, Consist (stand) 28.
Champian 172. Consist (agree) 71, 144.
Changelings 63. Consort (verb) 99.
Chaos of futurity 146, (158), Consorts (companions) 28.
Chiromancy 102. Consortion 175.
Choragium of the stars 182. Constellated 100.
Chorography 114. Contaction 165.
Christianize 165, 187. Contentatlons 155, 161.
Circumscriptions of pleasure 155. Contracted hand of God 164.
Chyraicks 89. Contradictors 156.
Civility (of bees, &c.) 42. Conversion of the needle, 42, 85,
Civility of my knee, &c. 27. Convincible madness, 83.
Clawing (tickling) 144. Corps of the soul 71,122.
Classical rules 138. Corpulency of bodies 69.
Climacter 62. Cosmography of myself 42.
Coaction 184. Cottages of breasts 153.
Coetaneous 175. Counterfeilly (Preface.)
Cognition (retrograde) 181. Cradle of polities 101.
Cognizance 150. Crambe 126.
Colony of God (the soul) 90. Crany 72.
Colonies of heaven 191. Crasis 71.
Colossus 42. Create and make 70.
 "

INDEX. 219

Critically (seasonably) 175. E.

Crooked piece of man 115.
Crowd of themselves 176. Earless generation 174.
Cryptick, 45. Economy (man's) 141.
Crystalline heaven 140. Edge (of belief) 35.
Crystalline of tljy soul 182. Edified (formed) 52.
Cunctation 152. Effront 75.
Curricle (course) 190. Elator 186.
Cymbal of applause 137. Elder than 74.
Cymbal in the breast 1 52, Eleemosynaries 102.
Elohims of the earth 142.
Elongation 149.
D. Eluctation of truth 158.
Embasement 148.
Dashed with vices 148. Embryon felicities 178.
Dastard (verb) 112. Embryon truths 158.
Decimation (merciful) 1 65. Empress (opinion) 161.
Decrepit 63. Empyreal (subs.) 87.
Degeneration 148, 150, 192. Empyrean ocean 179.
Degenerous 140, 173, 184. Enemy vices 119.
Deject 104. English gentleman 153.
Delators 142. Enharden 75.
Deposition (overthrow) 55. Enlivening death 165.
Depravedly (Preface.) Entanglements 145.
Derived to 64. Entities 191.
Derogate from 153. Entrails of the sun 178.
Designments 192. Ephemerides 117, 143.
Diabolism 140. Epicycle of ambition 141.
Diameter (stand in) 26. Epicycle of my brain 31.
Dichotomy 34. Epidemical transgressions 112.
Difference (verb) 26, 28. Equilibriously 157.
Difficultest, 34. Erectly 181.
Digladiation (fcncing-match) 145. Ergotisms 157.
Disavouchcd 29. Estranged ashes 85.
Discontent (verb) 121. Eternized 106.
Discruciating 186. Ethnick superstition 57.
Displacency 138, 155, 173. Evacuate (render needless) 186.
Disproving, 29. Exaltation of gold 75.
Disputed them 33. Exantlation of (ruth 158.
Dispute proceedings 91. Exasperate ways of death 166.
Disputed way (deputed ?) 79. Existency 191.
Dissembled (in good sense) 91. Existent 53.
Dissentaneous (Preface.) Exits (tragical) 164.
Dissimilary 119. Exolution (Christian) 196.
Doradoes 100. Exorbitancy 178, 189.
Dormative (subs.) 123. Exordial (this life) 191.
Dormitories of the dead 73. Expansed 43.
Doubling (playing false) 186. Expired merits 151.
Doublings (turns) 46. Extances 191.
Drum (verb) 90. Extemporary knowledge 67.
Duality 110. Extempore wicked 150.
Dull aot away thy days 151. Extramission 164.
220 INDEX.

Extremest 88. Grain (verb) 173.

Extremity of mercy 92. Grained in honesty 137.
Exuperances (exaggerations) 171. Gramercy 45.
Grateful retaliations 180.
Gravelled 51.
F, Greener studies 31.
Grotesques 42.
Factories of the devil 143. Gulled 161.
Failed o/ 81. Gust ofthe world 187.
Faint-hued in integrity 137.
Falsifier (of money) 159.
Father (verb) 98, and Preface. H.
Father-sin 113.
Feminine manhood 179. Haggard reason 36.
Ferity of mind 179. Halting concomitances 133.
Fit of harmony 116. Hammer of offences 112.
Fit of happiness 121. Handsome anticipation 196.
Festination 151. Hatch (verb) 112.
Flat (downright) 70. Heels of pride 141.
Flaws (gusts) 133. Helix 46.
Flexible sense (Preface.) Hellebore 124.
Fleshless cadavers 178. Hermitage of himself 177.
Folious appearances 157. Hermaphrodiiically 150.
Foolishest 116. High-slraincd 50, 187.
Forelaid 44. Histrionical (the world) 186.
Foreshow 45. Histrionism 190.
Forgot 91. Hits of chance 45.
Fougade or powder-plot 45. Holocaust 134.
Founded 165. Homerican Mars 179.
Four-footed manners 181. Horoscope 81.
Fraught 39. House of flesh 75.
Fright away 76. House of Hfe 122.
Fruitful voice of God 85. House of darkness 167.
Fruitions of doubtful faces 178. Hull (verb) 133.
Fugitive faith 57. Humourists (not good humoured)
Funambulatory track 133. 166.
Fundamental hfe 190. Hypostasis 67.
Funeral of death 1 65.
Further and farther (used indiffe-
rently) I.

Ideated man 148.

G. Idiosyncracy in diet, air, &c. 99.
Immoderacy 154.
Galliardize 121. Impassible 90.
Gap for heresy 31. Imperfect (verb) 148.
Gaping vices 160. Impostures (impostors) 108.
Geography of religion 26. Impregnate 44.
Glanced by (missed) 157. Improperations 26.
Glome or bottom 79. Impulsions 101, 174.
Gordian knots of life 168. Inadvertency 164.
Graffs of education 101. Inadvertisement 177.
 INDEX. 221

Inculcated unto 142. Leaven (verb) 133.

Incurvate 77. Leaven of wisdom 59.
IndifFerency 71. Lecture (perusal) 55.
Indissoluble (not to be solved) 118. Lectures on mortality 76.
Individuals 45, 67, 85, Legacied 104.
In-draught 189. Lieve (as lieve) 35.
Inform (animate) 38, 70. Ligaments of the body 73, 122.
Ingrateful 166. Ligation of sense 121.
Ingression 196. Like (likely) 146.
Iniquous 179. Lions' skins (armour) 134.
Innocuous 141. Litany 119.
Inorg-anical.71. Lived (men are lived) 31.
Inorganitj of the soul 72. Livery of virtue 84.
Inquinated (defiled) 161. Longanimity 169, 192.
Insolvency 96. Longevous generations 169.
Insolent zeals 97. Loyalty to virtue y4.
Instances of time 37. Lucifcrously 171.
Intelligences 46. Lure of faith 36.
Integrity (perfectness) 135.
Intend (extend) 175.
Intercurrences 149. M.
Interiourly 183.
Interiours of men 188. Magisterial 68.
Interiours of truth 157. Magnalities of religion 182.
Intermissive 189. Magnetically 137.
Intrinsecal 147. Maligning 25.
Inverted on 118, Managery 134.
Invented (excogitated) 64. Mannerliest 61.
Ironically (men live) 186. Map of time 187.
Iterated 137, 173, 184. Marble conscience 112.
Marble memories 185.
Materiallcd unto life 73.
J. Mediocrity (with) 28.
Memorist (conscience) 143.
Janus-faced 171. Metempsuchosis 31, 72, 158, 181,
190.
Meticulously (timidly) 151.
K. Microcosm (man) 68, 74, 89, 119,
120,
Knee (civility of my knee) 27. Microcosmical 174.
Knee (owe a knee) 48. Militants 105.
Knee (worthy our knees) 77. Militia of life 141,145, 174. .'

Mimical conformation 170.

Mince themselves 34.
L. Mind (verb) 50.
Minorate 177.
Laconism 146. Miserablest 74.
Laconically suffering 179. Misery of circumference 90.
Lacteous stars 190, Modest ignorance 115.
Ladder of creatures 63. Monstrosity 44, 100, 112.
Lazy (the sloth) 151. Moralist of the mount 187.
Laqueary combatants 145. Moralize our actions 174.
19*
222 INDEX.

Morosity 27. Ovation 134,

Mortify (deaden) 184. Out-sce 88-9.
Mortified (scattered) 85. Out-talk 114.
Most abjectest 115.
Mother-sins and vices 172.
Mutilate (adj.) 125.
Myself could show 52.
My own and mine own (used in- Painted mistakes 144.
differently) Palative delights 154.
Pantalones and anticks 77,
Parallaxis 157,
N. Parallel (verb) 32.
Parallelisms 187.
Naked appetite 154. Parenthesis (digression) 105.
Nativity of our religion 29. Parenthesis in eternity 194,
Natural royalists 166. Parentheses of consideration 150.
Naturality 49. Patroned (verb) 30, 105,
Nebulous stars 190. Paucity 154.
Necessitousness 136. Peccant 161,
Negative impieties 57. Pedagogy 164.
Nimble heads 114. Peer (equal) 153.
Nocent (subs.) 144. Peradventure (subs.) 137.
Noctambuloes 122. Perfect (verb) 148.
Noise of the moon 142. Pericardium of truth 157,
Non-entiiy 192. Perfectcst 93, 103, 118,
Nor cannot 72, Periods (of persons) 164, 187.
Nor never 90. PericEci 144.
Nor take none 112, Periphrasis 35,
NovcUizing 146. Periscian state 178.
Novity 146. Perpend 93,
Nullity 70. Perspective (glasses) 166,
Numerous numbers 190. Peruse 53.
Perusing 120.
Pervert (in good sense) 43.
O. Phantasms 73.
Phylacteries 143, 178.
Object (propose) 98. Phytognomy 102.
Oblivion of ing-ratitude 14,3, Pickthank 142.
Observators 164, 177. Pinax of man's life 133.
(Edipus (man's own reason) 30. Pinnacles of divinity 38.
CEdipus (Providence) 145. Pitiful(mean) 153, 182.
Offer at 186. Pleasurists 189.
Olympiads 143. Plebeian heads 100.
Opacous side of opinions 171. Plume (verb) 113.
Only (alone) 70, 125, 192. Plunged 51.
Omneity 70. Poetry by Sir T. B. 40, 65, 123.
Opiniatrity 161. Poles of honesty 137.
Opinioned 54, 69. Policies 114.
Omnipresency 176. Polities 101.
Orbity 188, Poltron (subs.) 145,
Osseous part of goodness 172. Poltron (adj.) 153,
Ostiaries 172. Pontifical 155.
 INDEX. 223

Pose 60. Rapt (subs.) 145.

Posy 118. Receipt (prescription) 71.
Powerfullest 88, Recompensive justice 84.
Potion of immortality 118. Reduce (level) 84.
Practised conclusions 124. Reduced (led to) 71.
Precocity (virtuous) 152. Refections 154.
Predestination 37. Reflex (subs.) 39, 126.
Predestinate forms 85. Regiment 74, 119.
Predestinated 41, 46. Regression 150.
Pre-existimation 157. Regretfully 193.
Preferred (lifted) 68. Rejoices (subs.) 159.
Prejudicate 51. Reminiscential amulets ] 77.
Preordered 47. Remoras 177.
Premonition 64. Renascency 191.
Preordination 191. Resolved conscience 27.
Preordinate 46. Resolutions (resolvers) 26.
Prescience 180, 192. Resound (subs.) 152.
Prescious 37. Resume ihemsclves 186.
Prescript 93. Retaining lo 74.
Prescription 162. Retiary combatants 145.
Preventeth (saveth from) 153. Retractations 160.
Proceed (graduate) 40. Retracted looks 166.
Prodigious in revenge 179. Retribute unto 41.
Produce (lengthen out) 73. Retrograde rognition 181.
Profound (plunge) 93. Return the duty 40.
Profound (search into) 40, 41. Return upon 180.
Prognostick (verb) 96. Reverberated (by fire) 89.
Prohibit to 27. Revivification 85.
Prologue to death 80. Revolve (verb act.) 117.
Prompts unto us 177. Revulsions 177.
Propense 33. Rhetorick of misery 101.
Proper virtues 150, 175. Rhetorick of Satan 51.
Propriety 141. Riddle of sin 94.
Proprieties 150. Riddles in providence 173.
Pucellage 36. Rodomontade 77.
Punctual (minute) 54. Rusticity 40.
Punctual (exact) 82, 137. Roun riles 38.
Punctual memorist 143. Rudder of the will 140.
PuU-backs 177. Rubbidge 178.
Rubs 45, 162.
Q.

Quadrate (subs.) 164. S.

Quadrate (verb) 107.
Queasy stomachs 118. Salve (verb) 54, 61, 66, 70, 120.
Questionless 28, 59, 63. Salvifically 165.
Quodlibetically 156. Sanctuary of St. Paul 37.
Quotidian infirmities 113. Scape of infirmity 112.
Scarce (adv.) 32, 175, 188, 195.
R. Scattered differences 190.
Scatteringly 169.
Rabble 100, 176. Scenical differences 125.
224 INDEX.

Scenical mourninjr 137. Stories (histories) 68.

Scheme of man 181. Strabo's cloak 95.
Schemes of look 162. Stygian oaths 184, 186.
Scratch of offences 179. Subordinate (verb) 69.
Scripture of the heathens 43. Sub-reformists 95.
Secondine (slough of flesh) 75. Subterraneous idol 124.
Secretary of hell 51. Successless 141.
Seldomness 153. Suck divinity 43.
Self-conversation 176. Suggesting us unto 73.
Self-ended souls 184. Supererogate 124, 179.
Self-idolatry 144, Super-heresies 33.
Self reflections 160. Superstructions 137.
Semi-bodies 125. Supinity 151.
Seminals of iniquities 172. Supputation 48.
Seminalities of vegetables 148. Surd generation 174.
Sequestered imaginations 119. Suspensory assertions 157.
Sepulchre of thyself 143. Swart tinctures 173.
Shadow of corruption 176. Swell not 142.
Shadowed lesson 116. Swoon of reason 62.
Shaken hands (bid adieu) 26, 77.
Sharp (play at) 112.
Signatures of mercy 102.
Single hearts 186.
Singularest 55. Tables (game at) 47.
Sinistrous 186. Targum (commentary) 138.
Sinistrously 140. Tares of the brain 71.
So soon 185. Teeth of time 56.
Solary nature of gold 88. Temper (constitution) 71, 77, 78
Solemness 186. Temperamental 188.
Solicitudinous 151. Tenacity of prejudice 158.
Sordidest 104. Tenent 54.
Sorites 48. Tetrick philosophers 147.
Sortilegies 47. Textuary 83, 187.
Soul (translated divinity) 90. Theory of himself 108.
Sour (verb) 137. Thread of life 79.
Sourly 160. Thread of days 78.
Speak my soul 91. Thread of time 188.
Speckled face of honesty 160. Theorical mistakes 141.
Specifical 67, 88. Thetas (natural) 144.
Speculate (ponder) 124. Throughly 67, 122.
Speculate the universe 177. Timorous assertions 157.
Spintrian 113. Tower (verb) 113.
Square (verb) 29. Traduction 127.
Stabbing truth 140. Trajection 107.
Staggeringly evil 150. Transanimation 190.
Stair of creatures 66. Translate a passion 109.
Starts (subs.) 164. Translated divinity 90.
Station (fixation) 43. Transpeciate 63.
Statists 125. Transplace 150.
Statute madness 83. Traverse (overpass) 92.
Stenography 38. Trenchers 73.
Stint (subs.) 56. Trinity of souls 37.
 INDEX. 225

Triple continent 54, 162. Vespilloes 73.

Trisagion 140. Virtuous washes 173.
Triumvirate in the soul 49. Visible hands of God 48.
Tropical (figurative) (Preface.) Visitation (scrutiny) 44.
Truce (pause) 30. Visive organs 182.
Vitiosity 78, 112.
Vivacious abominations 169.
U. Vizards 62.
Vizard vices 161.
Ubi of spirits 75. Voice of the world 108.
TJbiquitary essence 69. Votes of hell 111.
Ultion 180.
Unaccessible 86.
Unbeing 191. W.
Uncharity 96.
Uncharitable logic 106. Wail (subs.) 190.
Undelightful 189. Waked senses 121.
Under-heads 94. Walls of flesh 72.
Underliving 145. Walls of man 70.
Underweening 191. Washes (virtuous) 173.
Unexerted 146. Weeds of the brain 71.
Unexistent 181. Well-wishes 124.
Unheard-of 113. Wheel (verb) 101.
Uniterable life 189. Wheel of providence 46.
Unlimitable 88. Wheel of the church 31.
Unman not thyself 181. Wheel of things 183.
Unremarkable 55. Wheel of inclinations 145.
Unsatiable 87. Wilderness of forms 85.
Unseparable 168. Windows of time 169.
Unthinking 176. Winged thoughts 171.
Unthought-of 46. Wingy 34, 66.
Un tractable 59. Wittily wicked 166.
Untwine 40, Wits o' work 156.
Unwary 25. Wiser zeals 28.
Unwelcome 54. Wormed out 63.
Urn of the Vatican 56. Worser 77, 160.
Utinam 56. Wrenches in life 45.
Writ (verb) 56.

Z.
Venerable (reverend) 62.
Venerable (reverential) 84. Zodiacal 19.3.
Vermy (venew) 94. Zoilism 155.
 226 INDEX.

UNUSUAL PLURALS, OR IN UNUSUAL POSITIONS.

I
Accomplishments 181. Incomprehensibles 182.
Acquitments 165. Ingenuities 77, 184.
Actions 74. Inquiries 64.
Ambitions 142. Interiours 188.
Apprehensions ISO. Invisibles 182.

Beginnings and ends 79, 163. Merits 32, 151.

Beings 157, 190.
Beliefs 38. Natures 32, 102, 122, 162, 190.
•
Considerations 101. Penitences 192.
Contents 189. Personations 190.
Contentments 161, 178. Pieties 102.
Credits 105. Pities 194, 165.
Progenies 76.
Deflexions 149. Proprieties 150.
Degenerations 192.
Destructions 163. Reasons82, 94, 104, 115, 118.
Disparities 147. Rebellions 113.
Devotions 58. Reparations {Preface.)
Discretions 110. Repentances 192.
Repugnances 99.
Ends 79, 91. . Respects 59,
Exorbitancies 178, Rejoices 159,
Expressions 39. Retaliations ISO.
Ruins 64.
Fates 163.
Felicities 178. Self-reflexions 160.
Fortunes 135, 163, Seminalities 148.
Fruitions 178. Securities 161.
Sleeps 121.
Graduations 75. Symmetries 162.
Gratitudes 185.
Tranquillities 178.
Honesties 141.
Unnaturals 186.
Impieties 57, 59,
Inabilities 184. Zeals 28.

JAN
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