perceive a man may be twice a child before the days of dotage, and stand in need of Eson's bath before threescore. And truly there goes a great deal of providence to produce a man's life unto threescore; there is more required than an able temper for those years; though the radical humor 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, determine not why Abel lived not so long as Adam. There is therefore a secret glome or bottom of our days; it was his wisdom to determine them, but his perpetual and waking providence that fulfills and accomplishes them; wherein the spirits, ourselves, and all the creatures of God in a secret and disputed way do execute his will. Let them not, therefore, complain of immaturity that die about thirty: they fall but like the whole world, whose solid and 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 beginnings; 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 it is the hand of God. 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 "We're all deluded, vainly searching ways 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 stoics, which I perceive, delivered in a pulpit, pass for current divinity. Yet herein are they in extremes, that can allow a man to be his It >> 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. is a brave act of valor to contemn death; but where life is more terrible than death, it is then the truest valor to dare to live; and herein religion hath taught us a noble example. For all the valiant acts of Curtius, Scævola, or Codrus, do not parallel or match that one of Job; and sure there is no torture to the rack of disease, nor any poniards in death itself, like those in the way. or prologue to it. "Emori nolo, sed me esse mortuum nihil curo; I would not die, but care not to be dead. Were I of Cæsar's religion, I should be of his desires, and wish rather to go off at one blow than to be sawn in pieces by the grating torture of a disease. Men that look no further than their outsides think health an appurtenance unto life, and quarrel with their constitutions for being sick; but I that have examined the parts of man, and know upon what tender filaments that fabric 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. It is not only the mischief of diseases, and villainy 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 beholden unto every one we meet that 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 immortal. Certainly there is no happiness within this circle of flesh, nor is it in the optics of these eyes to behold felicity. 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 stoic 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. Now, besides the literal and positive kind of death, there are others whereof divines make mention, and those, I think not merely metaphorical, as mortification, 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 this do I compute or calculate my nativity, not reckoning those horæ combuste and odd days, or esteeming myself anything, before I was my Savior'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 affections 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, therefore, 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 heathen rest in their graves, without further thought of Rhadamanthus, or some judicial proceeding after death, though in another way, and upon suggestion of their natural reasons. I cannot but marvel from what sibyl or oracle they stole the prophecy of the world's destruction by fire, or whence Lucan learned to say, "Communis mundo superest rogus, ossibus astra "There yet remains to th' world one common fire, I believe the world grows near its end, yet is neither old nor decayed, nor shall 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 is the truest consuming flame, my 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 of 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 mysteries 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, notwithstand ing the different interpretations, according to different capacities, may stand firm with our devotion, nor be any way prejudicial to each single edification. Now, to determine the day and the year of this inevitable time is not only convincible and statute madness, but also manifest impiety. How shall we interpret Elias's six thousand years, or imagine the secret communicated to a rabbi, which God hath denied unto his angels? It had been an excellent query to have posed the devil of Delphi, 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 present, 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 fulfill old prophecies rather than be the authors of new. "In those days there shall come wars and rumors of wars," to me seems no prophecy, but a constant truth, in all times 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. In our common compute he hath been come these many years; but for my own part, to speak freely, I am half of opinion that Antichrist is the philosopher's stone in divinity,—for the discovery and invention thereof, 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?" (How long, O Lord?) and groan in the expectation of that great jubilee. 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 understandings, and reduce those seeming inequalities, and respective distributions in this world, to an equality and recompensive justice in the next. This is that one day that shall include and comprehend all that went before it; 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 without a witness. "Ipsa sui 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 practiced that honest artifice of Seneca, and in my retired and solitary imaginations, to detain me from the foulness of vice, have fancied to myself the presence of my dear and worthiest friends, before whom I would lose my head rather than be vicious; yet herein I found that there was naught 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 inbred loyalty unto virtue, that I could serve her without a livery; yet not in that resolved and venerable way, but that the frailty of my nature, upon easy temptation, might be induced 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 endeavors; without this, all religion is a fallacy, and those impieties of Lucian, Euripides, and Julian are no blasphemies, but subtle verities, and atheists have been the only philosophers. 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 impossible, by any solid or demonstrative reasons, to persuade 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 to make 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 creation 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 relics shall be scat |
