RELIGIO MEDICI.
SECT. 1.—For my religion, though there be several circumstances
that might persuade the world I have none at all,—as the general
scandal of my profession,[I.1]—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 contention 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
the clime wherein I was born, as being bred up either to confirm those
principles my parents instilled into my understanding, or by a general
consent proceed in the religion of my country; but having, in my riper years
and confirmed judgment, seen and examined all, I find myself obliged, by the
principles 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.
Sect. 2.—But, because the name of a
Christian is become too general to express our faith,—there being
a geography of religion as well as lands, and every clime distinguished not
only by their laws and limits, but circumscribed 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 hands 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.
Sect. 3.—Yet have I not so shaken hands with
those desperate 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 diameter and
sword's point with them. We have reformed from them, not against them: for,
omitting those improperations[I.2] and terms of
scurrility betwixt us, which only difference our affections, and not our
cause, there is between 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 with them, to enter their churches in
defect of ours, and either pray with them or for them. I could never
perceive any rational consequences from those many texts which prohibit the
children of Israel to pollute themselves with the temples of the heathens;
we being all Christians, and not divided by such detested impieties as might
profane our prayers, or the place wherein we make them; or that a resolved
conscience may not adore her Creator anywhere, especially in places devoted
to his service; if their devotions offend him, mine may please him: if
theirs profane it, mine may hallow it. Holy water and crucifix (dangerous to
the common people) deceive not my judgment, nor abuse my devotion at all. I
am, I confess, naturally inclined to that which misguided zeal terms
superstition: my common conversation I do acknowledge 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
circumstances, there is something in it of devotion. I could never hear the
Ave-Mary bell
[I.a]
without an elevation, or think it a sufficient warrant, because
they erred in one circumstance, for me to err in all,—that is, in
silence and dumb contempt. Whilst, therefore, they direct their devotions to
her, I offered mine to God; and rectify the errors 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
excess of scorn and laughter. There are, questionless, both in Greek, Roman,
and African churches, solemnities and ceremonies, whereof the wiser zeals do
make a Christian 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
resist in the narrow point and centre of virtue without a reel or stagger to
the circumference.
Sect. 4.—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
reconciliation;—which, though peaceable spirits do desire, and may
conceive that revolution of time and the mercies of God may effect, yet that
judgment that shall consider the present antipathies between the two
extremes,—their contrarieties in condition, affection, and
opinion,—may, with the same hopes, expect a union in the poles of
heaven.
Sect. 5.—But, to difference myself nearer,
and draw into a lesser circle; there is no church whose every part so
squares unto my conscience, whose articles, constitutions,
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 endeavour to observe her
constitutions: whatsoever is beyond, as points indifferent, I observe,
according to the rules of my private reason, or the humour and fashion of my
devotion; neither believing this because Luther affirmed it, nor disproving
that because Calvin hath disavouched it. I condemn not all things in the
council of Trent, nor approve all in the synod of Dort.
[I.3] In brief, where the Scripture is silent, the church is my
text; where that speaks, 'tis but my comment;
[I.4]
where there is a joint silence of both, I borrow not the rules of my
religion from Rome or Geneva, but from the dictates of my own reason. It is
an unjust scandal of our adversaries, and a gross error 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,
[I.5] and effected no more than what his own predecessors desired and
essayed in ages past, and it was conceived the state of Venice would have
attempted in our days.
[I.6] 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 the duty of
good language. I confess there is 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: those usual satires and invectives of the pulpit may perchance
produce a good effect on the vulgar, whose ears
are opener to
rhetoric than logic; yet do they, in no wise, confirm the faith of wiser
believers, who know that a good cause needs not be pardoned by passion, but
can sustain itself upon a temperate dispute.
Sect. 6.—I could never divide myself from
any man upon the difference of an opinion, or be angry with his judgment for
not agreeing with me in that from which, perhaps, 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 disadvantage, or
when the cause of truth might suffer in the weakness of my patronage. Where
we desire to be informed, '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 inconsiderate zeal unto truth, have too rashly charged the troops of
error 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
therefore 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
Œdipus,[I.7] and will, upon a
reasonable truce, find a way to loose those bonds wherewith the subtleties
of error have enchained our more flexible and tender judgments. In
philosophy, where truth seems 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 have no gap for heresy,
schisms, or errors, of which at present, I hope I shall not injure truth to
say, 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 centuries,
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,
[I.8] 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 revolution of time, and the
like aspects from heaven, will restore it, when it will flourish till it be
condemned again. For, as though there were metempsychosis, 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 ourselves again, we
need not look for Plato's year:
[I.b] every 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 then, but there hath been some one since, that
parallels him, and is, as it were, his revived self.
Sect. 7.—Now, the first of mine was that of
the Arabians;[I.9] 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 thoroughly disproved), and
that both entered the grave together, yet I held the same conceit thereof
that we all do of the body, that it rise again. Surely it is but the merits
of our unworthy natures, if we sleep in darkness until the last alarm. A
serious reflex upon my own unworthiness did make me backward from
challenging this prerogative of my soul: so that 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, would release the damned souls from
torture; which error I fell into upon a serious contemplation of the great
attribute 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
offensive to my religion; 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 orison for his soul. 'Twas a good way, methought, to be
remembered by posterity, and far more noble than a history. These opinions I
never maintained 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
confirmed 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 errors, and single lapses of my
understanding, without a joint depravity of my will. Those have not only
depraved understandings, but diseased affections, which cannot enjoy a
singularity without 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; and upon
this experience he tempted only Eve, well understanding the communicable
nature of sin, and that to deceive but one was tacitly and upon consequence
to delude them both.
Sect. 8.—That heresies should arise, we have
the prophecy 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 the doctrines heretical there will be
superheresies; and Arians, not only divided from the church, but also among
themselves: for heads that are disposed unto schism, and complexionally
propense to innovation, are naturally indisposed for a community; nor will
be ever 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 general breach or dichotomy[I.10] with their church, do subdivide 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 his own church, or any other, but
also any particular 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, untouched,
unimagined, wherein the liberty of an honest reason may play and expatiate
with security, and far without the circle of a heresy.
Sect. 9.—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[I.11] of mine.
Methinks there be not impossibilities enough in religion for an active
faith: the deepest mysteries our 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 O altitudo!
'Tis my solitary recreation to pose my apprehension with those involved
enigmas and riddles of the Trinity—with incarnation and
resurrection. I can answer all the objections of Satan and my rebellious
reason with that odd resolution I learned of Tertullian, "Certum est quia impossibile est." I desire to exercise 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 thankful, that I lived not in the
days of miracles; that I never saw Christ nor his disciples. I would not
have been one of those Israelites that passed the Red Sea; nor one of
Christ's patients, on whom he wrought his wonders: then had my faith been
thrust upon me; nor should I enjoy that greater blessing pronounced to all
that believe and saw not. 'Tis an easy and necessary belief, to credit what
our eye and
sense hath examined. I believe he was dead, and
buried, and rose again; and desire to see him in his glory, rather than to
contemplate 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 prophesies and mystical types, could raise a belief, and expect
apparent impossibilities.
Sect. 10.—'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 that we knew nothing, my reason hath been
more pliable to the will of faith: I am now content to understand a mystery,
without a rigid definition, in an easy and Platonic description. That
allegorical description of Hermes[I.c] pleaseth me
beyond all the metaphysical definitions of divines. Where I cannot satisfy
my reason, I love to humour my fancy: I had as lieve you tell me that anima est
angelus hominis, est corpus Dei, as εντελεχεια;—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, periphrasis, or adumbration;[I.12] for, by acquainting our reason how unable it is to display the
visible and obvious effects of nature, it becomes more humble and submissive
unto 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 unhappy 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 pucelage and virginity of women, which God ordained the Jews, is very
fallible. Experience and history informs me that, not only many particular
women, but likewise whole nations, have escaped the curse of childbirth,
which God seems to pronounce 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, I 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.
Sect. 11.—In my solitary and retired
imagination ("neque enim cum porticus aut me lectulus
accepit, 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 confound, my understanding: for who can speak of
eternity without a solecism, or think thereof without an ecstasy? Time we
may comprehend; 'tis but five days elder than 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 sanctuary: my philosophy dares not say
the angels can do it. God hath not made a creature that can comprehend him;
'tis a 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 distinction of tenses; and
therefore that terrible term, predestination, 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 definitive blast of
his will already fulfilled, and at the instant that he first decreed it;
for, to his eternity, which is indivisible, and altogether, the last trump
is already sounded, the reprobates in the flame, and the blessed in
Abraham's bosom. St Peter speaks modestly, when he saith, "a thousand years
to God are but as one day;" for, to speak like a philosopher, those
continued 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.
Sect. 12.—There is no attribute that adds
more difficulty to the mystery of the Trinity, where, though in a relative
way of Father and Son, we must deny a priority. I wonder how Aristotle could
conceive the world eternal, or how he could make good two eternities. His
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
distinct souls, yet differing faculties, that can and do subsist apart in
different subjects, and yet in us are thus united as to make but one soul
and substance. If one soul were so perfect as to inform three distinct
bodies, that were a pretty trinity. Conceive the distinct number of three,
not divided nor separated by the intellect, but actually comprehended in its
unity, and that a perfect
trinity. I have often admired the
mystical way of Pythagoras, 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,
something of divinity; which, to wiser reasons, serve as luminaries 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 real substance
in that invisible fabrick.
Sect. 13.—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 therein, is an ample recompense for all my
endeavours, in what part of knowledge soever. Wisdom is his 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,[I.d][I.13] we had better known ourselves; nor had we
stood in fear to
know him. I know God is wise in all; wonderful
in what we conceive, but far more in what we comprehend not: for we behold
him but asquint, upon reflex or shadow; our understanding is dimmer than
Moses's 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 counsel, 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's best: his intellect stands
ready fraught with the superlative and purest ideas of goodness,
consultations, and election, which are two motions in us, make but one in
him: his actions springing from 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 discover those expressions he hath left
in his creatures, and the obvious effects of nature. There is no danger to
profound
[I.14] these mysteries, no
sanctum sanctorum in philosophy. 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. 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
admire his works. Those highly magnify him, whose judicious enquiry 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 scatter'd 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 damn'd meteors
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.
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 saith,
"Lord, Lord, but he that doth the will of the 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 our graves, and
our best endeavours not hope, but fear, a resurrection.
Sect. 14.—There is but one first cause, and
four second causes, of all things. Some are without efficient,[I.15] as God; others without matter, as angels;
some without
form, as the first matter: but every essence,
created or uncreated, 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 providence 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 predestinated ends, are from the
treasure 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 further, and to contemplate a reason why his providence hath so
disposed and ordered their motions 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,
[I.16] as in Suarez's Metaphysicks. Had Aristotle
been as curious in the enquiry of this cause as he was of the other, he had
not left behind him an imperfect piece of philosophy, but an absolute tract
of divinity.
Sect. 15.—Natura nihil
agit frustra, is the only indisputable axiom in philosophy. There
are no grotesques in nature; not any thing framed to fill up empty cantons,
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
wisdom 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 beyond his eagle;
[I.17] 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
contemplation with those general pieces of wonder, the flux and reflux of
the sea, the increase of Nile, the conversion of the needle to the north;
and have studied to match and parallel those in the more obvious and
neglected pieces of nature which, without farther 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.
Sect. 16.—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 manuscript, that lies
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 effects of
nature wrought more admiration in them than, in the other, all his miracles.
Surely the heathens knew better how to join and read these mystical letters
than we Christians, who cast a more careless eye on these common
hieroglyphics, 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, to be 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 did give it
motion. Now this course of nature God seldom alters or perverts; but, like
an excellent artist, 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 word, preserveth the creatures in the
ark, which the blest 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: 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
of species of creature whatsoever. I cannot tell by what logick we call a
toad, a bear, or an elephant ugly; they being created in those outward
shapes and figures which
best express the actions of their
inward forms; and having passed 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 irregular part, as they become
sometimes more remarkable 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 impregnant 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 it was
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.
Sect. 17.—This is the ordinary and open way
of his providence, which art and industry have in good part discovered;
whose effects we may foretell without an oracle. To foreshow these is not
prophecy, but prognostication. There is another way, full of meanders and
labyrinths, whereof the devil and spirits have no exact ephemerides: and
that is a more particular and obscure method of his providence; directing
the operations of individual and single essences: this we call fortune; that
serpentine and crooked line, whereby he draws those actions his wisdom
intends in a more unknown and secret way; this cryptic[I.18] 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, or 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, doublings, and wrenches, which pass a while under the
effects of chance; but at the last, well examined, prove the mere hand of
God. 'Twas not dumb chance that, to discover the fougade,
[I.19] or powder plot, contrived a miscarriage in
the letter. I like the victory of '88
[I.20] 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 not detract from the nation, when he said, he sent
his armada to fight with men, and not to combat with the winds. Where there
is a manifest disproportion between the powers and forces of two several
agents, upon a maxim of reason we may promise the victory to the superior:
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 may behold the hand, but
see not the spring that moves it. The success of that petty province of
Holland (of which the Grand Seignior proudly said, 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 the mercy of God, that hath
disposed them to such a thriving genius; and to the will of his providence,
that disposeth 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, and must obey the swing of that wheel, not moved by
intelligencies, but by the hand of God, whereby all estates arise to their
zenith and vertical points, according to their predestinated periods. For
the lives, not only of men, but of commonwealths and the whole world, run
not upon a helix that still enlargeth; but on a circle, where, arriving to
their meridian, they decline in obscurity, and fall under the horizon again.
Sect. 18.—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 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 superior cause. 'Tis
not a ridiculous devotion to say a prayer before a game at tables; for, even
in sortileges[I.21] and matters of greatest
uncertainty, 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
providence of the Almighty. I cannot justify that contemptible 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
thoroughly 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 unjust ambition, to desire to engross the
mercies of the Almighty, not to be content with the goods of mind, without a
possession of those of body or fortune: and it is an error, worse than
heresy, to adore these complimental and circumstantial pieces of felicity,
and undervalue 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 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 excess 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 creatures; 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 indifferent and uncertain nativity unto
such benevolous aspects. Those that hold that all things are 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,
[I.22] all things begin and end in the Almighty. There is a nearer
way to heaven than Homer's chain;
[I.23] an easy
logick may conjoin a heaven and earth in one argument, and, with less
than a sorites,
[I.24] resolve all
things to God. For though we christen effects by their most sensible and
nearest causes, yet is God the true and infallible cause of all; whose
concourse, 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.
Sect. 19.—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 have therefore always endeavoured to compose those feuds and angry
dissensions between affection, faith, and reason: for there is in our soul a
kind of triumvirate, or triple government of three competitors, which
distracts the peace of this our commonwealth not less than did that
other[I.25] the state of Rome.
As reason is a rebel unto faith, so passion unto reason. As the propositions
of faith seem absurd unto reason, so the theorems of reason unto passion and
both unto reason; 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 are, as
in philosophy, so in divinity, sturdy doubts, and boisterous 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 villany of
that
spirit takes a hint of infidelity from our studios; and,
by demonstrating a naturality in one way, makes us mistrust a miracle in
another. Thus, having perused the Archidoxes, 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 bade
me mistrust a miracle in Elias, when he intrenched the altar round with
water: for that inflamable substance yields not easily unto water, but
flames in the arms of its antagonist. 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, which 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
laboured to raise the structure of my reason, he strove to undermine the
edifice of my faith.
Sect. 20.—Neither had these or any other
ever such advantage 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 the difference of man from
beasts, 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 necessity of the stoicks is
nothing but the immutable law of his will. Those that heretofore denied the
divinity of the Holy 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 they deny two persons in the Trinity, they hold, as we
do, there is but one God.
That villain and secretary of hell,[I.26] that
composed that miscreant piece of the three impostors, though divided from
all religions, and 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 advanced judgments too rashly
venture on. It is the rhetorick of Satan; and may pervert a loose or
prejudicate belief.
Sect. 21.—I confess I have perused them all,
and can discover nothing that may startle a discreet belief; yet are their
heads carried off with the wind and breath of such motives. I remember a
doctor in physick, of Italy, who could not perfectly believe the immortality
of the soul, because Galen seemed to make a doubt thereof. With another I
was familiarly acquainted, in France, a divine, and a man of singular parts,
that on the same point was so plunged and gravelled with three lines of
Seneca,[I.e] that all our antidotes, drawn
from
both Scripture and philosophy, could not expel the poison
of his error. There are a set of heads that can credit the relations of
mariners, yet question the testimonies of Saint Paul: and peremptorily
maintain the traditions of Ælian 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 Scripture, stories that
do exceed the fables of poets, and, to a captious reader, sound like
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 from the little finger of the
Almighty. It is impossible that, either in the discourse of man or in the
infallible voice of God, to the weakness of our apprehensions there should
not appear irregularities, contradictions, and antinomies:
[I.27] myself could show 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 interim, his soul awaited; or raise a lawcase,
whether his heir might lawfully detain his inheritance bequeathed upon him
by his death, and he, though restored to life, have no plea or title unto
his former possessions. Whether Eve was framed out of the left side of Adam,
I dispute not; because I stand not yet assured 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 resurrection. 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 natures, before there was a
second composed. Likewise, whether the world was created in autumn, summer,
or the spring; because it was created in them all: for, whatsoever sign the
sun possesseth, those four seasons are actually existent. It is the nature
of this luminary to distinguish the several seasons of the year; all which
it makes at one time in the whole earth, and successively in any part
thereof. There are a bundle of curiosities, not only in philosophy, but in
divinity, proposed and discussed by men 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 library,
[I.28] or bound up with Tartaratus,
De Modo
Cacandi.
[I.f][I.29]
Sect. 22.—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 down the general flood of Noah, in that
particular inundation of Deucalion.[I.30] 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 bulks,
but with a competency of food 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
[I.31] 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 in it that necessary creature, a horse, is very
strange. By what passage those, not only birds, but dangerous and unwelcome
beasts, come over. How there be creatures 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 fifteen
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 tenets
drawn from Scripture, and generally believed as Scripture, whereunto,
notwithstanding, I would never betray the liberty of my reason. 'Tis a
paradox to me, that Methusalem was the longest lived of all the children of
Adam; and no man will be able to prove it; when, from the process of the
text, I can manifest it may be otherwise. 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
[I.32] 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 believed; yet is there another intention of theirs expressed in
Scripture. Besides, it is improbable, from the circumstance of the place;
that is, a plain in the land of Shinar. These are no points of faith; and
therefore may admit a free dispute. There are yet others, and those
familiarly 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 knocked at the door, "'Tis not he, but
his angel;" that is, might some say, his messenger, or somebody from him;
for so the original signifies; and is as likely to be the doubtful family's
meaning. This exposition I once suggested to a young divine, that answered
upon this point; to which I remember the Franciscan opponent replied no
more, but, that it was a new, and no authentick interpretation.
Sect. 23.—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 creation.
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 errors in
philosophy, impossibilities, fictions, and vanities beyond laughter,
maintained by evident and open sophisms, the policy of ignorance, deposition
of universities, and banishment of learning. That hath gotten foot by arms
and violence: this, without a blow, hath disseminated itself through the
whole earth. It is not
unremarkable, what Philo first observed,
that the law of Moses continued two thousand years without the least
alteration; whereas, we see, the laws of other commonwealths do alter with
occasions: and even those, that pretended their original from some divinity,
to have vanished without trace or memory. I believe, besides Zoroaster,
there were divers others that writ before Moses; who, notwithstanding, have
suffered the common fate of time. Men's works have an age, like 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.
Sect. 24.—I have heard some with deep sighs
lament the lost lines of Cicero; others with as many groans deplore the
combustion of the library of Alexandria;[I.33]
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,[I.34] had they many nearer
authors than Josephus, or did not relish somewhat of the fable. Some men
have written more than others have spoken. Pineda[I.35] quotes more authors, in one work,[I.g] than are necessary in a whole world. Of those three great
inventions in Germany,[I.36] there are two which
are not without their incommodities, and 'tis disputable whether they exceed
not their use and commodities. 'Tis not a melancholy utinam of my own, but the desires of better heads, that there were
a general synod—not to unite the incompatible difference of
religion, 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 scholars, and to maintain the trade and
mystery of typographers.
Sect. 25.—I cannot but wonder with what
exception the Samaritans could confine their belief to the Pentateuch, or
five books of Moses. I am ashamed at the rabbinical interpretation of the
Jews upon the Old Testament,[I.37] as much as
their defection from the New: and truly it is beyond wonder, how that
contemptible and degenerate issue of Jacob, once so devoted to ethnick
superstition, and so easily seduced to the idolatry of their neighbours,
should now, in such an obstinate 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 conversion. 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 herein I must accuse those of my own religion; for there is not
any of such a fugitive faith, such an unstable belief, as a Christian; none
that do so often transform themselves, not unto several shapes of
Christianity, and of the same species, but unto more unnatural and contrary
forms of Jew and Mohammedan; 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.[I.38] There are, I confess, some
new additions; yet small to those which accrue to our 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. But
the religion of the Jew is expressly against the Christian, and the
Mohammedan against both; for the Turk, in the bulk he now stands, is beyond
all hope of conversion: if he fall asunder, there may be conceived 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 error. They have already endured whatsoever may be inflicted: and
have suffered, in a bad cause, even to the 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 confirm honest religion, but
wicked heresies and extravagant 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 examples of fortitude. Those that are fetched from the field, or
drawn from the actions of the camp, are not ofttimes 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 requisites
which Aristotle requires
[I.39] to true and
perfect valour, we shall find the name only in his master, Alexander, and as
little in that Roman worthy, Julius Caesar; 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 trials; who,
notwithstanding, in a peaceable way, do truly adore their Saviour, and have,
no doubt, a faith acceptable in the eyes of God.
Sect. 26.—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 a heretick;[I.40] 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
(questionless) canonized on earth, that shall never be saints in heaven; and
have their names in histories and martyrologies, who, in the eyes of God,
are not so perfect martyrs as was that wise heathen Socrates, that suffered
on a fundamental point of religion,—the unity of God. I have often
pitied the miserable bishop[I.41] that suffered
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 way, fear the face of
death less than myself; yet, from the moral duty I owe to the commandment of
God, and the natural respect that I tender unto the conservation of my
essence and being, I would not perish upon a ceremony, politick points, or
indifferency: 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
ourselves to the flames is homicide, and (I fear) but to pass through one
fire into another.
Sect. 27.—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 record of
Scripture: that they outlived the apostles also, and were revived at the
conversion 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
believe those miracles abroad, who daily conceive a greater at
home—the transmutation of those visible elements into the body and
blood of our Saviour;—for the conversion of water into wine, which
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, indeed, to speak properly, there is not one
miracle greater than another; they being the extraordinary effects 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 contradictions, I do not
understand, yet dare not, therefore, deny. I cannot see why the angel of God
should question Esdras to recall the time past, if it were beyond his
own power; or that God should pose mortality in that which he
was not able to perform himself. I will not say that God 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.
Sect. 28.—Therefore, that miracles have
been, I do believe; 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 suspect the efficacy of relicks, to examine the
bones, question the habits and appertenances of saints, and even of Christ
himself. I cannot conceive why the cross that Helena[I.42] 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 his
bridle which our Saviour bore upon the cross in his hands. I compute among
piae fraudes, nor many degrees before consecrated
swords and roses, that which Baldwin, king of Jerusalem, returned the
Genoese for their costs and pains in his wars; to wit, the ashes of John the
Baptist. Those that hold, the sanctity of their souls doth leave behind a
tincture and sacred faculty on their bodies, speak naturally of miracles,
and do not salve the doubt. Now, one reason I tender so little devotion unto
relicks is, I think the slender and doubtful respect which I have always
held unto antiquities. For that, indeed, which I admire, is far before
antiquity; that is, Eternity; and that is, God himself; who, though he be
styled the Ancient of Days, cannot receive the adjunct of antiquity, who was
before the world, and
shall be after it, yet is not older than
it: for, in his years there is no climacter:
[I.43] his duration is eternity; and far more venerable than
antiquity.
Sect. 29.—But, above all things, I wonder
how the curiosity of wiser heads could pass that great and indisputable
miracle, the cessation of oracles; and in what swoon their reasons lay, to
content themselves, and sit down with such a far-fetched and ridiculous
reason as Plutarch allegeth for it.[I.44] 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.[I.h] Certainly it is not a warrantable curiosity, to examine the
verity of Scripture by the concordance of human history; or seek to confirm
the chronicle of Hester or Daniel by the authority of Megasthenes[I.45] or Herodotus. I confess, I have had an
unhappy curiosity this way, till I laughed myself out of it with 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
occurrences of the world, and know in what counterfeiting shapes and
deceitful visards times present represent on the stage things past, I do
believe them little more than things to come. Some have been of my own
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.
Sect. 30.—It is a riddle to me, how the
story of oracles hath not wormed out of the world that doubtful conceit 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 existence 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 made them already in a heresy
as capital as witchcraft; 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 legerdemain of changelings.
[I.46] I do not credit those transformations 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 conceive they may assume, steal, or
contrive 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 generation: 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 denied by
some, so God and good angels are pretended by others, whereof the late
defection of the maid of Germany hath left a pregnant example.
[I.47]
Sect. 31.—Again, I believe that all that use
sorceries,
incantations, and spells, are not witches, or, as we
term them, magicians. I conceive there is a traditional magick, 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 principles of nature;
where actives, aptly conjoined to disposed 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 than 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 discovery of
good and bad angels. I could never pass that sentence of Paracelsus without
an asterisk, or annotation:
"ascendens[I.i] constellatum multa revelat quaerentibus magnalia
naturae, i.e.
opera Dei." I do think that
many mysteries ascribed to our own inventions have been the corteous
revelations of spirits; for those noble essences in heaven bear a friendly
regard unto their fellow-nature 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.
Sect. 32.—Now, besides these particular and
divided spirits, there may be (for aught I know) a universal and common
spirit to the whole world. It was the opinion of Plato, and is yet of the
hermetical philosophers. If there be a common nature, that unites and ties
the
scattered and divided individuals into one species, 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 in 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, 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 horror, fear, sorrow, despair; and preserves the region of the mind in
serenity. Whatsoever 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 with their light bless not this orb of mine,
A chilly frost surpriseth every member.
And in the midst of June I feel December.
Oh how this earthly temper doth debase
The noble soul, in this her humble place!
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.
Oh 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!"
Sect. 33.—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 affordeth 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 ourselves and fellow-creatures: for there is in this
universe a stair, or manifest 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 proportion 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;[I.48] and distinguish them from ourselves by immortality: for,
before his fall, man also was immortal: yet must we needs affirm that he had
a different essence from the angels. Having, therefore, no certain knowledge
of their nature, '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 properties: and
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
hypostatis (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 lion's
den, or Philip to Azotus, infringeth this rule, and hath a secret
conveyance, wherewith mortality is not acquainted. If they have that
intuitive knowledge, whereby, as in reflection, 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 I can thoroughly answer that piece of Scripture, "At the
conversion of a sinner, the angels in heaven rejoice." I cannot, with those
in that great father,
[I.49] securely 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 as light in the sun and elements: we style it a bare
accident; but, where it subsists alone, 'tis a spiritual substance, and may
be an angel: in brief, conceive light invisible, and that is a spirit.
Sect. 34.—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 amphibious piece, between a corporeal and a
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 the rank of creatures which only are, and
have a dull kind of being, not yet 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 existencies, which comprehend 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 distinguished
worlds; for though there be but one to sense, there are two to reason, the
one visible, the other invisible; 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 of Genesis, I must confess
a great deal of obscurity; though divines have, to the power of human
reason, endeavoured to make all go in a literal meaning, yet those
allegorical interpretations are also probable, and perhaps the mystical
method
of Moses, bred up in the hieroglyphical schools of the
Egyptians.
Sect. 35.—Now for that immaterial world,
methinks we need not wander so far as the first moveable; for, 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 everywhere where is his essence, and do live, at a
distance even, in himself. That God made all things for man, is in some
sense true; yet, not so far as to subordinate the creation of those purer
creatures unto ours; though, as ministering 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 impossible he should make
them for any other end than his own glory: it is all he can receive, and all
that is without 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, angels, in this, man; which when we neglect, we forget 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 philosophers, but Moses decided that question, and all is salved with
the new term of a creation,—that is, a production of something out
of nothing. And what is that?—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
[I.50]
informed nullity into an essence.
Sect. 36.—The whole creation is a mystery,
and particularly that of man. At the blast of his mouth were the rest of the
creatures made; and at his bare word they 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 affections we have the philosophy and opinion
of the heathens, the flat affirmative of Plato, and not a negative from
Aristotle. There is another scruple cast in by divinity concerning its
production, much disputed in the German auditories, and with that
indifferency and equality of arguments, as leave the controversy
undetermined. I am not of Paracelsus's mind, that boldly delivers a receipt
to make a man without conjunction; yet cannot but wonder at the multitude of
heads that do deny traduction, having no other arguments to confirm their
belief than that rhetorical sentence and
antimetathesis[I.51] of Augustine,
"creando infunditur, infundendo creatur." Either
opinion will consist well enough with religion: yet I should rather incline
to this, did not one objection haunt me, not wrung from speculations and
subtleties, but from common sense and observation; not pick'd from the
leaves of any author, but bred amongst the weeds and tares of my own brain.
And this is a conclusion from the equivocal and monstrous productions 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? Nor, truly,
can I peremptorily deny 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
corpse 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 myself, as in that I find not,—that is, no organ or
instrument for the rational soul; for in the brain, which we term the seat
of reason, there is not anything of moment more than I can discover in the
crany of a beast; and this is a sensible and no inconsiderable argument of
the inorganity of the soul, at least in that sense we usually so conceive
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.
Sect. 37.—Now, for these walls of flesh,
wherein the soul doth seem to be immured before the resurrection, it is
nothing but an elemental composition, and a fabrick 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
what we all abhor, anthropophagi, and cannibals,
devourers not only of men, but of ourselves; 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
positively, and in a literal sense, affirm his metempsychosis, or impossible
transmigration of the souls of men into beasts. Of all metamorphoses or
transmigrations, I believe only one, that is of Lot's wife; for that of
Nabuchodonosor proceeded not so far. In all others 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 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 souls 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 suggesting 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.
But that those phantasms appear often, 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 over Adam.
Sect. 38.—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 convulsed and tremble at
the name of death. Not that I am insensible of the dread and horror thereof;
or, by raking into the bowels of the deceased, continual sight of anatomies,
skeletons, or cadaverous relicks, like vespilloes, or gravemakers, I am
become stupid, or have forgot the apprehension of mortality; but that,
marshalling all the horrors, and contemplating the extremities thereof, I
find not anything therein able to daunt the courage of a man, much less a
well-resolved Christian; and therefore am not angry at the error 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 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 entreat a moment's
breath from me. Could the devil work my belief to imagine 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 it; nor can I highly love any that is afraid 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
Christian to be amazed at death, I see not how he can escape this
dilemma—that he is too sensible of this life, or hopeless of the
life to come.
Sect. 39.—Some divines[I.52] count Adam thirty years old at his creation, because they
suppose him created in the perfect age and stature of man: and surely we are
all out of the computation of our age; and every man is some months older
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 life in
three distinct worlds, wherein we receive most manifest gradations. In that
obscure world, the 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;[I.53] 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 secundine, that
is, this slough of flesh, and are delivered into the last world, that is,
that ineffable place of Paul, that proper
ubi of
spirits. The smattering I have of the philosopher's stone (which is
something more than the perfect exaltation
[I.54]
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 I have observed in 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.
Sect. 40.—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, 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, without wondering eyes, tears of pity, lectures of mortality, and
none had said, "Quantum mutatus ab
illo!" Not that I am ashamed of the anatomy of my
parts, or can accuse nature of 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.
Sect. 41.—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 be a mere fallacy, unworthy
the desire of a man, that can but conceive a thought of the next world; who,
in a nobler ambition, should desire to live in his substance in heaven,
rather than his name and shadow in the earth. And therefore, 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 anywhere,
but in the universal register of God. I am not yet so cynical, as to approve
the testament of Diogenes,[I.j] nor do I
altogether allow that rodomontado of Lucan;[I.k]
—"Coelo tegitur, qui non habet
urnam."
He that unburied lies wants not his hearse;
For unto him a tomb's the universe.
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[I.55] 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;
[I.56] as yet I have not seen one
revolution of Saturn,
[I.57] nor hath my pulse
beat thirty years, and yet, excepting one,
[I.58]
have seen the ashes of, and left under ground, all the kings of Europe; have
been contemporary to three emperors, four grand signiors, and as many popes:
methinks I have outlived myself, and begin to be weary of the sun; I have
shaken 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 pantaloons and anticks, to my severer contemplations.
Sect. 42.—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 grey hairs in heaven, but all shall rise in the perfect state of
men, we do but outlive those perfections in this world, to be recalled 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 sin, it were worthy our knees to implore the days 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 not the same, though it agrees in all other
circumstances, as at forty; but swells and doubles from the 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,
[I.l] 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 make 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 perceive a man may be twice a child, before the days
of dotage; and stand in need of AEson's bath
[I.59] before threescore.
Sect. 43.—And truly there goes a 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 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, determine not why Abel lived not so long as Adam. There is
therefore a secret gloom or bottom of our days: 'twas his wisdom to
determine them: but his perpetual and waking providence that fulfils and
accomplisheth 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,
[I.60] 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.
Sect. 44.—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."
[I.m]
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,[I.61] 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 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, Scaevola,
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 unto it.
"Emori nolo, sed me
esse mortuum nihil curo;" I would not die, but care not to be dead.
Were I of Caesar's religion,
[I.62] 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 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 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 beholden 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
immortal. Certainly there is no happiness within this circle of flesh; nor
is it in the opticks 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.
[I.63] He
forgets that he can die, who
complains of misery: we are in the
power of no calamity while death is in our own.
Sect. 45.—Now, besides this 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 horae combustae,[I.64] and odd days, or esteeming myself anything,
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 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 heathens rest in their graves, without a further
thought, of Rhadamanth[I.65] 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
Misturus—"
[I.n]
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 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 that 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, notwithstanding, the different interpretations according to
different capacities may stand firm with our devotion, nor be any way
prejudicial to each single edification.
Sect. 46.—Now, to determine the day and 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 quaere 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 present; who,
neither understanding reasonably things past nor present, pretend a
knowledge of things to come; heads ordained only to manifest the incredible
effects of melancholy and to fulfil old prophecies,
[I.o] 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 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 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?" how long, O Lord? and
groan in the expectation of the great jubilee.
Sect. 47.—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
practised that honest artifice of Seneca,
[I.66]
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 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 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 an
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 endeavours; without this,
all religion is a fallacy, and those impieties of Lucian, Euripides, and
Julian, are no blasphemies, but subtile verities; and atheists have been the
only philosophers.
Sect. 48.—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 pieces; 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 relicks 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 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 sensible corruptions
perish not; nor, as we imagine, wholly 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 antagonist. A plant or
vegetable consumed to ashes to a contemplative and school-philosopher seems
utterly destroyed, 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.
[I.67] What the art of man can
do in these inferior pieces, what blasphemy is it to affirm the finger of
God cannot do in those 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 resurrection.
Sect. 49.—Now, the necessary mansions of our
restored selves are those two contrary and incompatible places we call
heaven and hell. To define them, or strictly to 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
returned into himself, could not express it. Saint John's description by
emeralds, chrysolites, and precious 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 satisfied that it can neither desire addition nor
alteration; that, I think, is truly heaven: and this can only be in the
enjoyment 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 anywhere, even
within the limits of his own proper body; and when it ceaseth to live in the
body it may remain in its own soul, that is, its Creator. And thus we may
say that Saint 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 destruction; 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,
committed 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 consequence 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-see the sun, and
behold without perspective the extremest 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 unlimitable a way as now
the intellectual. I grant that two 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 dispose 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.
Sect. 50.—I cannot tell how to say that fire
is the essence of hell; I know not what to make of purgatory, or conceive 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 whereon 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 consume us: for in this material world, there are bodies that
persist invincible in the powerfulest 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 into powder: for that mystical metal of gold, whose
solary and celestial nature I admire, exposed unto the violence of fire,
grows only hot, and liquefies, but consumeth not; so when the consumable 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 immortal in the arms of fire. And surely, if
this flame 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 composition of
fire, water, earth, and air; but at that time, spoiled of these ingredients,
it shall appear in a substance 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 facetiously affirm,
that, at the last fire, all shall be crystalized and reverberated into
glass, which is the utmost action of that element. Nor need we fear this
term, annihilation, 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
contemplate 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 understanding 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 existent
to the understanding. Thus God beholds all things, 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.
Sect. 51.—Men commonly set forth the
torments of hell by 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 comprehend 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 apprehensions 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 my breast; Legion is revived in me. There are as
many hells as Anaxagoras
[I.68] conceited worlds.
There was more than one hell in Magdalene, when there were seven devils; for
every devil is an hell unto himself,
[I.69] he
holds enough of torture in his own
ubi; and needs not
the misery of circumference to afflict him: and thus, a distracted
conscience here is a shadow or introduction unto hell hereafter. Who can but
pity the merciful intention of those hands that do destroy themselves? The
devil, were it in his power, would do the like; which being impossible, his
miseries are endless, and he suffers most in that attribute wherein he is
impassible, his immortality.
Sect. 52.—I thank God, and with joy I
mention it, I was never afraid of hell, nor ever grew pale at the
description of that place. I have so fixed my contemplations on heaven, that
I have almost forgot the idea of hell; and am afraid rather to lose the joys
of the one, than endure the misery of the other: to be deprived of them is a
perfect 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
mercies 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.
Sect. 53.—And to be true, and speak my soul,
when I survey the occurrences of my life, 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 further 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 miscall those noble
attributes; yet it is likewise an honest piece of logick so to dispute 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 committed 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, misfortune, 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 admire 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 bliss thereof, is accidental, and not the intended
work 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.
Sect. 54.—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 end of
those honest worthies and philosophers which died before his incarnation. It
is hard to place those souls in hell, whose worthy lives do teach us virtue
on earth. Methinks, among those many subdivisions of hell, there might have
been one limbo left for these. What a strange vision will it be to see their
poetical fictions converted into verities, and their imagined and fancied
furies into real devils! How strange to them will sound the history of Adam,
when they shall suffer for him they never heard of! When they who derive
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
others, 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 thus?" it would prevent
these arrogant 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 examples
of virtue must confirm, and make it good how the perfectest actions of earth
have no title or claim unto heaven.
Sect. 55.—Nor truly do I think the lives of
these, or of any other, were ever correspondent, or in all points
conformable, unto their doctrines. It is evident that Aristotle transgressed
the rule of his own ethicks;[I.70] the stoicks,
that condemn passion, and command a man to laugh in Phalaris's[I.71] bull, could not endure without a groan a
fit of the stone or colick. The scepticks, that affirmed they knew
nothing,[I.72] even in that opinion confute
themselves, and thought they knew more than all the world beside. Diogenes I
hold to be the most vainglorious man of his time, and more ambitious in
refusing all 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.73] I
will not accuse of prodigality, because it is a solemnity of good use and
consequence in the state: but the philosopher, that threw his money into the
sea to avoid avarice, was a notorious prodigal.[I.74] 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 religion, there is required a
panoplia, or complete armour; that whilst we lie at
close ward against one vice, we lie not open to the veney
[I.75] 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 another cannot persuade myself. There is a
depraved appetite in us, that will with patience hear the learned
instructions of reason, but yet perform no further than agrees to its own
irregular humour. In brief, we all are monsters; that is, a composition of
man and beast: 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 strait unto life: yet those who do confine
the church of God either to particular nations, churches, or families, have
made it far narrower than our Saviour ever meant it.
Sect. 56.—The vulgarity of those judgments
that wrap the church of God in Strabo's cloak,[I.76] and restrain it unto Europe, seem to me as bad geographers as
Alexander, 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, excommunicate from
heaven one another; much less those Christians 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 in the sunshine.
'Tis true, we all hold there is a number of elect, and many to be saved; yet,
take our 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,[I.77] reprobates all these; and all
these, 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.
Sect. 57.—I believe many are saved who to
man seem 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. These 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,
[I.78] 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.
Sect. 58.—The number of those who pretend
unto salvation, 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 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 protest, 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.
Sect. 59.—Again, I am confident, and fully
persuaded, yet dare not take my oath, of my salvation. I 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 an absolute certainty
of their salvation, yet
when an humble soul shall contemplate
our 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. "Before 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 in this sense, I say, the world was
before the creation, 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 miscarried of me, before she conceived of Cain.
Sect. 60.—Insolent zeals, that do decry good
works and rely only upon faith, take not away merit: for, depending upon the
efficacy of their faith, they enforce the condition of God, and in a more
sophistical way do seem to challenge heaven. It was decreed by God that only
those that lapped 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 obscure 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 anything, 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 judgments, I disclaim them, and do no further favour them than
the learned and best judgments shall authorize them.
[FOOTNOTES TO THE RELIGIO MEDICI, PART THE FIRST.]
[[I.1]]
It was a proverb, "Ubi tres medici duo athei."
[[I.2]]
A Latinised word meaning a taunt (impropero.)
[[I.3]]
The synod of Dort was held in 1619 to discuss the doctrines of Arminius.
It ended by condemning them.
[[I.4]]
Hallam, commenting on this passage, says—"That Jesuit must be
a disgrace to his order who would have asked more than such a concession
to secure a proselyte—the right of interpreting whatever was
written, and of supplying whatever was not"—Hist. England, vol. ii. p. 74.
[[I.5]]
See the statute of the Six Articles (31 Hen. VIII. c. 14), which
declared that transubstantiation, communion in one kind, celibacy of the
clergy, vows of widowhood, private masses, and auricular confession,
were part of the law of England.
[[I.6]]
In the year 1606, when the Jesuits were expelled from Venice, Pope Paul
V. threatened to excommunicate that republic. A most violent quarrel
ensued, which was ultimately settled by the mediation of France.
[[I.7]]
Alluding to the story of OEdipus solving the riddle proposed by the
Sphynx.
[[I.8]]
The nymph Arethusa was changed by Diana into a fountain, and was said to
have flowed under the sea from Elis to the fountain of Arethusa near
Syracuse.—Ov. Met. lib. v. fab. 8.
[[I.9]]
These heretics denied the immortality of the soul, but held that it was
recalled to life with the body. Origen came from Egypt to confute them,
and is said to have succeeded. (See Mosh. Eccl.
Hist., lib. i. c. 5. sec. 16.) Pope John XXII. afterwards adopted
it.
[[I.10]]
A division from the Greek διχοτομια.
[[I.12]]
A faint resemblance, from the Latin adumbro, to
shade.
[[I.13]]
Alluding to the idea Sir T. Browne often expresses, that an oracle was
the utterance of the devil.
[[I.14]]
To fathom, from Latin profundis.
[[I.15]]
Beginning from the Latin efficio.
[[I.16]]
Galen's great work.
[[I.17]]
John de Monte Regio made a wooden eagle that, when the emperor was
entering Nuremburg, flew to meet him, and hovered over his head. He also
made an iron fly that, when at dinner, he was able to make start from
under his hand, and fly round the table.—See De Bartas, 6me
jour 1me semaine.
[[I.18]]
Hidden, from the Greek κρυπτω.
[[I.19]]
A military term for a small mine.
[[I.21]]
The practice of drawing lots.
[[I.23]]
See Il. VIII. 18—
"Let down our golden everlasting chain,
Whose strong embrace holds heaven, and earth, and main."
—Pope, Il. viii. 26.
[[I.24]]
An argument where one proposition is accumulated upon another, from the
Greek σωρειτης,
a heap.
[[I.25]]
Alluding to the second triumvirate—that of Augustus, Antony,
and Lepidus. Florus says of it, "Respublica convulsa est lacerataque."
[[I.26]]
Ochinus. He was first a monk, then a doctor, then a Capuchin friar, then
a Protestant: in 1547 he came to England, and was very active in the
Reformation. He was afterwards made Canon of Canterbury. The Socinians
claim him as one of their sect.
[[I.27]]
The father of Pantagruel. His adventures are given in the first book of
Rabelais, Sir Bevys of Hampton, a metrical romance, relating the
adventures of Sir Bevys with the saracens.—Wright and
Halliwell's Reliquiae Antiquae, ii. 59.
[[I.28]]
Contradictions between two laws.
[[I.29]]
On his arrival at Paris, Pantagruel visited the library of St. Victor:
he states a list of the works he found there, among which was
"Tartaretus." Pierre Tartaret was a French doctor who disputed with Duns
Scotus. His works were republished at Lyons, 1621.
[[I.30]]
Deucalion was king of Thessaly at the time of the deluge. He and his
wife Pyrrha, with the advice of the oracle of Themis, repeopled the
earth by throwing behind them the bones of their
grandmother,—i.e., stones of the
earth.—See Ovid, Met. lib. i. fab. 7.
[[I.31]]
St. Augustine (De Civ. Dei, xvi. 7).
[[I.32]]
απηγξατο
(St. Matt. xxvii. 5) means death by choking. Erasmus translates it,
"abiens laqueo se suspendit."
[[I.33]]
Burnt by order of the Caliph Omar, A.D. 640. It contained 700,000
volumes, which served the city for fuel instead of wood for six months.
[[I.34]]
Enoch being informed by Adam the world was to be drowned and burnt, made
two pillars, one of stone to withstand the water, and one of brick to
withstand the fire, and inscribed upon them all known
knowledge.—See Josephus, Ant. Jud.
[[I.35]]
A Franciscan friar, counsellor to the Inquisition, who visited the
principal libraries in Spain to make a catalogue of the books opposed to
the Romish religion. His "index novus librorum prohibitorum" was
published at Seville in 1631.
[[I.36]]
Printing, gunpowder, clocks.
[[I.37]]
The Targums and the various Talmuds.
[[I.38]]
Pagans, Mahometans, Jews, Christians.
[[I.39]]
Valour, and death in battle.
[[I.41]]
Vergilius, bishop of Salzburg, having asserted the existence of
Antipodes, the Archbishop of Metz declared him to be a heretic, and
caused him to be burnt.
[[I.42]]
On searching on Mount Calvary for the true cross, the empress found
three. As she was uncertain which was the right one, she caused them to
be applied to the body of a dead man, and the one that restored him to
life was determined to be the true cross.
[[I.43]]
The critical time in human life.
[[I.44]]
Oracles were said to have ceased when Christ came, the reply to Augustus
on the subject being the last—
"Me puer Hebraeus divos Deus ipse
gubernans
Cedere sede jubet tristemque redire sub
Orcum
Aris ergo de hinc tacitus discedito
nostris."
[[I.45]]
An historian who wrote "De Rebus Indicis." He is cited by Pliny, Strabo,
and Josephus.
[[I.46]]
Alluding to the popular superstition that infant children were carried
off by fairies, and others left in their places.
[[I.47]]
Who is said to have lived without meat, on the smell of a rose.
[[I.48]]
"Essentiae rationalis immortalis."
[[I.49]]
St. Augustine, De Civ. Dei, lib. x., cc. 9, 19, 32.
[[I.50]]
That which includes everything is opposed to nullity.
[[I.51]]
An inversion of the parts of an antithesis.
[[I.52]]
St. Augustine—"Homily on Genesis."
[[I.53]]
Sir T. Browne wrote a dialogue between two twins in the womb respecting
the world into which they were going!
[[I.55]]
Constitution another form of temperament.
[[I.56]]
The Jewish computation for fifty years.
[[I.57]]
Saturn revolves once in thirty years.
[[I.58]]
Christian IV., of Denmark, who reigned from 1588-1647.
[[I.59]]
AEson was the father of Jason. By bathing in a bath prepared for him by
Medaea with some magic spells, he became young again. Ovid describes the
bath and its ingredients, Met., lib. vii. fab. 2.
[[I.60]]
Alluding to the rabbinical tradition that the world would last for 6000
years, attributed to Elias, and cited in the Talmud.
[[I.61]]
Zeno was the founder of the Stoics.
[[I.62]]
Referring to a passage in Suetonius, Vit. J. Caesar, sec
87:—"Aspernatus tam lentum mortis genus subitam sibi
celeremque optaverat."
[[I.63]]
In holding
"Mors ultima poena est,
Nec metuenda viris."
[[I.64]]
The period when the moon is in conjunction and obscured by the sun.
[[I.65]]
One of the judges of hell.
[[I.66]]
To select some great man for our ideal, and always to act as if he was
present with us. See Seneca, lib. i. Ep. 11.
[[I.67]]
Sir T. Browne seems to have made various experiments in this subject.
D'Israeli refers to it in his "Curiosities of Literature." Dr Power, a
friend of Sir T. Browne, with whom he corresponded, fives a receipt for
the process.
[[I.68]]
The celebrated Greek philosopher who taught that the sun was a mass of
heated stone, and various other astronomical doctrines. Some critics say
Anaxarchus is meant here.
[[I.69]]
See Milton's "Paradise Lost," lib. I. 254—
"The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven."
And also Lucretius—
"Hic Acherusia fit stultorum denique
vita."—iii. 1023.
[[I.70]]
Keck says here—"So did they all, as Lactantius has observed at
large. Aristotle is said to have been guilty of great vanity in his
clothes, of incontinency, and of unfaithfulness to his master, Alexander
II."
[[I.71]]
Phalaris, king of Agrigentum, who, when Perillus made a brazen bull in
which to kill criminals, placed him in it to try its effects.
[[I.72]]
Their maxim was
"Nihil sciri siquis putat id quoque
nescit,
An sciri possit quod se nil scire
fatetur."
[[I.73]]
Pope Alexander III., in his declaration to the Doge,
said,—"Que la mer vous soit soumise comme l'epouse l'est a son
epoux puisque vous in avez acquis l'empire par la victorie." In
commemoration of this the Doge and Senate went yearly to Lio, and
throwing a ring into the water, claimed the sea as their bride.
[[I.74]]
Appolonius Thyaneus, who threw a large quantity of gold into the sea,
saying, "Pessundo divitias ne pessundare ab illis."
[[I.75]]
The technical term in fencing for a hit—
"A sweet touch, a quick venew of wit."
Love's Labour Lost, act v. sc. 1.
[[I.76]]
Strabo compared the configuration of the world, as then known, to a
cloak or mantle (chlamys).
[[I.77]]
Atomists or familists were a Puritanical sect who appeared about 1575,
founded by Henry Nicholas, a Dutchman. They considered that the doctrine
of revelation was an allegory, and believed that they had attained to
spiritual perfection.—See Neal's Hist. of
Puritans, 1. 273.
[[I.78]]
From the 126th psalm St Augustine contends that Solomon is damned. See
also Lyra in 2 Kings vii.
2. PART THE SECOND.
Sect. 1.—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 inclination
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 delineated
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, anything. 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. I 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
salamander; 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 antipathies
that I can discover in 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 seem 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 everywhere, and under any meridian. I have been
shipwrecked, 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 anything, 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
[I.79] 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
another, another filed before him, according to the quality of his desert,
and pre-eminence of his good parts. Though the corruption of these times,
and the bias of present practice, wheel another way, thus it was in the
first and primitive commonwealths, and is yet in 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 licence or faculty to do or purchase anything.
Sect. 2.—This general and indifferent temper
of mine doth more nearly dispose me 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 inoculations and forced grafts 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; 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 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 occasions. And truly I have
observed that those professed eleemosynaries, though in a crowd or
multitude, do yet direct and place their petitions on a few and selected
persons; there is surely a physiognomy, which those experienced and master
mendicants observe, whereby they instantly discover a merciful aspect, and
will single out a face, wherein they spy the signature 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 can 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 is 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
à la volee or at random, because
delineated by a pencil that never works in vain; and hereof I 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 physiognomy, hath made no mention of chiromancy:
[I.80] yet I believe the Egyptians,
who were nearer addicted to those abstruse and mystical sciences, had a
knowledge therein: to which those vagabond and counterfeit Egyptians did
after
[I.81] 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 as much how there should
be any. He that shall consider how many thousand several words have been
carelessly and without study composed 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; yes, let him have his copy before him, yet, after all his art,
there will remain a sensible distinction: for the pattern or example of
everything is the perfectest 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 different from him. There was never anything
so like another as in all points to concur; there will ever some reserved
difference slip in, to prevent the identity; without which two several
things would not be alike, but the same, which is impossible.
Sect. 3.—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 hath wisely divided
the act thereof into many branches, 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. It is no greater charity to clothe his 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, illuminates another without obscuring itself. To
be reserved and caitiff
[I.82] in this part of
goodness is the sordidest piece of covetousness, and more contemptible than
the pecuniary 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 instruct no man as an exercise of my knowledge, or with an
intent rather to nourish and keep it alive 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 cannot fall out or contemn
a man for an error, or
conceive why a difference in opinion
should divide an affection; for controversies, disputes, and argumentations,
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 worthy
a passion, and yet never any dispute without, not only in divinity but
inferior arts. What a
Βατραχομυομαχια
and hot skirmish is betwixt S. and T. in Lucian!
[I.83] How do grammarians hack and slash for the genitive case in
Jupiter!
[I.84] How do they break their own
pates, to salve that of Priscian!
[I.85]
"Si foret in terris, rideret Democritus." Yes, 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 Actius's razor.
[I.86] their pens carry
farther, and give a louder report than thunder. I had rather stand the shock
of a basilisko
[I.87] 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 indulgent aspect unto
scholars; but a desire to have their names eternized by the memory of their
writings, and a fear of the revengeful pen of
succeeding ages:
for these are the men that, when they have played their parts, and had their
exits, must step out and give the moral of their
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
authentick kind of falsehood, that with authority belies our good names to
all nations and posterity.
Sect. 4.—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 opprobrious epithets we miscall each other,
and, by an uncharitable logick, from a disposition in a few, conclude a
habit in all.
Le mutin Anglois, et le bravache Escossois
Le bougre Italien, et le fol Francois;
Le poltron Romain, le larron de Gascogne,
L'Espagnol superbe, et l'Alleman yvrogue.
St Paul, that calls the Cretians liars, doth it but indirectly, and upon
quotation of their own poet.[I.88] It is as
bloody a thought in one way as Nero's was in another.[I.89] For by a word we wound a thousand, and at one blow
assassin the honour of a nation. It is as complete a piece of madness to
miscall 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 goodness,
seems to me as deeply hypochondriack as Heraclitus, that bewailed them. It
moves not my spleen to behold the multitude in their proper humours; that
is, in their fits of folly and madness, as well understanding that wisdom is
not profaned unto the world;
and it is 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 community of sin
doth not disparage goodness; for, when vice gains upon the major part,
virtue, in whom it remains, becomes more excellent, and, being lost in some,
multiplies its goodness in others, which remain untouched, and persist
entire 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 I am nothing: 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 help 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
others but for that wherein they seem to quadrate and 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 do
most 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 uncharitable 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.
"Non 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 in death; whereof he beheld the practice and
example in his own son Abel; and saw that verified in the experience of
another which faith could not persuade him in the theory of himself.
Sect. 5.—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 parties 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 expostulations of his friends
a deeper injury than the down-right blows of the devil. It is not the tears
of our own eyes only, but of our friends also, that do exhaust the current
of our sorrows; which, falling 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 entreat without 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 anything 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 mine 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 ordain 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 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; one soul in two bodies. 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.
Sect. 6.—There are wonders in true
affection. It is a body of enigmas, mysteries, and riddles; wherein two so
become 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
affection will make me believe I have not loved him at all. When I am from
him, I am dead till I be with him. United souls are not satisfied with
embraces, but desire to be truly each other; which being impossible, these
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 selves, 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 common constitutions; but on such as are marked for virtue. He
that can love his friend with this noble ardour will in a competent degree
effect 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 happiness that we can bequeath the
soul is that wherein we all do place our last felicity, salvation; which,
though it 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 particular, 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 supplication for him,
who perhaps is no more to me than a common nature: and if God hath
vouchsafed 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 practice
of our daily and ordinary devotions. I cannot believe the story of the
Italian;
[I.90] our bad wishes and
uncharitable desires proceed no further than this life; it is the devil, and
the uncharitable votes of hell, that desire our misery in the world to come.
Sect. 7.—"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 things 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.
I were unjust unto mine own conscience if I should say I am at variance with
anything like myself. I find there are many pieces in this one fabrick of
man; this frame is raised upon a mass of antipathies: I am one methinks but
as the world, wherein notwithstanding
there are a swarm of
distinct essences, and in them another world of contrarieties; we carry
private and domestick enemies within, public and more hostile adversaries
without. The devil, that did but buffet St Paul, plays methinks at sharp
[I.91] with me. Let me be nothing, if within the
compass of myself, I do not find the battle of Lepanto,
[I.92] passion against reason, reason against faith, faith
against the devil, and my conscience against all. There is another man
within me that's angry with me, rebukes, commands, and dastards me. I have
no conscience of marble, to resist the hammer of more heavy offences: nor
yet so soft and waxen, as to take the impression of each single peccadillo
or scape of infirmity. I am of a strange belief, that it is as easy to be
forgiven some sins as to commit some others. For my original 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 general
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 singular in offences; my transgressions are epidemical, and from the
common breath of our corruption. For there are certain tempers of body
which, matched with a humorous depravity of mind, do hath and produce
vitiosities, whose newness and monstrosity of nature admits no name; this
was the temper of that lecher that carnaled with a statua, and the
constitution of Nero in his 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 otherwise of myself, that I repute myself the most abject 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. It is no breach of charity to ourselves to 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.
Sect. 8.—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 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 in the world, and none to boast
himself either linguist or critick. I have not only seen several countries,
beheld the nature 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. I know the names and somewhat more of
all 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 impossible, they fall upon the opinion of Socrates, and
only know they know not anything. I cannot think that Homer pined away upon
the riddle of the fishermen, or that Aristotle, who understood the
uncertainty of knowledge, 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.
[I.93] We do but learn, to-day, what
our better advanced judgments will unteach 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 studies and
junior endeavours may style us Peripateticks, Stoicks, or Academicks, yet I
perceive the wisest heads prove, at last, almost all Scepticks,
[I.94] 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 experience,
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 endeavour 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 by the
uncertain knowledge of this life with sweat and vexation, which death gives
every fool gratis, and is an accessary of our glorification.
Sect. 9.—I was never yet once, and commend
their resolutions 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 content that we might procreate like trees, without conjunction, or
that there were any way to perpetuate the world without this trivial and
vulgar way of coition: it is the foolishest act a wise man commits in all
his life, nor is there anything 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 instrument. For there is a musick
wherever there is a harmony, 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
harmonically composed delights in harmony, which makes me much distrust the
symmetry of those heads which declaim 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 hieroglyphical 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 intellectually sounds in the ears of God.
I will not say, with Plato, the soul is an harmony, but harmonical, and hath
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 naturally inclined unto rhythm. This made Tacitus, in the very first
line of his story, fall upon a verse;
[I.p] and
Cicero, the worst of poets, but declaiming for a poet, falls in the very
first sentence upon a
perfect hexameter.
[I.q] 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 everything 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 confess 'tis but the worthy salary of our well intended endeavours.
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 generally, those three noble
professions which all civil commonwealths do honour, are raised upon the
fall of Adam, and are not any way exempt from their infirmities. There are
not only diseases incurable in physick, but cases indissolvable in law,
vices incorrigible in divinity. If general councils may err, I do not see
why particular 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 Aristotle ofttimes the opinions of his
predecessors, because, though agreeable to reason, yet were 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 unknown,—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 they 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 stomachs, yet to prepared appetites is
nectar, and a pleasant potion of immortality.
Sect. 10.—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 so discordant and jarring a temper, to which a tuneable
disposition may not strike a harmony. Magnae virtutes, nec
minora vitia; it is the posy[I.95] of
the best natures, and may be inverted on the worst. There are, in the most
depraved and venomous dispositions, certain pieces that remain untouched,
which by an antiperistasis[I.96] become more excellent, or by the excellency of their
antipathies are able to preserve themselves from the contagion of their
enemy vices, and persist entire beyond the general corruption. For it is
also thus in nature: the greatest balsams do lie enveloped in the bodies of
the 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 that I
do infect myself; the man without a navel
[I.97]
yet lives in me. I feel that original canker corrode 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,"[I.r] though it be the
apothegm 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 anything 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, there can be nothing truly alone, and
by its self, which is not truly one, and such is only God: all others do
transcend an unity, and so by consequence are many.
Sect. 11.—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 condition and fortunes, do err in my altitude; for I am
above Atlas's shoulders.
[I.98] The earth is a
point not only in respect of the heavens above us, but of the 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 ark 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 the image of God, as 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 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. In brief, I am content; and what should
providence add more? Surely this is it we call happiness, and this do I
enjoy; with this I am happy in a dream, and as content to enjoy a happiness
in a fancy, as others in a more apparent truth and reality. There is surely
a nearer apprehension of anything 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 the 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 satisfaction 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, to those of the next, as the phantasms of 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 the
liberty of reason; and our waking conceptions do not match the fancies of
our sleeps. At my nativity, my ascendant was the watery sign of
Scorpio. 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
galliardise
[I.99] of company; yet in one
dream I can compose 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 fruitful, I would never study but in my dreams, and
this time also would I choose for my devotions: but our grosser memories
have then so little hold of our abstracted understandings, that they forget
the story, and can only relate to our awaked souls a confused and broken
tale of that which hath passed. Aristotle, who hath written a singular tract
of sleep, hath not, methinks, thoroughly defined it; nor yet Galen, though
he seem to have corrected it; for those
noctambulos
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 Morpheus; and that those abstracted and
ecstatick souls do walk about in their own corpses, 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 themselves. 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.
Sect. 12.—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 every man
truly lives, so long as he acts his nature, or some way makes good the
faculties of himself. Themistocles 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 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.
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.
Sleep is a death;—Oh 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:
Oh come that hour, when I shall never
Sleep again, but wake for ever!
This is the dormitive 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.
Sect. 13.—The method I should use in
distributive justice, I often observe in commutative; and keep a geometrical
proportion in both, whereby becoming equable to others, I become unjust to
myself, and supererogate in that 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 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 persuaded that we are dead,
is not so ridiculous, nor so many degrees beyond the power of hellebore,
[I.100] 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 to honour that the world adores; whatsoever virtue
its prepared substance may have within my body, it hath no influence nor
operation without. I would not entertain a base design, or an action that
should call me villain, for the Indies; and for this only do I love and
honour my own soul, and have methinks two arms too few to embrace myself.
Aristotle is too severe, that will not allow us to be truly liberal without
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 example of the mite be not only an act of wonder, but an example of
the noblest charity, surely poor men may also build hospitals, and the rich
alone have not erected cathedrals. I have a private method which others
observe not; I take the opportunity of myself to do good; I borrow occasion
of charity from my own necessities, and supply the 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 repay 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 he 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 goodness. "He
that giveth to the poor lendeth to the Lord:" there is more rhetorick in
that one sentence than in a 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 epitome. Upon this motive only I cannot behold a
beggar without relieving his necessities with 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 both: there is under these
centoes
[I.101] and miserable outsides, those
mutilate and semi bodies, a soul of the same alloy with our own, whose
genealogy is God's as well as ours, and in as fair a way to salvation as
ourselves. Statists that labour to contrive a commonwealth without our
poverty take away the object of charity; not understanding only the
commonwealth of a Christian, but forgetting the prophecy of Christ.
[I.s]
Sect. 14.—Now, there is another part of
charity, which is 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 for
himself, and our neighbour for God. And all that is truly amiable is God, or
as it were a divided piece of him, that retains a reflex or shadow of
himself. Nor is it strange that we should 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 be 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 affection 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 affection between us and our parents; yet how
easily dissolved! We betake ourselves to a woman, forgetting our mother in a
wife, and the womb that bare us in that which 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 may be buried alive,
and behold his grave in his own issue.
Sect. 15.—I conclude therefore, and say,
there is no happiness under (or, as Copernicus[I.t] will have it, above) the sun; nor any crambe[I.102] in that repeated verity and burthen 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, falls upon one himself: for his
summum bonum is a chimaera; and there is 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, a tale of Bocace or Malizspini, 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 affections, the love of thyself and my dearest friends, and I shall be
happy enough to pity Caesar! These are, O Lord, the humble desires of my
most reasonable ambition, and all I dare call happiness on earth; wherein I
set no rule or limit to thy hand or providence; dispose of me according to
the wisdom of thy pleasure. Thy will be done, though in my own undoing.
[FOOTNOTES TO THE RELIGIO MEDICI, PART THE SECOND.]
[[I.p]]
"Urbem a Romam in principio reges habuere."
[ENDNOTES TO THE RELIGIO MEDICI, PART THE SECOND.]
[[I.79]]
From the Spanish "Dorado," a gilt head.
[[I.80]]
Sir T. Browne treats of chiromancy, or the art of telling fortunes by
means of lines in the hands, in his "Vulgar Errors," lib. v. cap. 23.
[[I.82]]
S. Wilkin says that here this word means niggardly.
[[I.83]]
In the dialogue, "judicium vocalium," the vowels are the judges, and
Σ complains that T has deprived him of many letters that ought
to begin with Σ.
[[I.84]]
If Jovis or Jupitris.
[[I.85]]
The celebrated Roman grammarian. A proverbial phrase for the violation
of grammar was "Breaking Priscian's head."
[[I.86]]
Livy says, Actius Nevius cut a whetstone through with a razor.
[[I.87]]
A kind of lizard that was supposed to kill all it looked at—
"Whose baneful eye
Wounds at a glance, so that the soundest dye."
—De Bartas, 6me jour 1me sem.
[[I.88]]
Epimenides (Titus x. 12)— "Κρητες
αει
ψευσται
κακα
θηρια
γαστερες
αργαι."
[[I.89]]
Nero having heard a person say, "When I am dead, let earth be mingled
with fire," replied, "Yes, while I live."—Suetonius, Vit. Nero.
[[I.90]]
Alluding to the story of the Italian, who, having been provoked by a
person he met, put a poniard to his heart, and threatened to kill him if
he would not blaspheme God; and the stranger doing so, the Italian
killed him at once, that he might be damned, having no time to repent.
[[I.91]]
A rapier or small sword.
[[I.92]]
The battle here referred to was the one between Don John of Austria and
the Turkish fleet, near Lepanto, in 1571. The battle of Lepanto (that
is, the capture of the town by the Turks) did not take place till 1678.
[[I.93]]
Several authors say that Aristotle died of grief because he could not
find out the reason for the ebb and flow of the tide in Epirus.
[[I.94]]
Who deny that there is such a thing as science.
[[I.95]]
A motto on a ring or cup. In an old will, 1655, there is this passage: "I
give a cup of silver gilt to have this posy written in the
margin:—
"When the drink is out, and the bottom you may see,
Remember your brother I. G."
[[I.96]]
The opposition of a contrary quality, by which the quality it opposes
becomes heightened.
[[I.97]]
Adam as he was created and not born.
[[I.98]]
Meaning a world, as Atlas supported the world on his shoulders.
[[I.99]]
Merriment. Johnson says that this is the only place where the word is
found.
[[I.100]]
Said to be a cure for madness.
[[I.101]]
Patched garments.
[[I.102]]
A game. A kind of capping verses, in which, if any one repeated what had
been said before, he paid a forfeit.