above half of it, earth and stone in its affections and distempers; our hearts are hard and inflexible to the softer whispers of mercy and compassion, having no loves for anything but strange flesh and heaps of money and popular noises, for misery and folly; and therefore we are a huge way off from the Kingdom of God, whose excellencies, whose designs, whose ends, whose constitution is spiritual and holy and separate and sublime and perfect. Sermon, Of Luke-warmness and Zeal. WANDERING THOUGHTS HOWEVER it be very easy to have our thoughts wander, yet it is our indifferency and lukewarmness that makes it so natural: and you may observe it, that so long as the light shines bright, and the fires of devotion and desire flame out, so long the mind of a man stands close to the altar and waits upon the sacrifice; but as the fires die, and desires decay, so the mind steals away, and walks abroad to see the little images of beauty and pleasure, which it beholds in the falling stars and little glow-worms of the world. THE STARS Ibid. RELIGION is worth as much to-day as it was yesterday, and that cannot change, though we do; and if we do we have left God; and whither he can go that goes from God, his own sorrows will soon enough instruct him. This fire must never go out, but it must be like the fire of Heaven; it must shine like the Stars, though sometimes covered with a cloud, or obscured by a greater light; yet they dwell for ever in their orbs, and walk in their circles, and observe their cir cumstances, but go not out by day nor night, and set not when kings die, nor are extinguished when nations change their government. Sermon, Of Luke-warmness and Zeal. CHILDREN No man can tell but he that loves his children, how many delicious accents make a man's heart dance in the pretty conversation of those dear pledges: their childishness, their stammering, their little angers, their innocence, their imperfections, their necessities are so many little emanations of joy and comfort to him that delights in their persons and society; but he that loves not his wife and children, feeds a lioness at home, and broods a nest of sorrow. Sermon, The Marriage Ring. INTEMPERANCE As temperance begins to go away, having done the ministries of nature, every morsel, and every new goblet, is still less delicious, and cannot be endured but as men force nature by violence to stay longer than she would. How have some men rejoiced when they have escaped a cup! And when they cannot escape, they pour it in, and receive it with as much pleasure as the old women have in the Lapland dances they dance the round, but there is a horror and a harshness in the music. Sermon, Apples of Sodom. THE SUN IN WINTER BUT SO have I seen the sun kiss the frozen earth, which was bound up with the images of death and the colder breath of the North; and then the waters break from their enclosures, and melt with joy, and run in useful channels; and the flies do rise again from their little graves in walls, and dance awhile in the air, to tell that there is joy within, and that the great mother of creatures will open the stock of her new refreshment, become useful to mankind, and sing praises to her Redeemer. Sermon, The Duties of the Tongue. ENJOYMENT I CONSIDER that he that is the greatest possessor in the world, enjoys its best and most noble parts, and those which are of most excellent perfection, but in common with the inferior persons, and the most despicable of his kingdom. Can the greatest prince enclose the sun, and set one little star in his cabinet for his own use, or secure to himself the gentle and benign influence of any one constellation? Are not his subjects' fields bedewed with the same showers that water his gardens of pleasure? . . . The poorest artisan of Rome, walking in Cæsar's gardens, had the same pleasures which they ministered to their Lord: and although it may be, he was put to gather fruits to eat from another place, yet his other senses were delighted equally with Cæsar's: the birds made him as good music, the flowers gave him as sweet smells; he there sucked as good air, and delighted in the beauty and order of the place, for the same reason and upon the same perception as the prince himself, save only that Cæsar paid for all that pleasure vast sums of money, the blood and treasure of a province, which the poor man had for nothing. Suppose a man lord of all the whole world (for still we are but in supposition), yet since everything is received, not according to its own greatness and worth, but according to the capacity of the receiver, it signifies very little as to our content, or to the riches of our possession. . . . He to whom the world can be given to any purpose greater than a private estate can minister, must have new capacities created in him: he needs the understanding of an angel to take the accounts of his estate; he had need have a stomach like fire or the grave, for else he can eat no more than one of his healthful subjects: and unless he hath an eye like the sun, and a motion like that of a thought, and a bulk as big as one of the orbs of heaven, the pleasures of his eye can be no greater than to behold the beauty of a little prospect from a hill, or to look upon the heap of gold packed up in a little room, or to dote upon a cabinet of jewels better than which there is no man that sees at all but sees every day. For not to name the beauties and sparkling diamonds of heaven, a man's or a woman's or a hawk's eye is more beauteous and excellent than all the jewels of his crown. Sermon, The Foolish Exchange. THE SOUL If we consider what the soul is in its own capacity to happiness, we shall find it to be an excellency greater than the sun, of an angelical substance, sister to a cherubin, an image of the Divinity, and the great argument of that mercy whereby God did distinguish us from the lower form of beasts, and trees, and minerals. ... But the soul is all that whereby we may be, and ΙΟΙ without which we cannot be, happy. It is not the eye that sees the beauties of the heaven, nor the ear that hears the sweetnesses of music, or the glad tidings of a prosperous accident, but the soul that perceives all the relishes of sensual and intellectual perfections; and the more noble and excellent the soul is, the greater and more savoury are its perceptions. And, if a child beholds the rich ermine, or the diamonds of a starry night, or the order of the world, or hears the discourses of an Apostle; because he makes no reflex acts upon himself, and sees not that he sees, he can have but the pleasure of a fool, or the deliciousness of a mule. But, although the reflection of its own acts be a rare instrument of pleasure or pain respectively, yet the soul's excellency is, upon the same reason, not perceived by us, by which the sapidness of pleasant things of nature are not understood by a child; even because the soul cannot reflect far enough. For as the sun, which is the fountain of light and heat, makes violent and direct emissions of his rays from himself, but reflects them no further than to the bottom of a cloud, or the lowest imaginary circle of the middle region, and, therefore, receives [not] a duplicate of his own heat; so is the soul of man; it reflects upon its own inferior action of particular sense, or general understanding; but, because it knows little of its own nature, the manners of volition, the immediate instruments of understanding, the way how it comes to meditate; and cannot discern how a sudden thought arrives, or the solution of a doubt not depending upon preceding premises; therefore, above half its pleasures are abated, and its own worth less understood; and possibly, it is the better it is so. If the elephant knew his strength, or |