the affrighting truths of an evil conscience, they would give all the world for a year, for a month: nay, we read of some that called out with amazement, inducias usque ad mane, 'truce but till the morning' and if that year or some few months were given, those men think they could do miracles in it. And let us a while suppose what Dives would have done if he had been loosed from the pains of hell, and permitted to live on earth one year. Would all the pleasures of the world have kept him one hour from the Temple? would he not perpetually have been under the hands of Priests, or at the feet of the doctors, or by Moses' chairm, or attending as near the Altar as he could get, or relieving poor Lazarus, or praying to God, and crucifying all his sin? I have read of a melancholic person who saw Hell but in a dream or vision, and the amazement was such, that he would have chosen ten times to die rather than to feel again so much of that horror: and such a person cannot be fancied but that he would spend a year in such holiness, that the religion of a few months would equal the devotion of many years, even of a good man. Let us but compute the proportions. If we should spend all our years of reason so as such a person would spend that one, can it be thought that life would be short and trifling in which he had performed such a religion, served God with so much holiness, mortified sin with so great a labour, purchased virtue at such a rate and so rare an industry? It must needs be that such a man must die when he ought to die, and be like ripe and pleasant fruit falling from a fair tree, and gathered into baskets for the planter's use. He that hath done all his busi

1 Luke xvi. 19, &c.

m Matth. xxiii. 2.

ness, and is begotten to a glorious hope by the seed of an immortal Spirit, can never die too soon, nor live too long.

Xerxes wept sadly when he saw his army of 2,300,000 men, because he considered that within an hundred years all the youth of that army should be dust and ashes; and yet, as Seneca well observes of him, he was the man that should bring them to their graves: and he consumed all that army in two years, for whom he feared and wept the death after a hundred. Just so we do all. We complain that within thirty or forty years, a little more, or a great deal less, we shall descend again into the bowels of our mother, and that our life is too short for any great employment; and yet we throw away five and thirty years of our forty, and the remaining five we divide between art and nature, civility and customs, necessity and convenience, prudent counsels and religion: but the portion of the last is little and contemptible, and yet that little is all that we can prudently account of our lives. We bring that fate and that death near us, of whose approach we are so sadly apprehensive.

de

4. In taking the accounts of your life do not reckon by great distances, and by the periods of pleasure, or the satisfaction of your hopes, or the stating your sires; but let every intermedial day and hour pass with observation. He that reckons he hath lived but so many harvests, thinks they come not often enough, and that they go away too soon. Some lose the day with longing for the night, and the night in waiting for the day. Hope and fantastic expectations spend much of our lives; and while with passion we look for a coronation, or the death of an enemy, or a day of

joy, passing from fancy to possession without any intermedial notices, we throw away a precious year, and use it but as the burden of our time, fit to be pared off and thrown away, that we may come at those little pleasures which first steal our hearts, and then steal our life.

5. A strict course of piety is the way to prolong our lives in the natural sense, and to add good portions to the number of our years: and sin is sometimes by natural causality, very often by the anger of God and the Divine judgment, a cause of sudden and untimely death. Concerning which I shall add nothing (to what I have somewhere else" said of this article) but only the observation of Epiphanius; that for 3332 years, even to the twentieth age, there was not one example of a son that died before his Father, but the course of nature was kept, that he who was first born in the descending line did first die, (I speak of natural death, and therefore Abel cannot be opposed to this observation), till that Terah the Father of Abraham taught the people a new religion, to make images of clay and worship them; and concerning him it was first remarked, that Haran died before his father Terah in the land of his nativity: God by an unheard-of judgment and a rare accident punishing his newlyinvented crime, by the untimely death of his son.

6. But if I shall describe a living man, a man that hath that life that distinguishes him from a fool or a bird, that which gives him a capacity next to Angels; we shall find that even a good man lives not long, because it is long before he is born to this life, and

"Life of Christ, part iii. Disc. 14.

• Lib. i. tom. i. Panar. Sect. 6. a Gen. xi. 28.

P Josh. xxiv. 2, but cf. Gen. xxxi. 53, and xi. 31.

longer yet before he hath a man's growth. "He that can look upon Death, and see its face with the same countenance with which he hears its story; that can endure all the labours of his life with his Soul supporting his body; that can equally despise riches when he hath them, and when he hath them not; that is not sadder if they lie in his neighbour's trunks, nor more brag if they shine round about his own walls; he that is neither moved with good fortune coming to him, nor going from him; that can look upon another man's lands evenly and pleasedly as if they were his own, and yet look upon his own, and use them too, just as if they were another man's; that neither spends his goods prodigally and like a fool, nor yet keeps them avariciously and like a wretch; that weighs not benefits by weight and number, but by the mind and circumstances of him that gives them; that never thinks his Charity expensive if a worthy person be the receiver; he that does nothing for opinion sake, but every thing for conscience, being as curious of his thoughts as of his actings in markets and theatres, and is as much in awe of himself as of a whole assembly; he that knows God looks on, and contrives his secret affairs as in the presence of God and His holy angels; that eats and drinks because he needs it, not that he may serve a lust or load his belly; he that is bountiful and cheerful to his friends, and charitable and apt to forgive his enemies; that loves his country, and obeys his Prince, and desires and endeavours nothing more than that he may do honour to God":" this person may reckon his life to be the life of a man, and

Seneca de Vita beata, cap. 20.

compute his months, not by the course of the sun, but the Zodiac and circle of his virtues: because these are such things which fools and children and birds and beasts cannot have; these are therefore the actions of life, because they are the seeds of immortality. That day in which we have done some excellent thing, we may as truly reckon to be added to our life, as were the fifteen years to the days of Hezekiahs.

SECT. IV.

CONSIDERATION OF THE MISERIES OF MAN'S LIFE.

As our Life is very short, so it is very miserable; and therefore it is well it is short. God in pity to mankind, lest his burden should be insupportable, and his nature an intolerable load, hath reduced our state of misery to an abbreviature; and the greater our misery is, the less while it is like to last: the sorrows of a man's spirit being like ponderous weights, which by the greatness of their burden make a swifter motion, and descend into the grave to rest and ease our wearied limbs; for then only we shall sleep quietly, when those fetters are knocked off, which not only bound our souls in prison, but also ate the flesh till the very bones opened the secret garments of their cartilages, discovering their nakedness and sorrow.

1. Here is no place to sit down in, but you must rise as soon as you are set, for we have gnats in our chambers, and worms in our gardens, and spiders and flies in the palaces of the greatest kings. How few men in the world are prosperous! what an infinite

• Isa. xxxviii. 5..