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 they may do honour to God." This person may reckon his life to be the life of a man, and compute his mouths not by the course of the sun, by 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 Hezekiah.

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 burthen 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 burthen, 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 bone 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 number of slaves and beggars, of persecuted and oppressed people, fill all the corners of the earth with groans, and heaven itself with weeping, prayers, and sad remembrances? How many provinces and kingdoms are afflicted by a violent war, or made desolate by popular diseases? Some whole countries are remarked with fatal evils, or periodical sicknesses. Grand Cairo in Egypt feels the plague every three years returning like a quartan-ague, and destroying many thousands of persons. All the inhabitants of Arabia the desert are in continual fear of being buried in huge heaps of sand; and therefore dwell in tents and ambulatory houses, or retire to unfruitful mountains, to prolong an uneasy and wilder life. And all the countries round about the Adriatic sea, feel such violent convulsions, by tempests, and intolerable earthquakes, that sometimes whole cities find a tomb, and every man sinks with his own house made ready to become his monument, and his bed is crushed into the disorders of a grave. Was not all the world drowned at one deluge, and breach of the di

* Nulla requies in terris; surgite postquam sederites; hic est locus pulicum et culicum.

vine anger? and shall not all the world again be destroyed by fire? Are there not many thousands that die every night, and that groan and weep sadly every day? But what shall we think of that great evil, which, for the sins of men, God hath suffered to possess the greatest part of mankind? most of the men that are now alive, or that have been living for many ages, are Jews, Heathens, or Turks: and God was pleased to suffer a base epileptic person, a villain and a vicious, to set up a religion which hath filled all the nearer parts of Asia, and much of Africa, and some parts of Europe; so that the greatest number of men and women born in so many kingdoms and provinces are infallibly made Mahometan, strangers and enemies to Christ, by whom alone we can be saved. This consideration is extremely sad, when we remember how universal and how great an evil it is, that so many millions of sons and daughters are born to enter into the possession of devils, to eternal ages. These evils are the miseries of great parts of mankind, and we cannot easily consider more particularly the evils which happen to us, being the inseparable affections or incidents to the whole nature

of man.

2. We find that all the women in the world are either born for barrenness or the pains of child-birth, and yet this is one of our greatest blessings; but such indeed are the blessings of this world; we cannot be well with, nor without many things. Perfumes make our heads ache; roses prick our fingers; and in our

very blood, where our life dwells, is the scene under which nature acts many sharp fevers, and heavy sicknesses. It were too sad, if I should tell how many persons are afflicted with evil-spirits, with spectres and illusions of the night; and that huge multitudes of men and women live upon man's flesh, nay, worse yet, upon the sins of men, upon the sins of their sons and of their daughters, and they pay their souls down for the bread they eat, buying this day's meal with the price of the last night's sin.

3. Or if you please in charity to visit an hospital, which is indeed a map of the whole world, there you shall see the effects of Adam's sin, and the ruins of human nature; bodies laid up in heaps, like the bones of a destroyed town; homines precarii spiritus et malè hærentis; men whose souls seem to be borrowed, and are kept there by art and the force of medicine, whose miseries are so great, that few people have charity or humanity enough to visit them, fewer have the heart to dress them, and we pity them in civility or with a transient prayer, but we do not feel their sorrows by the mercies of a religious pity; and therefore as we leave their sorrows in many degrees unrelieved and uneased, so we contract, by our unmercifulness, a guilt by which ourselves become liable to the same calamities. Those many that need pity, and those infinites of people that refuse to pity are miserable upon a several charge, but yet they almost make up all mankind.

4. All wicked men are in love with that which entangles them in huge varieties of troubles; they are

slaves to the worst of masters, to sin and to the devil, to a passion, and to an imperious woman. Good men are for ever persecuted, and God chastises every son whom he receives; and whatsoever is easy is trifling and worth nothing; and whatsoever is excellent is not to be obtained without labour and sorrow; and the conditions and states of men that are free from great cares, are such as have in them nothing rich and orderly; and those that have, are stuck full of thorns and trouble. Kings are full of care; and learned men, in all ages, have been observed to be very poor, et honestas miserias accusiant, they complain of their honest miseries.

5. But these evils are notorious and confessed; even they also whose felicity men stare at and admire, besides their splendour and the sharpness of their light, will, with their appendant sorrows, wring a tear from the most resolved eye: for not only the winter quarter is full of storms and cold and darkness, but the beauteous spring hath blasts and sharp frosts, the fruitful teeming summer is melted with heat and burnt with the kisses of the sun, her friend, and choked with dust, and the rich autumn is full of sickness; and we are weary of that which we enjoy, because sorrow is its bigger portion: and when we remember that upon the fairest face is placed one of the worse sinks of the body, the nose; we may use it not only as a mortification to the pride of beauty, but as an allay to the fairest outside of the condition, which any of the sons and daughters of Adam do possess. For