would still be nearer him United souls are not satisfied with imbraces but desire to be truly each other which being impossible their desires are infinite and proceed without a possibility of satisfaction Another misery there is in affection that whom we truly love like our own we forget their looks nor can our memory retain the Idea of their faces and it is no wonder for they are our selves and our affection makes their looks our own This noble affection falls not on vulgar and common constitutions but on such as are mark'd 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 my self 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 in stead of imitating him I fall into a 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 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 setled years and Christian constitution have fallen upon severer resolutions I can hold there is no such thing 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 our selves I were unjust unto mine own Conscience if I should say I am at variance with any thing like my self 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 publick and more hostile adversaries without The Devil that did but buffet St. Paul plays methinks at sharp with me Let me be nothing if within the compass of my self I do not find the battail of Lepanto 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 too 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 easie to be forgiven some sins as to commit some others Eor 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 matcht with an humorous depravity of mind do hatch and produce vitiosities whose newness and monstrosity of nature admits no name ‖ this was the temper of that Lecher that carnal'd with a Statua * and 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 mens minds also in villany and vices now the dulness of my reason and the vulgarity of my disposition never prompted my invention nor sollicited my affection unto any of those 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 my self that I repute my self the most abjectest 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 sute with this action nor my proper constitution It is no breach of charity to our selves 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 ruine 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 farther-sin not onely 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 towr and plume himself over a single line in Horace and shew 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 my self than had our Fathers before the consusion of Babel when there was but one Language in the World and none to boast himself either Linguist or Critick I have not onely seen several Countries beheld the nature of their Climes the Chorography of their Provinces Topography of their Cities but understood their several
give me leave to observe what our Country-man Roger Bacon did long ago That those Students who busie themselves much with such Notions as reside wholly to the fantasie do hardly ever become Idoneous for abstracted Metaphysical Speculations the one having bulkie Foundation of Matter or of the Accidents of it to settle upon at the least with one foot The other flying continually even to a lessening pitch in the subtil Air. And accordingly it hath been generally noted That the exactest Mathematicians who converse altogether with Lines Figures and other Differences of Quantity have seldom proved eminent in Metaphysicks or Speculative Divinity Nor again the Professors of these Sciences in the other Arts. Much less can it be expected that an excellent Physician whose fancy is alwayes fraught with the material Drugs that he prescribeth his Apothecary to compound his Medicines of and whose hands are inured to the cutting up and eyes to the inspection of Anatomized Bodies should easily and with success flie his thoughts at so towring a Game as a pure Intellect a separated and unbodied Soul Surely this acute Author 's sharp wit had he orderly applied his Studies that way would have been able to satisfie himself with less labour and others with more plenitude than it hath been the Lot of so dull a brain as mine concerning the Immortality of the Soul And yet I assure you my Lord the little Philosophy that is allowed me for my share demonstrateth this Proposition to me as well as Faith delivereth it which our Physician will not admit in his To make good this Assertion here were very unreasonable since that to do it exactly and without exactness it were not demonstration requireth a total Survey of the whole Science of Bodies and of all the operations that we are conversant with of a rational Creature which I having done with all the succinctness I have been able to explicate so knotty a subject with hath taken me up in the first draught neer two hundred sheets of Paper I shall therefore take leave of this Point with only this Note That I take the Immortality of the Soul under his favour to be of that nature that to them onely that are not versed in the ways of proving it by Reason it is an Article of Faith to others it is an evident Conclusion of demonstrative Science And with a like short Note I shall observe how if he had traced the Nature of the Soul from its first principles he could not have suspected it should sleep in the Grave 'till the Resurrection of the Body Nor would he have permitted his compassionative Nature to imagin it belonged to God's mercy as the Chiliasts did to change its condition in those that are damned from pain to happiness For where God should have done that he must have made that anguished Soul another creature than what it was as to make fire cease from being hot requireth to have it become another thing than the Element of fire since that to be in such a condition as maketh us understand damned souls miserable is a necessary effect of the temper it is in when it goeth out of the Body and must necessarily out of its Nature remain in unvariably for all Eternity Though for the Conceptions of the vulgar part of Mankind who are not capable of such abstruse Nations it be styled and truely too the sentence and punishment of a severe Judge I am extreemly pleased with him when he saith There are not Impossibilities enough in Religion for an Active Faith And no whit less when in Philosophy he will not be satisfied with such naked terms as in Schools use to be obtruded upon easie minds when the Master's fingers are not strong enough to untie the Knots proposed unto them I confess when I enquire what Light to use our Author's Example is I should be as well contented with his silence as with his telling me it is Actus perspicui unless he explicate clearly to me what those words mean which I find very few go about to do Such meat they swallow whole and eject it as entire But were such things Scientifically and Methodically declared they would be of extream Satisfaction and Delight And that work taketh up the greatest part of my formerly-mentioned Treatise For I endeavour to shew by a continued Progress and not by Leaps all the Motions of Nature and unto them to fit intelligibly the terms used by her best Secretaries whereby all wilde fantastick Qualities and Moods introduced for refuges of Ignorance are banished from Commerce In the next place my Lord I shall suspect that our Author hath not pennetrated into the bottom of those Conceptions that deep Scholars have taught us of Eternity Me thinketh he taketh it for an infinite Extension of time and a never ending Revolution of continual succession which is no more like Eternity than a gross Body is like a pure Spirit Nay such an Infinity of Revolutions is demonstrable to be a Contradiction and impossible In the state of Eternity there is no Succession no Change no Variety Souls or Angels in that condition do not so much as change a thought All things notions and actions that ever were are or shall be in any creature are actually present to such an Intellect And this my Lord I aver not as deriving it from Theology and having recourse to beatifick Vision to make good my Tenet for so onely glorified creatures should enjoy such immense knowledge but out of the principles of Nature and Reason and from thence shall demonstrate it to belong to the lowest Soul of the ignorantest wretch whilst he lived in this world since damned in Hell A bold undertaking you will say But I confidently engage my self to it Upon this occasion occurreth also a great deal to be said of the nature of Predestination which by the short touches our Author giveth of it I doubt he quite mistakes and how it is an unalterable Series and Chain of Causes producing infallible and in respect of them necessary Effects But that is too large a Theam to unfold here too vast an Ocean to describe in the scant Map of a Letter And therefore I will refer that to a fitter opportunity fearing I have already too much trespassed upon your Lordship's patience but that indeed I hope you have not had enough to read thus far I am sure my Lord that you who never forgot any thing which deserved a room in your memory do remember how we are told that Abyssus abyssum invocat so here our Author from the Abyss of Predestination falleth into that of the Trinity of Persons consistent with the Indivisibility of the Divine Nature And out of that if I be not exceedingly deceived into a third of mistaking when he goeth about to illustrate this admirable Mystery by a wild discourse of a Trinity in our Souls The dint of Wit is not forcible enough to dissect such tough Matter wherein all the obscure glimmering we gain of that
course of Nature and of Reason it is a mighty great blessing were it but in this regard that it giveth time leave to vent and boyl away the unquietnesses and turbulencies that follow our passions and to wean our selves gently from carnal affections and at the last to drop with ease and willingness like ripe fruit from the Tree as I remember Plotinus finely discourseth in one of his Eneads For when before the Season it is plucked off with violent hands or shaken down by rude and boysterous winds it carrieth along with it an indigested raw tast of the Wood and hath an unpleasant aigerness it its juyce that maketh it unfit for use till long time hath mellowed it And peradventure it may be so backward as in stead of ripening it may grow rotten in the very Center In like manner Souls that go out of their Bodies with affection to those Objects they leave behind them which usually is as long as they can relish them do retain still even in their Separation a by as and a languishing towards them which is the Reason why such terrene Souls appear oftenest in Coemeteries and Charnel-houses and not that moral one which our Author giveth For Life which is union with the body being that which carnal souls have straightest affection to and that they are loathest to be separated from their unquiet Spirit which can never naturally lose the impressions it had wrought in it at the time of its driving out lingereth perpetually after that dear Consort of his The impossibility cannot cure them of their impotent desires they would fain be alive again Iterumque ad tarda revierti Corpora Quae lucis miseris tam dira cupido And to this cause peradventure may be reduced the strange effect which is frequently seen in England When at the approach of the Murderer the slain body suddenly bleedeth afresh For certainly the Souls of them that are treacherously murdered by surprize use to leave their bodies with extream unwillingness and with vehement indignation against them that force them to so unprovided and abhorred a passage That Soul then to wreak its evil talent against the hated Murderer and to draw a just and desired revenge upon his head would do all it can to manifest the author of the fact To speak it cannot for in it self it wanteth Organs of voice and those it is parted from are now grown too heavy and are too benummed for it to give motion unto Yet some change it desireth to make in the body which it hath so vehement inclinations to and therefore is the aptest for it to work upon It must then endeavour to cause a motion in the subtilest and most fluid parts and consequently the most moveable ones of it This can be nothing but the Blood which then being violently moved must needs gush out at those places where it findeth issues Our Author cannot believe that the World will perish upon the ruines of its own principles But Mr. White hath demonstrated the end of it upon natural Reason And though the precise time for that general Destruction be inscrutable yet he learnedly sheweth an ingenious Rule whereby to measure in some sort the duration of it without being branded as our Author threatneth with convincible and Statute-madness or with impiety And whereas he will have the work of this last great Day the Summer up of all past days to imply annihilation and thereupon interesseth God only in it I must beg leave to contradict him namely in this Point and to affirm that the letting loose then of the activest Element to destroy this face of the World will but beget a change in it and that no annihilation can proceed from God Almighty For his Essence being as I said before self-existence it is more impossible that Not-being should flow from him than that cold should flow immediately from fire or darkness from the actual presence of light I must needs acknowledge that where he ballanceth Life and Death against one another and considereth that the latter is to be a Kind of nothing for a moment to become a pure Spirit within one instant and what followeth of this strong thought is extream handsomely said and argueth very gallant and generous Resolutions in him To exemplifie the Immortality of the Soul he needeth not have recourse to the Philosophers-stone His own store furnisheth him with a most pregnant one of reviving a Plant the same numerical Plant out of his own ashes But under his favour I believe his experiment will fail if under the notion of the same he comprehendeth all the Accidents that first accompanied that Plant for since in the ashes there remaineth onely the fixed Salt I am very confident that all the Colour and much of the Odour and Taste of it is flown away with the Volatile Salt What should I say of his making so particular a Narration of personal things and private thoughts of his own the knowledge whereof cannot much conduce to any mans betterment which I make account is the chief end of his writing this Discourse As where he speaketh of the soundness of his Body of the course of his Diet of the coolness of his Blood at the Summer-Solstice of his age of his neglect of an Epitaph how long he hath lived or may live what Popes Emperours Kings Grand-Seigniors he hath been Contemporary unto and the like Would it not be thought that he hath a special good opinion of himself and indeed he hath reason when he maketh such great Princes the Landmarks in the Chronology of himself Surely if he were to write by retale the particulars of his own Story and Life it would be a notable Romance since he telleth us in one total Sum it is a continued Miracle of thirty years Though he creepeth gently upon us at the first yet he groweth a Gyant an Atlas to use his own expression at the last But I will not censure him as he that made Notes upon Balsac's Letters and was angry with him for vexing his Readers with Stories of his Cholicks and voiding of Gravel I leave this kind of expressions without looking further into them In the next place my Lord I shall take occasion from our Author 's setting so main a difference between moral Honesty and Vertue or being vertuous to use his own phrase out of an inbred loyalty to Vertue and on the other side being vertuous for a rewards sake to discourse a little concerning Vertue in this life and the effects of it afterwards Truely my Lord however he seemeth to prefer this later I cannot but value the other much before it if we regard the nobleness and heroickness of the nature and mind from whence they both proceed And if we consider the Journeys end to which each of them carrieth us I am confident the first yieldeth nothing to the second but indeed both meet in the period of Beatitude To clear this point which is very well worth the wisest man's seriousest thought
a possibility of generation and therefore that opinion that Antichrist should be born of the Tribe of * Dan by conjunction with the Divil 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 Melancholly others the spirit of Delusion others that as the Devil is concealed and denyed 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 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 emperically practise without his advice they proceeding upon the principles of Nature where actives aptly conjoyned to disposed passives will under any Master produce their effects Thus I think at first a part of Philosophy was Witchcraft which being afterward derived to one another proved but Philosophy and was indeed no more but 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 constellatum multa revelat quaerentibus magnalia naturae i. e. opera Dei I do think that many mysteries ascribed to our own inventions have been the courteous 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 fore-run the ruines of States Princes and private persons are the charitable premonitions of good Angels which more careless enquiries term but the effects of chance and nature Sect. 32 Now besides these particular and divided Spirits there may be for ought I know an universal and common Spirit to the whole World It was the opinion of Plato and it is yet of the Hermetical Philosophers if there be a common nature that unites and tyes 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 fcintillation of that noble and mighty Essence which is the life and radical heat of spirits and those essences that know not the vertue 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 horrour 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 truely 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 Vp to the top of lofty Cancers back The ycie Ocean cracks the frozen pole Thaws with the heat of the Celestial coale So when thy absent beams begin t' impart Again a Solstice on my frozen heart My winter's ov'r my drooping spirits sing And every part revives into a Spring But if thy quickning 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 O 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 O 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 choak my devout aspires Sect. 33 Therefore for Spirits I am so far from denying their existence that I could easily believe that not onely 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 heresie in it and if not manifestly defin'd in Scripture yet is an opinion of a good and wholesome use in the course and actions of a mans 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 our selves 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 meer existence and things of life there is a large disproportion of nature between plants and animals of creatures of sense a wider difference between them and man a far greater and if the proportion hold one between Man an Angels there should be yet a greater We do not comprehend their natures who retain the first definition of Porphyry and distinguish them from our selves by immortality for before his Fall 't is thought 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 Natures 't is no bad method of the Schools whatsoever perfection we find obscurely in our selves in a more compleat 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 onely of the specifical but numerical forms of individuals and understand by what reserved difference each single Hypostasis 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 Lyons 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 reflexion 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 secondine 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 Philosophers Stone which is something more then the perfect exaltation 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 lye obscure and sleep a while within this house of flesh Those strange and mystical transmigrations that I have observed in Silk-worms turned my Philosophy into Divinity There is in these works of nature which seem to puzzle reason something Divine and hath more in it then 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 truely I am not so much afraid of death as ashamed thereof 't is 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 unpityed 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 for playing the bungler in any part of me or my own vitious life for contracting any shameful disease upon me whereby I might not call my self 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 meer fallacy unworthy the desires 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 memory of my name to be found any where but in the universal Register of God I am not yet so Cynical as to approve the Testament of Diogenes nor do I altogether allow that Rodomontado of Lucan Coelo tegitur qui non habet urnam He that unburied lies wants not his Herse For unto him a Tomb's the Vniverse But commend in my calmer judgement those ingenuous intentions that desire to sleep by the urns of theirs Fathers and strive to go the neatest way unto corruption * I do not envy the temper 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 as yet I have not seen one revolution of Saturn nor hath my pulse beat thirty years and yet excepting one have seen the Ashes left underground all the Kings of Europe have been contemporary to three Emperours four Grand Signiours and as many Popes methinks I have outlived my self 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 Pantalones 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 dye yet if as Divinity affirms there shall be no gray 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 super-annuated from sin it were worthy our knees to implore the days of Methuselah But age doth not rectifie 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 that circumstance of our ages wherein besides the constant and inexcusable habit of transgressing the maturity of our judgement cuts off pretence unto excuse or pardon every sin the oftner 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 thred of my days * not upon Cicero's ground 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 makes 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 Aesons bath before threescore Sect. 43 And truely there goes a great deal of providence to produce a mans life unto threescore there is more required than an able temper for those years though the radical humour contain in it sufficient oyl 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 balsome or vital sulphur of the parts determine not why Abel lived not so long as Adam There is therefore a secret glome or bottome of our days 't was his wisdom to determine them but his perpetual and waking providence that fulfils and accomplisheth them wherein the spirits our selves and all the creatures of God in a secret and disputed way do execute his will Let them not therefore complain of immaturity that dye 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
I chuse 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 that hath passed Aristotle who hath written a singular Tract of Sleep hath not methinks throughly defined it nor yet Galen though he seem to have corrected it for those Noctambuloes and night-walkers though in their sleep do yet injoy 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 corps as spirits with the bodies they assume wherein they seem to hear 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 her self and to discourse in a strain above mortality Sect. 12 We tearm sleep a death and yet it is waking that kills us and destroys those spirits that are the house of life 'T is indeed a part of life that best expresseth death for every man truely 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 't is 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 dye daily a death which Adam dyed 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 farewel 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 centry 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 O make me try By sleeping what it is to die And as gently lay my head On my grave as now my bed Howere I rest great God let me Awake again at least with thee And thus assur'd behold I lie Securely or to awake or die These are my drowsie days in vain I do now wake to sleep again O come that hour when I shall never Sleep again but wake for ever This is the Dormative 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 my self and supererogate in that common principle Do unto others as then wouldst he done unto thy self 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 our selves Urinals or be perswaded that we are dead is not so ridiculous nor so many degrees beyond the power of Hellebore as this The opinion 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 perswade my self to honour that the World adores whatsoever vertue 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 my self Aristotle is too severe that will not allow us to be truely 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 my self to do good I borrow occasion of Charity from mine own necessities and supply the wants of others when I am in most need my self for it is an honest stratagem to make advantage of our selves and so to husband the acts of vertue that where they were 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 Cantoes and miserable outsides these mutilate and semi bodies a soul of the same alloy with our own whose Genealogy is Gods as well as ours and is as fair a way to Salvation as our selves Statists that labour to contrive a Common-wealth without our poverty take away the object of charity not understanding only the Common wealth of Christian but
inaccessible Light cometh to us cloathed in the dark Weeds of Negations and therefore little can we hope to meet with any positive Examples to parallel it withal I doubt he also mistaketh and imposeth upon the several Schools when he intimateth that they gain-say this visible worlds being but a Picture or Shadow of the Invisible and Intellectual which manner of Philosophizing he attributeth to Hermes Trismegistus but is every where to be met with in Plato and is raised since to a greater height in the Christian Schools But I am sure he learned in no good School nor sucked from any good Philosophy to give an actual Subsistence and Being to first Matter without a Form He that will allow that a Real Existence in Nature is as superficially tincted in Metaphysicks as another would be in Mathematicks that should allow the like to a Point a Line or a Superficies in Figures These in their strict Notions are but Negations of further Extension or but exact Terminations of that Quantity which falleth under the Consideration of the Understanding in the present purpose no real Entities in themselves so likewise the Notions of Matter Form Act Power Existence and the like that are with Truth considered by the Understanding and have there each of them a distinct Entity are nevertheless no where by themselves in Nature They are terms which we must use in the Negotiations of our thoughts if we will discourse consequently and conclude knowingly But then again we must be very wary of attributing to things in their own Natures such Entities as we create in our Understandings when we make Pictures of them there for there every different consideration arising out of the different impression which the same thing maketh upon us hath a distinct Being by it self Whereas in the thing there is but one single Vnity that sheweth as it were in a Glass at several positions those various faces in our understanding In a word all these words are but artificial terms not real things And the not right understanding of them is the dangerousest Rock that Scholars suffer shipwrack against I go on with our Physician 's Contemplations Upon every occasion he sheweth strong parts and a vigorous brain His wishes and aims and what he pointeth at speak him owner of a noble and a generous heart He hath reason to wish that Aristotle had been as accurate in examining the Causes Nature and Affections of the great Universe he busied himself about as his Patriarch Galen hath been in the like considerations upon this little World Man's Body in that admirable Work of his De Vsu Partium But no great humane thing was ever born and perfected at once It may satisfie us if one in our age buildeth that magnificent Structure upon the others foundations and especially if where he findeth any of them unsound he eradicateth those and sixeth new unquestionable ones in their room But so as they still in gross keep a proportion and bear a Harmony with the other great Work This hath now even now our learned Countryman done The knowing Mr. White whose name I believe your Lordship hath met with al in his excellent Book De Mundo newly printed at Paris where he now resideth and is admired by the World of Letter'd men there as the Prodigie of these latter times Indeed his three Dialogues upon that Subject if I am able to judge any thing are full of the profoundest Learning I ever yet met withal And I believe who hath well read digested them will perswade himself there is no truth so abstruse nor hitherto conceived out of our reach but mans wit may raise Engines to scale and conquer I assure my self when our Author hath studied him throughly he will not lament so loud for Aristotle's mutilated and defective Philosophy as in Boccaline Caesar Caporali doth for the loss of Livies ship-wracked Decads That Logick which he quarrelleth at for calling a Toad or Serpent ugly will in the end agree with his for no body ever took them to be so in respect of the Vniverse in which regard he desendeth their Regularity and Symmetry but onely as they have relation to us But I cannot so easily agree with him where he affirmeth that Devils or other Spirits in the Intellectual World have no exact Ephemerides wherein they may read before-hand the Stories of fortuite Accidents For I believe that all Causes are so immediately chained to their Effects as if a perfect knowing Nature get hold but of one link it will drive the entire Series or Pedigree of the whole to its utmost end as I think I have proved in my fore-named Treatise so that in truth there is no Fortuitness or Contingency of things in respect of themselves but onely in respect of us that are ignorant of their certain and necessary Causes Now a little Series or Chain and Complex of all outward Circumstances whose highest link Poets say prettily is fasten'd to Jupiter's Chair and the lowest is riveted to every Individual on Earth steered and levelled by God Almighty at the first setting out of the first Mover I conceive to be that Divine Providence and Mercy which to use our Author 's own Example giveth a thriving Genius to the Hollanders and the like And not any secret invisible mystical Blessing that falleth not under the search or cognizance of a prudent indagation I must needs approve our Authors Aequanimity and I may as justly say his Magnanimity in being contented so cheerfully as he saith to shake hands with the fading Goods of Fortune and be deprived of the joys of her most precious blessings so that he may in recompence possess in ample measure the true ones of the mind like Epictetus that Master of moral Wisdom and Piety who taxeth them of high injustice that repine at Gods Distribution of his Blessings when he putteth not into their share of goods such things as they use no Industry or Means to purchase For why should that man who above all things esteemeth his own freedom and who to enjoy that sequestreth himself from commerce with the vulgar of mankind take it ill of his Stars if such Preferments Honours and Applauses meet not him as are painfully gained after long and tedious Services of Princes and brittle Dependances of humorous Favourites and supple Compliances with all sorts of Natures As for what he saith of Astrologie I do not conceive that wise men reject it so much for being repugnant to Divinity which he reconcileth well enough as for having no solid Rules or ground in Nature To rely too far upon that vain Art I judge to be rather folly than impiety unless in our censure we look to the first Origine of it which favoureth of the Idolatry of those Heathens that worshipping the Stars and heavenly Bodies for Deities did in a superstitious Devotion attribute unto them the Causality of all Effects beneath them And for ought I know the belief of solid Orbs in the Heavens