versation with ourselves, nay, we keep spies about us that we may not have; and if we feel a suggestion, hear an importunate call from within, we divert it by company or quiet it with sleep; and when we wake, no man runs faster from an enemy than we do from ourselves, get to our friends that we may not be with ourselves. This is not only an epidemical disease that spreads everywhere, but effected and purchased at as great a price as most other of our diseases, with the expence of all our precious time; one moment of which we are not willing to bestow upon ourselves, though it would make the remainder of it more useful to us, and to others upon whom we prodigally consume it, without doing good to them or ourselves: whereas, if we would be conversant with ourselves, and as ingenuous and impartial in that conversation as we pretend to be with other men, we should find that we have very much of that at home by us, which we take wonderful unnecessary pains to get abroad; and that we have much of that in our own disposal, which we endeavour to obtain from others; and possess ourselves of that happiness from ourselves, whether it concerns our ambition or any other of our most exorbitant passions or affections, which more provoke and less satisfy by resorting to other men, who are either not willing to gratify us, or not able to comply with our desires; and

the trouble and agony, which for the most part accompanies those disappointments, proceeds merely from our not beginning with ourselves before we repair to others.

It is not the purpose and end of this discourse, to raise such seraphical notions of the vanity and pleasures of this world, as if they were not worthy to be considered, or could have no relish with virtuous and pious men. They take very unprofitable pains, who endeavour to persuade men that they are obliged wholly to despise this world and all that is in it, even whilst they themselves live here: God hath not taken all that pains in forming and framing and furnishing and adorning this world, that they who were made by him to live in it should despise it; it will be enough if they do not love it so immoderately, to prefer it before Him who made it: nor shall we endeavour to extend the notions of the Stoic philosophers, and to stretch them farther by the help of Christian precepts, to the extinguishing all those affections and passions, which are and will always be inseparable from human nature; and which it were to be wished that many Christians could govern and suppress and regulate, as well as many of those heathen philosophers used to do. As long as the world lasts, and honour and virtue and industry have reputation in the world, there will be ambition and emu

lation and appetite in the best and most accomplished men who live in it; if there should not be, more barbarity and vice and wickedness would cover every nation of the world, than it yet suffers under. If wise and honest and virtuously-disposed men quit the field, and leave the world to the pillage, and the manners of it to the deformation of persons dedicated to rapine, luxury, and injustice, how savage must it grow in half an age? nor will the best princes be able to govern and preserve their subjects, if the best men be without ambition and desire to be employed and trusted by them. The end therefore of this speculation into ourselves, and conversation with ourselves, is, that we may make our journey towards that which we do propose with the more success; that we may be discreet in proposing reasonable designs, and then pursue them by reasonable ways; foresee all the difficulties which are probable to fall out, that so we may prevent or avoid them; since we may be sure to master and avoid them to a great degree by foreseeing them, and as sure to be confounded by them, if they fall upon us without foresight. In a word, it is not so to consult with ourselves, as to consult with nobody else; or to dispose us to prefer our own judgment before any other man's: but first, by an impartial conference with ourselves, we may understand first our own mind, what it is

we would have, and why we would have it, before we consult with others which way to compass it, that we may set both the matter we desire and the manner of obtaining it before our own eyes, and spend our passions upon ourselves in the disquisition.

It is no wonder that when we are prodigal of nothing else, when we are over-thrifty of many things which we may well spare, we are very prodigal of our time, which is the only precious jewel of which we cannot be too thrifty, because we look upon it as nothing worth, and that makes us not care how we spend it. The labouring man and the artificer knows what every hour of his time is worth, what it will yield him, and parts not with it but for the full value: they are only noblemen and gentlemen, who should know best how to use it, that think it only fit to be cast away; and their not knowing how to set a true value upon this, is the true cause of the wrong estimate they make of all other things; and their ignorance of that proceeds only from their holding no correspondence with themselves, or thinking at all before they begin their journey, before they violently set their affections upon this or that object, until they find they are out of the way, and meet with false guides to carry them farther out. We should find much ease in our pursuits, and probably much better success

in our attempts and enterprises in the world, if, before we are too solicitous and set our heart upon any design, we would well weigh and consider the true value of the thing we desire, whether it be indeed worth all that trouble we shall be put to, and all the time we are like to spend in the obtaining it, and upon it after we have obtained it: if this inquisition doth not divert us, as it need not to do, it will the better prepare and dispose us to be satisfied after we have it; whereas nothing is more usual than for men who succeed in their most impatient pretences, to be more unsatisfied with their success than they were before; it is not worth what they thought or were persuaded it would be, so that their appetite is not at all allayed, nor their gratitude provoked, by the obligation; a little previous consideration would have better fitted the mind to contentedness upon the issue, or diverted it from affecting what would not be acceptable when obtained. In the next place, we should do well prudently to consider, whether it be probable that we shall obtain what we desire, before we engage our affections and our passions too deeply in the prosecution of it; not that we may not lawfully affect and prosecute an interest in which it is very probable we may not succeed. Men who always succeed in what they go about, are often the worse for their success; however, we