PART II. SECT. XII. Good-na tured persons for Heaven. Although their Thoughts may seem too severe, who think that few ill-natur'd Men go to Heaven; yet it may be acknowledged that goodbest founded natur'd Persons are best founded for that place; who enter the World with good Dispositions and natural Graces, more ready to be advanced by impressions from above, and christianized unto pieties; who carry about them plain and down-right dealing Minds, Humility, Mercy, Charity, and Virtues acceptable unto GOD and Man. But whatever success they may have as to Heaven, they are the acceptable Men on Ps. cxxvii. 5. Earth, and happy is he who hath his quiver full of them for his Friends. These are not the Dens wherein Falshood lurks, and Hypocrisy hides its Head, wherein Frowardness makes its Nest, or where Malice, Hard-heartedness, and Oppression love to dwell; not those by whom the Poor get little, and the Rich some time loose all; Men not of retracted Looks, but who carry their Hearts in their Faces, and need not to be look'd upon with perspectives; not sordidly or mischievously ingrateful; who cannot learn to ride upon the neck of the afflicted, nor load the heavy laden, but who keep the Temple of Janus shut by peaceable and quiet tempers; who make not only the best Friends, but the best Enemies, as easier to forgive than offend, and ready to pass by the second offence before they avenge the first; who make natural Royalists, obedient Subjects, kind and merciful Princes, verified in our own, one of the best-natur'd Kings of this Throne. Of the old Roman Emperours the best were the best-natur'd; though PART II. they made but a small number, and might be writ in a Ring. Many of the rest were as bad Men as Princes; Humorists rather than of good humors, and of good natural parts rather than of good natures; which did but arm their bad inclinations, and make them wittily wicked. Many See above, p. 130. With what strift and pains we come into the SECT. XIII. World we remember not; but 'tis commonly found no easy matter to get out of it. have studied to exasperate the ways of Death, but fewer hours have been spent to soften that necessity. That the smoothest way unto the grave is made by bleeding, as common opinion presumeth, beside the sick and fainting Languors which accompany that effusion, the experiment in Lucan and Seneca will make us doubt; under which the noble Stoick so deeply laboured, that, to conceal his affliction, he was fain to retire from the sight of his Wife, and not ashamed to implore the merciful hand of his Physician to shorten his misery therein. Ovid, the old Heroes, and the Stoicks, who were so afraid of drowning, (as dreading thereby the extinction of their Soul, which they conceived to be a Fire,) stood probably in fear of an easier way of Death; wherein the Water, entring the possessions of Air, makes a temperate suffocation, and kills as it were without a Fever. Surely many, who have had the Spirit to destroy themselves, have not been ingenious in the contrivance thereof. 'Twas a dull way practised by Themistocles to overwhelm himself with PART II. Bulls-blood, who, being an Athenian, might have held an easier Theory of Death from the state potion of his Country; from which Socrates in Plato seemed not to suffer much more than from the fit of an Ague. Cato is much to be pitied, who mangled himself with poyniards; and Hannibal seems more subtle, who carried his delivery, not in the point but the pummel of his Sword. To learn to die, better than to study the ways of dying. The Egyptians were merciful contrivers, who destroyed their malefactors by Asps, charming their senses into an invincible sleep, and killing as it were with Hermes his Rod. The Turkish Emperour, odious for other Cruelty, was herein a remarkable Master of Mercy, killing his Favorite in his sleep, and sending him from the shade into the house of darkness. He who had been thus destroyed would hardly have bled at the presence of his destroyer; when Men are already dead by metaphor, and pass but from one sleep unto another, wanting herein the eminent part of severity, to feel themselves to dye, and escaping the sharpest attendant of Death, the lively apprehension thereof. But to learn to dye is better than to study the ways of dying. Death will find some ways to unty or cut the most Gordian Knots of Life, and make men's miseries as mortal as themselves: whereas evil Spirits, as undying Substances, are unseparable from their calamities; and therefore they everlastingly struggle under their Angustia's, and bound up with immortality can never get out of themselves. CHRISTIAN MORALS PART III. IS hard to find a whole Age to imitate, or SECT. I. "That Century to propose for Example. No one age exemplary Some have been far more approveable than others but Virtue and Vice, Panegyricks and Satyrs, scatteringly to be found in all. History sets down not only things laudable, but abominable; things which should never have been or never have been known: so that noble patterns must be fetched here and there from single Persons, rather than whole Nations, and from all Nations, rather than any one. The World was the world early bad. early bad, and the first sin the most deplorable of any. The younger World afforded the oldest Men, and perhaps the Best and the Worst, when length of days made virtuous habits heroical and immoveable, vitious, inveterate and irreclaimable. And since 'tis said that the imaginations of their hearts were evil, only evil, Gen. vi. 5. and continually evil; it may be feared that their sins held pace with their lives; and their Longevity swelling their Impieties, the Longanimity of GOD would no longer endure such vivacious PART III. abominations. Their Impieties were surely of a deep dye, which required the whole Element of Water to wash them away, and overwhelmed their memories with themselves; and so shut up the first Windows of Time, leaving no Histories of those longevous generations, when Men might have been properly Historians, when Adam might have read long Lectures unto Methuselah, and Methuselah unto Noah. For had we been happy in just Historical accounts of that unparallel'd World, we might have been acquainted with Wonders, and have understood not a little of the Acts and undertakings of Moses his mighty Men, and Men of renown of old; which might have enlarged our Thoughts, and made the World older unto us. For the unknown part of time shortens the estimation, if not the compute of it. What hath escaped our Knowledge falls not under our Consideration, and what is and will be latent is little better than non-existent. SECT. II. GOD who imitates Him. Some things are dictated for our Instruction, some acted for our Imitation, wherein 'tis best to ascend unto the highest conformity, and to He honours the honour of the Exemplar. He honours GOD who imitates Him. For what we virtuously imitate we approve and admire; and since we delight not to imitate Inferiors, we aggrandize and magnify those we imitate; since also we are most apt to imitate those we love, we testify our affection in our imitation of the Inimitable. To affect to be like may be no imitation. To act, and not to be what we pretend to imitate, |