most beauteous attribute, no man can attain unto it, yet Solomon pleased God when he desired it. He is wise because he knows all things, and he knoweth all things because he made them all; but his greatest knowledge is in comprehending that he made not, that is, himself. And this is also the greatest knowledge in man. For this do I honour my own profession, and embrace the counsel even of the devil himself; had he read such a lecture in paradise as he did at Delphos,* we had better known ourselves, nor had we stood in fear to know him. I know he is wise in all, wonderful in what we conceive, but far more in what we comprehend not; for we behold him but asquint, upon reflex or shadow; our understanding is dimmer than Moses' eye, we are ignorant of the back parts or lower side of his divinity. Therefore to pry into the maze of his counsels, is not only folly in man, but presumption even in angels; like us, they are his servants not his senators; he holds no council but that mystical one of the Trinity, wherein though there be three Persons, there is but one mind, that decrees without contradiction; nor needs he any, his actions are not begot with deliberation, his wisdom naturally knows what is best; his intellect stands ready fraught with the superlative and purest ideas of goodness; consultation and election, which are two motions in us, make but one in him; his actions springing from his power, at the first touch of his will. These are contemplations metaphysical; my humble speculations have another method, and are content to trace and discover those expressions he hath left in his creatures, and the obvious effects of nature. There is no danger * [vadi OEXUTòr. Nosce teipsum. to profound these mysteries, no sanctum sanctorum in philosophy; the world was made to be inhabited by beasts, but studied and contemplated by man; 'tis the debt of our reason we owe unto God, and the homage we pay for not being beasts; without this the world is still as though it had not been, or as it was before the sixth day, when as yet there was not a creature that could conceive or say there was a world. The wisdom of God receives small honour from those vulgar heads that rudely stare about, and with a gross rusticity admire his works; those highly magnify him, whose judicious inquiry into his acts, and deliberate research into his creatures, return the duty of a devout and learned admiration. Therefore Search while thou wilt, and let thy reason go But unto reason can he e'er be known. The devils do know thee, but those damned meteours Teach my endeavours so thy works to read, That learning them, in thee I may proceed. Give thou my reason that instructive flight, Whose weary wings may on thy hands still light; Teach me to soar aloft, yet ever so, When near the sun to stoop again below; Thus shall my humble feathers safely hover, And though near earth, more than the heavens discover. And then at last, when homeward I shall drive Rich with the spoils of nature to my hive, And this is almost all wherein an humble creature may endeavour to requite, and some way to retribute unto his Creator; for if not he that sayeth, Lord, Lord, but he that doeth the will of his Father, shall be saved, certainly our wills must be our performances, and our intents make out our actions; otherwise our pious labours shall find anxiety in their graves, and our best endeavours not hope but fear a resurrection. XIV. There is but one first cause, and four second causes of all things; some are without efficient, as God; others without matter, as angels; some without form, as the first matter; but every essence created or uncreated, hath its final cause, and some positive end both of its essence and operation; this is the cause I grope after in the works of nature, on this hangs the providence of God: to raise so beauteous a structure as the world and the creatures thereof, was but his art, but their sundry and divided operations with their predestinated ends, are from the treasury of his wisdom. In the causes, nature, and affections of the eclipses of the sun and moon, there is most excellent speculation; but to profound farther, and to contemplate a reason why his providence hath so disposed and ordered their motions in that vast circle, as to conjoin and obscure each other, is a sweeter piece of reason and a diviner point of philosophy; therefore sometimes, and in some things, there appears to me as much divinity in Galen his books de usu partium, as in Suarez' metaphysics: had Aristotle been as curious in the inquiry of this cause as he was of the other, he had not left behind him an imperfect piece of philosophy, but an absolute tract of divinity. XV. Natura nihil agit frustra, is the only indis putable axiom in philosophy; there are no grotesques in nature, nor any thing framed to fill up empty cantons, and unnecessary spaces; in the most imperfect creatures, and such as were not preserved in the ark, but having their seeds and principles in the womb of nature, are everywhere where the power of the sun is, in these is the wisdom of his hand discovered; out of this rank Solomon chose the object of his admiration; indeed what reason may not go to school to the wisdom of bees, ants, and spiders? What wise hand teacheth them to do what reason cannot teach us? Ruder heads stand amazed at those prodigious pieces of nature, whales, elephants, dromedaries and camels; these, I confess, are the colossus and majestick pieces of her hand; but in these narrow engines there is more curious mathematicks, and the civility of these little citizens more neatly sets forth the wisdom of their Maker. Who admires not Regio-Montanus his fly beyond his eagle? or wonders not more at the operation of two souls in those little bodies, than but one in the trunk of a cedar? I could never content my contemplation with those general pieces of wonder, the flux and reflux of the sea, the increase of Nile, the conversion of the needle to the north; and have studied to match and parallel those in the more obvious and neglected pieces of nature, which without further travel I can do in the cosmography of myself. We carry with us the wonders we seek without us; there is all Africa and her prodigies in us; we are that bold and adventurous piece of nature, which he that studies, wisely learns in a compendium what others labour at in a divided piece and endless volume. XVI. Thus there are two books from whence I col lect my divinity; besides that written one of God, another of his servant nature, that universal and publick manuscript that lies expansed unto the eyes of all; those that never saw him in the one have discovered him in the other this was the scripture and theology of the heathens; the natural motion of the sun made them more admire him, than its supernatural station did the children of Israel; the ordinary effect of nature wrought more admiration in them, than in the other all his miracles; surely the heathens knew better how to join and read these mystical letters than we Christians, who cast a more careless eye on these common hieroglyphicks, and disdain to suck divinity from the flowers of nature. Nor do I so forget God as to adore the name of nature; which I define not with the schools, the principle of motion and rest, but that straight and regular line, that settled and constant course the wisdom of God hath ordained the actions of his creatures, according to their several kinds. To make a revolution every day is the nature of the sun, because of that necessary course which God hath ordained it, from which it cannot swerve but by a faculty from that voice which first gave it motion. Now this course of nature God seldom alters or perverts, but like an excellent artist hath so contrived his work, that with the selfsame instrument, without a new creation, he may effect his obscurest designs. Thus he sweeteneth the water with a wood; preserveth the creatures in the ark, which the blast of his mouth might have as easily created; for God is like a skilful geometrician, who when more easily and with one stroke of his compass he might describe or divide a right line, had yet rather do this in a |