in it sufficient oil 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 balsam, or vital sulphur of the parts, determine not why Abel lived not so long as Adam. There is therefore a secret glome or bottom of our days. 'T was his wisdom to determine them, but his perpetual and waking providence that fulfils and accomplisheth them, wherein the spirits, ourselves, and all the creatures of God, in a secret and disputed way, do execute his will. Let them not therefore complain of immaturity that die 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 things are completed in it, its age is accomplished; and the last and general fever may as naturally destroy it before six thousand, as me before forty. There is therefore some other hand that twines the thread of life than that of nature. We are not only ignorant in antipathies and occult qualities; our ends are as obscure as our beginnings; the line of our days is drawn by night, and the various effects therein by a pencil that is invisible; wherein, though we confess our ignorance, I am sure we do not err if we say it is the hand of God.

I am much taken with two verses of Lucan, since I have been able not only, as we do at school, to construe, but understand.

Victurosque Dei celant, ut vivere durent,
Felix esse mori.

We're all deluded, vainly searching ways
To make us happy by the length of days;
For cunningly to make 's protract this breath,]
The gods conceal the happiness of death.

There be many excellent strains in that poet, wherewith his stoical genius hath liberally supplied him; and truly there are singular pieces in the philosophy of Zeno, and doctrine of the Stoics, which I perceive, delivered in a pulpit, pass for current divinity. Yet herein are they in extremes, that can allow a man to be his own assassin, and so highly extol the end and suicide of Cato. This is indeed not to fear death, but yet to be afraid of life. It is a brave act of valor to contemn death; but where life is more terrible than death, it is then the truest valor to dare to live; and herein religion hath taught us a noble example. For all the valiant acts of Curtius, Scævola, or Codrus, do not parallel or match that one of Job; and sure there is no torture to the rack of a disease, nor any poniards in death itself, like those in the way or prologue to it. "Emori nolo, sed me esse mortuum nihil curo;" I would not die, but

care not to be dead. gion, I should be of his desires, and wish rather to go off at one blow, than to be sawed in pieces by the grating torture of a disease. Men that look no farther than their outsides, think health an appurtenance unto life, and quarrel with their constitutions for being sick; but I, that have examined the parts of man, and know upon what tender filaments the fabric hangs, do wonder that we are not always so; and considering the thousand doors that lead to death, do thank my God that we can die but once. 'T is not only the mischief of diseases, and the villany of poisons, that make an end of us; we vainly accuse the fury of guns, and the new inventions of death; it is in the power of every hand to destroy us, and we are beholden unto every one we meet, he doth not kill us. There is therefore but one comfort left, that though it be in the power of the weakest arm to take away life, it is not in the strongest to deprive us of death. God would not exempt himself from that; the misery of immortality in the flesh he undertook not that was immortal. Certainly there is no happiness within this circle of flesh, nor is it in the optics of these eyes to behold felicity; the first day of our jubilee is death. The devil hath therefore failed of his desires; we are happier with death than we should have

Were I of Cæsar's reli

been without it. There is no misery but in himself, where there is no end of misery; and so indeed, in his own sense, the Stoic is in the right. He forgets that he can die who complains of misery; we are in the power of no calamity while death is in our own.

Now besides this literal and positive kind of death, there are others whereof divines make mention, and those, I think, not merely metaphorical, as mortification, dying unto sin and the world. Therefore, I say, every man hath a double horoscope, one of his humanity, his birth; another of his Christianity, his baptism; and from this do I compute or calculate my nativity; not reckoning those "horæ combusta" and odd days, or esteeming myself any thing, before I was my Saviour's, and enrolled in the register of Christ. Whosoever enjoys not this life, I count him but an apparition, though he wear about him the sensible affections of flesh. In these moral acceptions, the way to be immortal is to die daily; nor can I think I have the true theory of death, when I contemplate a skull, or behold a skeleton, with those vulgar imaginations it casts upon us. I have therefore enlarged that common "Memento mori," into a more Christian memorandum, "Memento quatuor novissima," those four inevitable points of us all, death, judgment, hea

ven, and hell. Neither did the contemplations of the heathens rest in their graves, without further thought of Rhadamanth or some judicial proceeding after death, though in another way, and upon suggestion of their natural reasons. I cannot but marvel from what sibyl or oracle they stole the prophecy of the world's destruction by fire, or whence Lucan learned to say,

Communis mundo superest rogus, ossibus astra
Misturus.

There yet remains to the world one common fire,
Wherein our bones with stars shall make one pyre.

I believe the world grows near its end, yet is neither old nor decayed, nor shall ever perish upon the ruins of its own principles. As the work of creation was above nature, so its adversary, annihilation; without which the world hath not its end, but its mutation. Now what force should be able to consume it thus far, without the breath of God, which is the truest consuming flame, my philosophy cannot inform

me.

Some believe there went not a minute to the world's creation, nor shall there go to its destruction; those six days so punctually described, make not to them one moment, but rather seem to manifest the method and idea of the great work of the intellect of God, than