reckons many years; for still his soul is childish, and trifling like an untaught boy.

If the parts of this sad complaint find their remedy, we have by the same instruments also cured the evils and the vanity of a short life; therefore,

1. Be infinitely curious you do not set back your life in the accounts of God, by the intermingling of criminal actions, or the contracting vicious habits. There are some vices which carry a sword in their hand, and cut a man off before his time. There is a sword of the Lord, and there is a sword of a Man, and there is a sword of the Devil. Every vice of our own managing in the matter of carnality, of lust or rage, ambition or revenge, is a sword of Satan put into the hands of a man: these are the destroying angels; sin is the Apollyon, the destroyer that is gone out, not from the Lord, but from the tempter; and we hug the poison, and twist willingly with the vipers, till they bring us into the regions of an irrecoverable sorrow. We use to reckon persons as good as dead, if they have lost their limbs and their teeth, and are confined to an hospital, and converse with none but surgeons and physicians, mourners and divines, those Pollinctores, the dressers of bodies and souls to funeral: but it is worse when the soul, the principle of life, is employed wholly in the offices of death: and that man was worse than dead of whom Seneca tells, that being a rich fool, when he was lifted up from the baths and set into a soft couch, asked his slaves, An ego jam sedea? Do I now sit? the beast was so drowned in sensuality

and the death of his soul, that whether he did sit or no, he was to believe another. Idleness and every vice is as much of death as a long disease is, or the expence of ten years: and she that lives in pleasure is dead while she liveth, (saith the apostle,) and it is the style of the spirit concerning wicked persons, they are dead in tresspasses and sins. For as every sensual pleasure, and every day of idleness and useless living lops off a little branch from our short life; so every deadly sin, and every habitual vice does quite destroy us: but innocence leaves us in our natural portions and perfect period: we lose nothing of our life, if we lose nothing of our soul's health; and therefore he that would live a full age must avoid a sin, as he would decline the regions of death, and the dishonours of the grave.

2. If we would have our life lengthened *, let us begin betimes to live in the accounts of reason and sober counsels, of religion and the spirit, and then we shall have no reason to complain that our abode on carth is so short: many men find it long enough, and indeed it is so to all senses. But when we spend in waste what God has given us in plenty, when we sacrifice our youth to folly, our manhood to lust and rage, our old age to covetousness and irreligion, not beginning to live till we are to die, designing that time to virtue which indeed is infirm to every thing,

* Ædepol, proinde ut bene diu vivitur. Plaut. Trinum. Non accepimus brevem vitam, sed fecimus, nec inopes ejus, sed prodigi sumus. Seneca.

and, profitable to nothing: then we make our lives short, and lust runs away with all the vigorous and healthful part of it, and pride and animosity steal the manly portion, and craftiness and interest possess old age; velut ex pleno et abundanti perdimus, we spend as if we had too much time, and knew not what to do with it, we fear every thing, like weak and silly mortals; and desire strangely, and greedily, as if we were immortal; we complain our life is short, and yet we throw away much of it, and are weary of many of its parts: we complain the day is long, and the night is long and we want company, and seek our arts to drive the time away, and then weep because it is gone too soon. But so the treasure of the capitol is but a small estate when Cæsar comes to finger it, and to pay with it all his legions; and the revenue of all Egypt and the eastern provinces was but a little sum, when they were to support the luxury of Mark Antony, and feed the riot of Cleopatra. But a thousand crowns is a vast proportion to be spent in the cottage of a frugal person, or to feed an hermit. Just so is our life: it is too short to serve the ambition of a haughty prince, or an usurping rebel: too little time to purchase great wealth, to satisfy the pride of a vain-glorious fool, to trample upon all the enemies of our just or unjust interest: but for the obtaining virtue, for the purchase of sobriety and modesty, for the actions of religion, God gave us time sufficient, if we make the outgoings of the morning and evening, that is, our infancy and old age, to be taken into the computations

1

of a man, which we may see in the following particulars..

1. If our childhood, being first consecrated by a forward baptism, be seconded by a holy education, and a complying obedience; if our youth, be chaste and temperate, modest and industrious, proceeding through a prudent and sober manhood * to a religious old age; then we have lived our whole duration, and shall never die, but be changed in a just time to the preparations of a better and an immortal life.'

2. If besides the ordinary returns of our prayers, and periodical and festival solemnities, and our seldom communions, we would allow to religion and the studies of wisdom those great shares that are trifled away upon vain sorrow, foolish mirth, troublesome ambition, busy covetousness, watchful lust, and impertinent amours, and balls, and revellings, and banquets, all that which was spent viciously, and all that time that lay fallow and without employment, our life would quickly amount to a great sum. Tostatus Abulensis was a very painful person, and a great clerk, and in the days of his manhood he wrote so many books, and they not ill ones, that the world computed a sheet for every day of his life ; I suppose they meant, after he came to the use of reason and the state of a man :

* Sed potes Publi, geminare magna

Secula famâ

Quem sui raptum gemuère cives,
Hic diu vixit. Sibi quisque famam
Scribat hæradem; rapiunt avaræ

Cetera Lune.

year

and John Scotus died about the two and thirtieth of his age; and yet besides his public disputations, his daily lectures of divinity in public and private, the books that he wrote, being lately collected and printed at Lyons, do equal the number of volumes of any two the most voluminous fathers of the Latin church: Every man is not enabled to such employments, but every man is called and enabled to the works of a sober and religious life; and there are many saints of God that can reckon as many volumes of religion, and mountains of piety, as those others did of good books. St. Ambrose, (and I think from his example, St. Augustine) divided every day into three tertias of employment: eight hours he spent in the necessities of nature and recreation; eight hours in charity and doing assistance to others, dispatching their businesses, reconciling their enmities, reproving their vices, correcting their errors, instructing their ignorances, transacting the affairs of his diocese; and the other eight hours he spent in study and prayer. If we were thus minute and curious in the spending our time, it is impossible but our life would seem very long. For so have I seen an amorous person tell the minutes of his absence from his fancied joy, and while he told the sands of his hour glass, or the throbs and little beatings of his watch, by dividing an hour into so many members, he spun out its length by number, and so translated a day into the tediousness of a month. And if we tell our days by canonical hours of prayer, our weeks by a constant revolution of fasting days, or days