of special devotion, and over all these draw a black cypress, a veil of penitential sorrow and severe mortification, we shall soon answer the calumny and objection of a short life. He that governs the day and divides the hours, hastens from the eyes and observation of a merry sinner; but loves to stand still, and behold, and tell the sighs, and number the groans, and sadly-delicious accents of a grieved penitent. It is a vast work that any man may do, if he never be idle: and it is a huge way that a man may go in virtue, if he never goes out of his way by a vicious habit or a great crime; and he that perpetually reads good books, if his parts be answerable, will have a huge stock of knowledge. It is so in all things else. Strive not to forget your time, and suffer none of it to pass undiscerned ; and then measure your life, and tell me how you find the measure of its abode. However, the time we live is worth the money we pay for it; and therefore it is not to be thrown away. 3. When vicious men are dying, and scared with the affrighted truth of an evil conscience, they would give all the world for a year, for a month; nay, we read of some that called out with amazement, inducias usque ad manè, truce but till the morning and if that year or some few months were given those men think they could do miracles in it. And let us awhile suppose what Dives would have done, if he had been loosed from the pains of hell, and permitted to live on earth one year: would all the pleasures of the world have kept him one hour from : the temple? would he not perpetually have been under the hands of priests, or at the feet of the doctors, or by Moses's chair, or attending as near the altar as he could get, or relieving poor Lazarus, or playing to God, and crucifying all his sins? I have read of a melancholick person who saw hell but in a dream or vision, and the amazement was such, that he would have chosen ten times to die rather than to feel again so much of that horror: and such a person cannot be fancied but that he would spend a year in such holiness, that the religion of a few months would equal the devotion of many years, even of a good man. Let us but compute the proportions. If we should spend all our years of reason, so as such a person would spend that one, can it be thought that life would be short and trifling in which he had performed such a religion, served God with so much holiness, mortified sin with so great a labour, purchased virtue at such a rate, and so rare an industry? It must needs be that such a man must die when he ought to die, and be like ripe and pleasant fruit falling from a fair tree, and gathered into baskets for the planter's use. He that hath done all his business, and is begotten to a glorious hope by the seed of an immortal spirit*, can never die too soon, nor live too long. Xerxes wept sadly when he saw his army of 1,300,000 men, because he considered that within an hundred years all the youth of that army should be * Huic neque defungi visum est, nec vivere pulchrum ? dust and ashes: and yet, as Seneca well observes of him, he was the man that should bring them to their graves, and he consumed all that army in two years, for whom he feared and wept the death after an hundred. Just so we do all. We complain that within thirty or forty years, a little more, or a great deal less, we shall descend again into the bowels of our mother, and that our life is too short for any great employment; and yet we throw away five and thirty years of our forty, and the remaining five we divide between art and nature, civility and customs, necessity and convenience, prúdent counsels and religion: but the portion of the last is little and contemptible, and yet that little is all that we can prudently account of our lives. We bring that fate and that death near us, of whose approach we are so sadly apprehensive. 4. In taking the accounts of your life do not reckon by great distances, and by the periods of pleasure, or the satisfaction of your hopes, or the starting your desires; but let every intermedial day and hour pass with observation. He that reckons he hath lived but so many harvests, thinks they come not often enough, and that they go away too soon. Some loose the day with longing for the night, and the night in waiting for the day. Hope and fantastick expectations spend much of our lives; and while with passion we look for * In spe viventibus proximum quodcunque tempus elabitur, subitque aviditas temporis, et miserrimus, atque miserrima omnia efficiens, metus mortis. Ex hac autem indigentia timor nascitur, et cupiditas futuri exedens animum. Seneca. No. 2. F a coronation, or the death of an enemy, or a day of joy passing from fancy to possession without any intermedial notices, we throw away a precious year, and use it but as the burthen of our time, fit to be pared off and thrown away, that we may come at those little pleasures which first steal our hearts, and then steal our life. 5. A strict course of piety is the way to prolong our lives in the natural sense, and to add good portions to the number of our years: and sin is sometimes by natural casualty, very often by the anger of God, and the divine judgment, a cause of sudden and untimely death. Concerning which I shall add nothing (to what I have somewhere else said of this article) but only the observation of Epiphanius ; that for 3332 years, even to the twentieth age, there was not one example of a son that died before his father, but the course of nature was kept, that he who was first-born in the descending line did first die, (I speak of natural death, and therefore Abel cannot be opposed to this observation) till that Terah, the father of Abraham, taught the people a new religion, to make images of clay and worship them; and concerning him it was first remarked, that Haran died before his father Terah in the land of his nativity: God by an unheard of judgment, and rare accident, punishing his newly invented crime, by the untimely death of his son. 6. But if I shall describe a living man, a man that hath that life that distinguishes him from a fool or a *Life of Christ, Par. 3. Disc. 14. Lib. 1 Tom. 1. Panar. Sec. 6. bird, that which gives him a capacity next to angels; we shall find that even a good man lives not long because it is long before he is born to this life, and longer yet before he hath a man's growth *. "He that can look upon death, and see its face with the same countenance with which he hears its story; that can endure all the labours of his life with his soul supporting his body; that can equally despise riches when he hath them, and when he hath them not; that is not sadder if they lie in his neighbour's trunks, nor more brag if they shine round about his own walls; he that is neit ther moved with good-fortune coming to him, nor going from him; that can look upon another man's lands evenly and pleasedly as if they were his own, and yet look upon his own and use them too, just as if they were another man's; that neither spends his goods prodigally and like a fool, nor yet keeps them avariciously and like a wretch, that weighs not benefits by weight and number, but by the mind and circumstances of him that gives them; that never thinks his charity expensive, if a worthy person be the receiver: he that does nothing for opinion sake, but every thing for conscience, being as curious of his thoughts as of his actings in markets and theatres, and is as much, in awe of himself, as of a whole assembly; he that. knows God looks on, and contrives his secret affairs as in the presence of God and his holy angels; that eats and drinks because he needs it, not that he may serve a lust or load his belly; he that is bountiful * Seneca, de Vità. Beatâ, cap. 20. ' |