tions as the heart or hand of man can be guilty of; and they might as well have called it an impious conscience; when in truth, if it be either impious or erroneous, it ceaseth to be conscience; it is not consistent with any of those destructive epithets, nor receives any ornament from the best which can be annexed to it. Conscience implies goodness and piety, as much as if you call it good and pious. The luxuriant wit of the school-men and the confident fancy of ignorant preachers has so disguised it, that all the extravagancies of a light or a sick brain, and the results of the most corrupt heart, are called the effects of conscience: and to make it the better understood, the conscience shall be called erroneous, or corrupt, or tender, as they have a mind to support or condemn those effects. So that, in truth, they have made conscience a disease fit to be entrusted to the care of the physician every spring and fall, and he is most like to reform and regulate the operation of it. And if the madness and folly of men be not in a short time reformed, it will be fitter to be confined as a term in physic and in law, than to be used or applied to religion or salvation. Let apothecaries be guided by it in their bills, and merchants in their bargains, and lawyers in managing their causes; in all which cases it may be waited upon by the epithets they think fit to annex to it; it is in great danger to be robbed of the integrity in which it was created, and will not have purity enough to carry men to heaven, or to choose the way thither. It were to be wished, that some pains were taken to purge away that dross, which want of understanding, or want of honesty, have annexed to it, that so it may prove a 1 good guide; or that that varnish may be taken Solomon was the more inexcusable for departing : guest at a feast; therefore it cannot be a good conscience: anger and ill words break up any feast; for mirth, that is of the essence of a feast, and a great part of the good cheer, is banished by any ill humour that appears. It is not the quantity of the meat, but the cheerfulness of the guests, which makes the feast; it was only at the feast of the Centaurs, where they ate with one hand, and had their drawn swords in the other; where there is no peace, there can be no feast. Charity and tenderness is a principal ingredient in this feast: the conscience cannot be too tender, too apprehensive of angrying any man, of grieving any man; the feast is the more decently carried on never interrupted by this tenderness. But if it be tender at some times, scrupulous to some purposes, is startled to do somewhat against which it hath no objection, but that it is not absolutely necessary to be done, and at other times is so rough and boisterous, that it leaps over all bounds, and rushes into actions dishonest and unwarrantable, neither the tenderness nor the presumption hath the least derivation from conscience: and a man in a deep consumption of the lungs can as well run a race, as a tender conscience can lead any man into an action contrary to virtue and piety. It is possible that the frequent appeals that are made upon several occasions to the consciences of ill men, do in truth increase their love of wickedness; that when they are told that their own consciences cannot but accuse them of the ill they do, and they feel no such check or control in themselves, they believe from thence that they do nothing amiss, and so take new courage to prosecute the career they are in: it is a very hard thing to believe, that the worst men can do the worst things without some sense and inward compunction, which is the voice of their conscience; but it is easy to think that they may still and drown that voice, and that by a custom of sinning they may grow so deaf as not to hear that weak voice; that wine may drive away that heaviness, that indisposed them to mirth, and ill company may shut out those thoughts which would interrupt it: and yet, alas! conscience is not by this subdued; they have only made an unlucky truce, that it shall not beat up their quarters for some time, till they have surfeited upon the pleasure and the plenty of men; it will disturb and terrify thein the more for the repose it hath suffered them to take. If the strength of nature, and the custom of excesses, hath given the debauched person the privilege of not finding any sickness or indisposition from his daily surfeits, after a few years he wonders to find the faculties of his mind and understanding so decayed that he is become a fool, and so much more a fool if he does not find it before he comes to that age that usually resists all decay; and then every body sees, if he does not, the unhappiness of his constitution, that it was no sooner disturbed by those excesses. If the lustful and voluptuous person, who sacrifices the strength and vigour of his body to the rage and temptation of his blood, and spends his nights in unchaste embraces, does not in the instant discover how much his health is impaired by those caresses, he will in a short time, by weakness and diseases, have good cause to remember those distempers: and so that conscience that is laid asleep by a long licentious life, and reprehends not the foulest transgressions, doth at last start up in sickness or in age, and plays the tyrant in those seasons when men most need comfort, and makes them pay dear interest for their hours of riot, and for the charms they used, to keep it in that lethargy that it might not awaken them. And since it cannot be a feast, because it is not a good conscience; being an evil one, it must be famine, and torment, and hell itself. In a word, no man hath a good con. science, but he who leads a good life. XX. OF WAR. Montpellier, 1670. As the plague in the body drives all persons away but such who live by it, searchers, and those who are to bury the corpse, who are as ready to strangle those who do not die soon enough, as to bury them; and they who recover are very long tried with the malignity, and remain longer deserted by their neighbours and friends out of fear of infection; so war in a state makes all men abandon it but those who are to live by the blood of it, and who have the pillaging of the living as well as of the dead; and if it recover, and the war be extinguished, there remains such a weakness and paleness, so many ghastly marks of the distemper, that men remain long frighted from their old familiarity, from the confidence they formerly had of their own security, and of the justice of that state, the war leaving still an ill odour behind it, and much infection in the nature and manners of those who are delighted with it. Of all the punishments and judgments that the provoked anger of the Divine Providence can pour |