ven to keep all smooth on earth. Common forcible ways make not an end of evil, but leave hatred. and malice behind them. An enemy thus reconciled is little to be trusted, as wanting the foundation of love and charity, and but for a time restrained by disadvantage or inability. If thou hast not mercy for others, yet be not cruel unto thyself. To ruminate upon evils, to make critical notes upon injuries, and be too acute in their apprehensions, is to add unto our own tortures, to feather the arrows of our enemies, to lash ourselves with the scorpions of our foes, and to resolve to sleep no For injuries long dreamt on take away at last all rest; and he sleeps but like Regulus, who busieth his head about them.

more.

XIII. Amuse not thyself about the riddles of future things. Study prophecies when they are become histories, and past hovering in their causes. Eye well things past and present, and let conjectural sagacity suffice for things to come. There is a sober latitude for prescience in contingences of discoverable tempers, whereby discerning heads see sometimes beyond their eyes, and wise men become prophetical. Leave cloudy predictions to their periods, and let appointed seasons have the

lot of their accomplishments.

'Tis too early to

study such prophecies before they have been long made, before some train of their causes have already taken fire, laying open in part what lay obscure and before buried unto us. For the voice of prophecies is like that of whispering-places; they who are near or at a little distance hear nothing, those at the farthest extremity will understand all. But a retrograde cognition of times past, and things which have already been, is more satisfactory than a suspended knowledge of what is yet unexistent. And the greatest part of time being already wrapt up in things behind us, it's now somewhat late to bait after things before us; for futurity still shortens, and time present sucks in time to come. What is prophetical in one age proves historical in another, and so must hold on unto the last of time, where there will be no room for prediction; when Janus shall lose one face, and the long beard of time shall look like those of David's servants, shorn away upon one side, and when, if the expected Elias should appear, he might say much of what is past, not much of what's to come.

XIV. Live unto the dignity of thy nature, and leave it not disptuable at last, whether thou hast

been a man; or since thou art a composition of man and beast, how thou hast predominantly passed thy days, to state the denomination. Unman not therefore thyself by a bestial transformation, nor realize old fables. Expose not thyself by four-footed manners unto monstrous draughts, and caricatura representations. Think not after the old Pythagorean conceit, what beast thou may'st be after death. Be not under any brutal metempsuchosis while thou livest, and walkest about erectly under the scheme of man. In thine own circumference, as in that of the earth, let the rational horizon be larger than the sensible, and the circle of reason than of sense. Let the divine part be upward, and the region of beast below. Otherwise, 'tis but to live invertedly, and with thy head unto the heels of thy antipodes. Desert not thy title to a divine particle and union with invisibles. Let true knowledge and virtue tell the lower world thou art a part of the higher. Let thy thoughts be of things which have not entered into the hearts of beasts; think of things long past, and long to come; acquaint thyself with the choragium of the stars, and consider the vast expansion beyond them. Let intellectual tubes give thee a glance of things which

visive organs reach not. Have a glimpse of incomprehensibles; and thoughts of things which thoughts but tenderly touch. Lodge immaterials in thy head; ascend unto invisibles; fill thy spirit with spirituals, with the mysteries of faith, the magnalities of religion, and thy life with the honour of God; without which, though giants in wealth and dignity, we are but dwarfs and pygmies in humanity, and may hold a pitiful rank in that triple division of mankind into heroes, men, and beasts. For though human souls are said to be equal, yet is there no small inequality in their operations; some maintain the allowable station of men, many are far below it; and some have been so divine, as to approach the apogeum of their natures, and to be in the confinium of spirits.

XV. Behold thyself by inward opticks and the crystalline of thy soul. Strange it is that in the most perfect sense there should be so many fallacies, that we are fain to make a doctrine, and often to see by art. But the greatest imperfection is in our inward sight, that is, to be ghosts unto our own eyes, and while we are so sharp-sighted as to look through others, to be invisible unto ourselves; for the inward eyes are more fallacious than the out

ward. The vices we scoff at in others laugh at us within ourselves. Avarice, pride, falshood, lie undiscerned and blindly in us, even to the age of blindness; and therefore, to see ourselves interiourly we are fain to borrow other men's eyes; wherein true friends are good informers, and censurers no bad friends. Conscience only, that can see without light, sits in the areopagy and dark tribunal of our hearts, surveying our thoughts and condemning their obliquities. Happy is that state of vision that can see without light, though all should look as before the creation, when there was not an eye to see, or light to actuate a vision : wherein notwithstanding, obscurity is only imaginable respectively unto eyes; for unto God there was none, eternal light was ever; created light was for the creation, not himself, and as he saw before the sun, may still also see without it. In the city of the new Jerusalem there is neither sun nor moon; where glorified eyes must see by the archetypal sun, or the light of God, able to illuminate intellectual eyes, and make unknown visions. Intuitive perceptions in spiritual beings may perhaps hold some analogy unto vision; but yet how they see us, or one another, what eye, what light, or