for contracting any shameful disease upon me whereby I might not call myself as wholesome a morsel for the worms as any. XLI. Some, upon the courage of a fruitful issue, wherein as in the truest chronicle they seem to outlive themselves, can with greater patience away with death. This conceit and counterfeit subsisting in our progenies seems to me a mere fallacy, unworthy the desires of a man that can but conceive a thought of the next world; who, in a nobler ambition, should desire to live in his substance in heaven rather than his name and shadow in the earth. And therefore at my death I mean to take a total adieu of the world, not caring for a monument, history, or epitaph, not so much as the bare memory of my name to be found any where but in the universal register of God. I am not yet so cynical as to approve the testament of Diogenes, nor do I altogether allow that rodomontado of Lucan, * Cœlo tegitur, qui non habet urnam. He that unburied lies wants not his hearse, For unto him a tomb's the universe; * Who willed his friend not to bury him, but to hang him up with a staff in his hand to fright away the crows. but commend in my calmer judgment, those ingenuous intentions that desire to sleep by the urns of their fathers, and strive to go the neatest way unto corruption. I do not envy the temper of crows and daws, nor the numerous and weary days of our fathers before the flood. If there be any truth in astrology I may outlive a jubilee; as yet I have not seen one revolution of Saturn, nor hath my pulse beat thirty years, and yet excepting one, have seen the ashes and left under ground, all the kings of Europe; have been contemporary to three emperours, four grand signiours, and as many popes: methinks I have outlived myself, and begin to be weary of the sun; I have shaked hands with delight in my warm blood and canicular days; I perceive I do anticipate the vices of age, the world to me is but a dream or mock-show, and we all therein but pantalones and anticks to my severer contemplations. XLII. It is not, I confess, an unlawful prayer to desire to surpass the days of our Saviour, or wish to outlive that age wherein he thought fittest to die; yet if (as divinity affirms) there shall be no gray hairs in heaven, but all shall rise in the perfect state of men, we do but outlive those perfections in this world to be recalled unto them by a greater miracle in the next, and run on here but to be retrograde hereafter. Were there any hopes to outlive vice, or a point to be superannuated from sin, it were worthy our knees to implore the days of Methuselah. But age doth not rectify, but incurvate our natures, turning bad dispositions into worser habits, and (like diseases) brings on incurable vices; for every day as we grow weaker in age we grow stronger in sin, and the number of our days doth but make our sins innumerable. The same vice committed at sixteen, is not the same, though it agree in all other circumstances, as at forty, but swells and doubles from that circumstance of our ages, wherein, besides the constant and inexcusable habit of transgressing, the maturity of our judgment cuts off pretence unto excuse or pardon: every sin, the oftener it is committed the more it acquireth in the quality of evil; as it succeeds in time, so it proceeds in degrees of badness, for as they proceed they ever multiply, and like figures in arithmetick, the last stands for more than all that went before it. And though I think no man can live well once but he that could live twice, yet for my own part I would not live over my hours past, or begin again the thread of my days; not upon Cicero's ground, because I have lived them well, but for fear I should live them worse. I find my growing judgment daily instruct me how to be better, but my untamed affections and confirmed vitiosity makes me daily do worse; I find in my confirmed age the same sins I discovered in my youth; I committed many then because I was a child, and because I commit them still I am yet an infant. Therefore I perceive a man may be twice a child before the days of dotage, and stand in need of son's bath before threescore. XLIII. And truly there goes a great deal of providence to produce a man's life unto threescore; there is more required than an able temper for those years; though the radical humour contain 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; 'twas his wisdom to determine them, but his perpetual and waking providence that fulfils and accom plisheth 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 wellcomposed 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. XLIV. 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, We're all deluded, vainly searching ways |