Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia and Letter to a Friend by Thomas Browne

1 01 - Religio Medici - Pt 1: To the Reader; 1-8 27:26

Religio Medici, the first part.

To the reader. Certainly that man were greedy of life. Who should desire to live when all the world were at an end. And he must needs be very impatient, who would repine at death, in the society of all things that suffer under it. Had not almost every man suffered by the press, or were not the tyranny thereof become universal, I had not wanted reason for complaint, But in times wherein I have lived to behold the highest perversion of that excellent invention, the name of his majesty defamed, the honour of Parliament depraved, the writings of both depravedly, anticipatively, counterfeitly imprinted complaints may seem ridiculous in private persons, and men of my condition may be as incapable of affronts as Hopeless of their reparations.

And truly, had not the duty I owe unto the importunity of friends, and the allegiance I must ever acknowledge unto truth, prevailed with me, the inactivity of my disposition might have made these sufferings continual. And time that brings other things to light, should have satisfied me in the remedy of its oblivion.

But because things evidently false are not only printed, but many things of truth most falsely set forth, in this latter I could not but think myself engaged. For though we have no power to redress the former, yet in the other, reparation being within ourselves, I have at present represented unto the world a full and intended copy, Of that piece which was most imperfectly and surreptitiously published before.

This, I confess, about seven years past, with some others of affinity thereto, for my private exercise and satisfaction, I had at leisureable hours composed, which being communicated unto one, it became common unto many, and was by transcription successively corrupted, until it arrived in a most depraved copy at the press.

He that shall peruse that work, and shall take notice of sundry particularities and personal expressions therein, will easily discern the intention was not public, And being a private exercise directed to myself, what is delivered therein was rather a memorial unto me, than an example or rule unto any other. And therefore, if there be any singularity therein correspondent unto the private conceptions of any man, it doth not advantage them, or if discentaneous thereunto, it in no way overthrows them. It was penned in such a place, and with such disadvantage, that, I protest, from the first setting of pen under the paper, I had not the assistance of any good book whereby to promote my invention or relieve my memory.

And therefore there might be many real lapses therein which others might take notice of, and more than I suspected myself.

It was set down many years past, and was the sense of my conception at that time, not an immutable law unto my advancing judgement at all times, and therefore there might be many things therein plausible unto my past apprehension, which are not agreeable until my present self. There are many things delivered rhetorically, many expressions therein merely Tropical, and as they best illustrate my intention, and therefore also there are many things to be taken in a soft and flexible sense, and not to be called under the rigid test of reason. Lastly, all that is contained therein is in submission unto mature discernments, and, as I have declared, shall no further father them than the best and learned judgments.

Shall authorize them.

Under favor of which considerations I have made its secrecy public, and committed the truth thereof to every ingenuous reader. Thomas Brown.

One. For my religion, though there be several circumstances that might persuade the world I have none at all, as The general scandal of my profession, the natural course of my studies, the indifferency of my behaviour and discourse in matters of religion, neither violently defending one, nor with that common ardour and contention opposing another, yet in despite hereof I dare without usurpation assume the honourable style of a Christian. Not that I merely owe this title to the font, my education, or clime wherein I was born, as being bred up, either to confirm those principles my parents instilled into my understanding, or, by a general consent, proceed in the religion of my country, but having in my rival years, and confirmed judgment, seen and examined all, I find myself obliged by the principles of grace and the law of mine own reason to embrace no other name but this.

Neither doth herein my zeal so far make me forget the general charity I owe unto humanity as rather to hate than pity Turks, infidels, and what is worse Jews, rather contenting myself to enjoy that happy style than maligning. Those who refuse so glorious a title.

Two. But because the name of a Christian is become too general to express our faith, there being a geography of religion as well as lands, and every clime distinguished not only by their laws and limits, but circumscribed by their doctrines and rules of faith to be particular, I am of that reformed, new-caste religion, wherein I dislike nothing but the name. Of the same belief our Saviour taught, the Apostles disseminated, the Fathers authorised, and the Martyrs confirmed. But, by the sinister ends of princes, the ambition and avarice of prelates, and the fatal corruption of times, So decayed, impaired, and fallen from its native beauty, that it required the careful and charitable hands of these times to restore it to its primitive integrity.

Now the accidental occasion whereupon, the slender means whereby the low and abject condition of the person by whom so good a work was set on foot, which in our adversaries beget contempt and scorn, Fills me with wonder, and is the very same objection the insolent pagans first cast at Christ and his disciples.

Yet I have not so shaken hands with those desperate resolutions who would rather venture at large their decayed bottom than bring her in to be new trimmed in the dock. Who had rather promiscuously retain all than abridge any, and obstinately be what they are than what they have been, as to stand in diameter and sword's point with them.

We have reformed from them, not against them. For omitting those impropriations and terms of scurrility betwixt us which only Difference our affections, and not our cause. There is between us one common name and appellation, one faith and necessary body of principles common to us both. And therefore I am not scrupulous to converse and live with them, or into their churches in defective hours, and either pray with them or for them.

I could never conceive Any rational consequence from those many texts which prohibit the children of Israel to pollute themselves with the temples of the heathens?

We being all Christians, and not divided by such detested impieties as might profane our prayers, or the place wherein we make them, or that are resolved. Conscience may not adore her Creator anywhere, especially in places devoted to his service, where, if their devotions offend him, mine may please him. If theirs profane it, mine may hallow it.

Holy water and crucifix, dangerous to the common people, perceive not my judgment, nor abuse my devotion at all.

I am, I confess, Naturally inclined to that which misguided zeal terms superstition. My common conversation I do acknowledge austere, my behaviour full of rigour, sometimes not without morosity. Yet at my devotion I love to use the civility of my knee, my hat, and hand, with all those outward and sensible motions which may express or promote my invisible devotion.

I should violate my own arm rather than a church, nor willingly deface the name of saint or martyr.

At the sight of a cross or crucifix, I can dispense with my hat, but scarce with the thought or memory of my Saviour.

I cannot laugh at, but rather pity the fruitless journeys of pilgrims, or contemn the miserable conditions of friars, for, though misplaced in circumstances, there is something in it of devotion.

I could never hear the Ave Mary bell without an elevation, or think it a sufficient warrant, because they erred in one circumstance for me to err in all, that is, in silence and dumb contempt. Whilst therefore they directed their devotions to her, I offered mine to God, and rectified the errors of their prayers, by rightly ordering mine own. At a solemn procession, I have wept abundantly, while my concerts, blind with opposition and prejudice, have fallen into an excess of scorn and laughter.

There are questioners, both in Greek, Roman, and African churches. Solemnities and ceremonies were of the wiser zeals, to make a Christian use, and stand condemned by us not as evil in themselves, but as allurements and baits of superstition to those vulgar heads that look a squint on the face of truth, and those unstable judgments That cannot resist in the narrow point and centre of virtue without a reel or stagger to the circumference. 4. As there were many reformers, so likewise many reformations. Every country proceeding in a particular way and method according as their national interest, together with their constitution and clime, inclined them. Some angrily and with extremity, others calmly and with mediocrity, not rending, but easily dividing the community, and leaving an honest possibility of a reconciliation.

Which, though peaceable spirits do desire, and may conceive that revolution of time and the mercies of God may effect, Yet that judgment that shall continue the present antipathies between the two extremes, their contrarieties in condition, affection, and opinion, may with the same hopes expect an union in the poles of heaven.

But to difference my self nearer, and draw into a lesser circle, there is no church Whose every part so squares unto my conscience, whose articles, constitutions, and customs seem so consonant unto reason, and, as it were, framed to my particular devotion, as this whereof I hold my belief, the Church of England, to whose faith I am a sworn subject, and therefore in a double obligation subscribe unto her articles, and endeavour to observe her constitutions.

Whatsoever is beyond, as points indifferent, I observe according to the rules of my private reason, or the humour and fashion of my devotion, neither believing this because Luther affirmed it, or disproving that because Calvin hath disavouched it. I condemn not all things in the council of Trent, nor approve all in the Synod of Dort. In brief. Where the scripture is silent, the church is my text. Where that speaks, tis but my comet. Where there is a joint silence of both, I borrow not the rules of my religion from Rome or Geneva, but the dictates of my own reason.

It is an unjust scandal of our adversaries, and a gross error in ourselves, To compute the nativity of our religion from Henry VIII, who, though he rejected the pope, refused not the faith of Rome, and effected no more than what his own predecessors desired and assayed in ages past, and was conceived the state of Venice would have attempted in our days.

It is as uncharitable a point in us to fall upon those popular scurrilities and opprobrious scoffs of the bishop of Rome, To whom, as a temporal prince, we owe the duty of good language.

I confess there is cause of passion between us. By his sentence, I stand excommunicated. Heretic is the best language he affords me. Yet can no ear witness I ever returned him the name of Antichrist, Man of Sin, or Whore of Babylon. It is the method of charity. To suffer without reaction.

Those usual satyrs and invectives of the pulpit may perchance produce a good effect on the vulgar, whose ears are opener to rhetoric than logic. Yet they do in no wise confirm the faith of wiser believers, who know that a good cause needs not to be pardoned by passion, but can sustain itself upon a temperate. Dispute.

VI.

I could never divide myself from any man upon the difference of an opinion, or be angry with his judgment for not agreeing with me in that from which perhaps within a few days I should dissent myself.

I have no genius to disputes in religion, and have often thought it wisdom to decline them. Especially upon her disadvantage, or when the cause of truth might suffer in the weakness of my patronage.

Where we desire to be inform'd, tis good to contest with men above ourselves, but to confirm and establish our opinions. Tis best to argue with judgments below our own, That the frequent spoils and victories over their reasons may settle in ourselves an esteem and confirmed opinion of our own.

Every man is not a proper champion for truth, nor fit to take up the gauntlet in the cause of verity.

Many from the ignorance of these maxims, and an inconsiderate zeal unto truth, Have too rashly charged the troops of error, and remain as trophies unto the enemies of truth.

A man may be in as just possession of truth as of a city, and yet be forced to surrender. It is therefore far better to enjoy her with peace, than to hazard her on a battle. If therefore there rise any doubts in my way, I do forget them. Or at least defer them till my better settled judgment, and more manly reason be able to resolve them.

For I perceive every man's own reason is his best, Oedipus, and will, upon a reasonable truce, find a way to loose those bonds wherewith the subtleties of error have enchained our more flexible and tender judgments, In philosophy, where truth seems double-faced, there is no man more paradoxical than myself.

But in divinity I love to keep the road, and though not in an implicit yet an humble faith, follow the great wheel of the church by which I move, not reserving any proper poles or motion from the epicycle of my own brain, By this means, I leave no gap for heresies, schisms, or errors, of which at present I hope I shall let into truth to say I have no taint or tincture.

I must confess my greener studies have been polluted with two or three, not any begotten in the latter centuries, but old and obsolete. Such as could never have been revived, By such extravagant and irregular heads as mine. For indeed heresies perish not with their authors, but like the river Arethusa, though they lose their currents in one place, they rise up again in another.

One general counsel is not able to extirpate one single heresy. It may be canceled for the present, but revolution of time and the like aspects from heaven will restore it, when it will flourish till it be condemned again.

For as though there were a metempsychosis, and the soul of one man passed into another, opinions do find, after certain revolutions, men and minds like those that first begat them.

To see ourselves again, we need not look for Plato's year.

Every man is not only himself. There hath been many Diogenes, and as many Timons, though but few of that name. Men are lived over again. The world is now as it was in ages past. There was none then, but there hath been some one since that parallels him, and is, as it were, his revived. Self. 7. Now, the first of mine was that of the Arabians, that the souls of men perished with their bodies, but should yet be raised again at the last day.

Not that I did absolutely conceive a mortality of the soul, but if that were which faith, not philosophy, hath yet thoroughly disproved, And that both entered the grave together, yet I held the same conceit thereof that we all do of the body, that it should rise again.

Surely it is but the merits of our unworthy natures, if we sleep in darkness until the last alarm.

A serious reflex upon my own unworthiness did make me backward from challenging this prerogative of my soul. So that I might enjoy my saviour at the last, I could with patience be nothing almost done to eternity.

The second was that of Origen, that God would not persist in his vengeance for ever, but after a definite time of his wrath, he would release the damned souls from torture, which error I fell into upon a serious contemplation of the great attribute of God, His mercy. And did a little cherish it in myself, because I found therein no malice, and a ready weight to sway me from the other extreme of despair, whereunto melancholy and contemplative natures are too easily disposed.

A third there is, which I did never positively maintain or practice, but have often wished it had been Consonant to truth, and not offensive to my religion, and that is, the prayer for the dead.

Whereunto I was inclined from some charitable inducements, whereby I could scarce contain my prayers for a friend at the ringing of a bell, or behold his corpse without an orison for his soul?

"'Twas a good way, methought, to be remembered by posterity. And far more noble than in history.

These opinions I never maintained with pertinacy, or endeavoured to inveigle any man's belief unto mine, nor so much as ever revealed or disputed them with my dearest friends.

By which means I neither propagated them in others, nor confirmed them in myself, but Suffering them to flame upon their own substance without addition of new fuel, they went out insensibly of themselves. Therefore these opinions, though condemned by lawful counsels, were not heresies in me, but bare errors and single lapses of my understanding without a joint depravity of my will.

Those have not only depraved understandings, but diseased affections, which cannot enjoy a singularity without an heresy, or be the author of an opinion, without they be of a sect also. This was the villainy of the first schism of Lucifer, who was not contempt to err alone, but drew into his faction many legions, And upon this experience he tempted only Eve, as well understanding the communicable nature of sin, and that to deceive but one was tacitly, and upon consequence, to delude them both. 8. That heresies should arise, we have the prophecy of Christ. But that old ones should be abolished, we hold no prediction.

That there must be heresies is true, not only in our church, but also in any other, even in doctrines heretical. There will be super-heresies, and Aryans not only divided from their church, but also among themselves. For heads that are disposed unto schism, and complexionally propense to innovation, are naturally disposed for a community. nor will be ever confined unto the order or economy of one body, and therefore, when they separate from others, they knit but loosely among themselves, nor contented with a general breach or dichotomy with their church, do subdivide, and mince themselves almost into atoms.

Tis true that men of singular parts and humours have not been free from Singular opinions and conceits in all ages, retaining something not only beside the opinion of his own church or any other, but also any particular author, which, notwithstanding, a sober judgment may do, without offence or heresy. For there is yet, after all the decrees of councils and the niceties of schools, many things untouched, unimagined.

2 02 - Religio Medici - Pt 1: 9-13 22:34

Religio.

Medici.

As for those wingy mysteries in divinity, Airy subtleties in religion which have unhinged the brains of betterheads. They never stretch the pia mater of mine. Methinks there be not impossibilities enough in religion for an active faith. The deepest mysteries ours contains have not only been illustrated, but maintained by syllogism and the rule of reason.

I loved to lose myself in a mystery, to pursue my reason to an o altitudo. Tis my solitary recreation to pose my apprehension with those involved enigmas and riddles of the Trinity with incarnation and resurrection. I can answer all the objections of Satan and my rebellious reason with that odd resolution I learnt of Tertullian. Certum est quia impossibile est.

I desire to exercise my faith in the difficultest point. For to credit, ordinary and visible objects is not faith, but persuasion.

Some believe the better for seeing Christ's sepulchre, and when they have seen the Red Sea, doubt not of the miracle.

Now, contrarily, I bless myself, and am thankful that I lived not in the days of miracles, that I never saw Christ and all his disciples. I would not have been one of those Israelites that passed the Red Sea, nor one of Christ's patients on whom he wrought his wonders. Then had my faith been thrust upon me. Nor should I enjoy that greater blessing pronounced to all that believe and saw not. Tis an easy and necessary belief to credit what our eye and sense hath examined.

I believe he was dead and buried and rose again, and desire to see him in his glory rather than to contemplate him in his cenotaph or sepulchre.

Nor is this much to believe. As we have reason, we owe this faith unto history. They only had the advantage of a bold and noble faith who lived before his coming, who upon obscure prophecies and mystical types could raise a belief and expect apparent impossibilities. 10. Tis true there is an edge. In all firm belief, and with an easy metaphor, we may say, the sword of faith. But in these obscurities, I rather use it in the adjunct the apostle gives it a buckler, under which I conceive a weary combatant may lie invulnerable.

Since I was of understanding to know we knew nothing, My reason hath been more pliable to the will of faith. I am now content to understand a mystery without a rigid definition, in an easy and platonic description.

That allegorical description of Hermes pleaseth me beyond all the metaphysical definitions of divines, where I cannot satisfy my reason. I love to humour my fancy.

I had as live you tell me that anima est angulus hominis est corpus dei as entelechia, lux est umbra dei as actus perspicui, where there is an obscurity too deep for our reason. It is good to sit down. With the description, Periphrasis, or Adumbration. For by acquainting our reason, how unable it is to display the visible and obvious effects of nature, it becomes more humble and submissive unto the subtleties of faith. And thus I teach my haggard and unreclaimed reason to stoop unto the lure of faith.

I believe there was already a tree whose fruit our unhappy parents tasted, though in the same chapter where God forbids it, it is positively said, the plants of the field were not yet grown, for God had not caused it to rain upon the earth. I believe that the serpent, if we shall literally understand it, from his proper form and figure made a motion on his belly before the curse.

I find the trial of the pusillage and virginity of women which God ordained the Jews is very fallible. Experience and history informs me that not only many particular women, but likewise whole nations have escaped the curse of childbirth, which God seems to pronounce upon the whole sex.

Yet I do believe that all this is true, which indeed my reason would persuade me to be false. And this, I think, is no vulgar part of faith, to believe a thing not only above, but contrary to reason, and against the arguments of our proper senses. 11. In my solitary and retired imagination, I remember I am not alone, and therefore forget not to contemplate him and his attributes who was ever with me, especially those two mighty ones, his wisdom and eternity.

With the one I recreate, with the other I confound my understanding. For who can speak of eternity without a solecism, or think thereof without an ecstasy? Time, we may comprehend. Tis but five days elder than ourselves, and hath the same horoscope with the world. But to retire so far back as to apprehend a beginning, to give such an infinite start forwards, as to conceive an end, in an essence that we affirm hath neither the one nor the other, It puts my reason to St. Paul's sanctuary. My philosophy, dares not say the angels can do it. God hath not made a creature that can comprehend him. Tis a privilege of his own nature. I am that I am, was his own definition unto Moses, and was a short one, To confound mortality that durst question God, or ask him what he was.

Indeed he only is. All others have and shall be. But in eternity there is no distinction of tenses.

And therefore that terrible term predestination Which hath troubled so many weak heads to conceive, and the wisest to explain, is in respect to God no precious determination of our estates to come, but a definitive blast of his will already fulfilled, and at the instant that he first decreed it. For to his eternity, which is indivisible and altogether, the last trump is already sounded. The reprobates in the flame, and the blessed in Abraham's bosom.

St. Peter speaks modestly when he saith, A thousand years to God are but as one day. For to speak like a philosopher, those continued instances of time which flow into a thousand years make not to him one moment what is to us to come. To his eternity is present, his whole duration being but one permanent point, without succession, parts, flux, or division. There is no attribute that adds more difficulty to the mystery of the Trinity, where, though in a relative way of father and son, we must deny a priority. I wonder how Aristotle could conceive the world eternal, or how he could make good two eternities. His similitude of a triangle comprehended in a square doth somewhat illustrate the trinity of our souls, and that the triple unity of God.

For there is in us not three, but a trinity of souls. Because there is in us, if not three distinct souls, yet Differing faculties that can and do subsist apart in different subjects, and yet in us are thus united as to make but one soul and a substance.

If one soul was so perfect as to inform three distinct bodies, that were a petty trinity, conceive the distinct number of three, not divided nor separated by the intellect, but actually comprehended in its unity, and that is a perfect trinity.

I have often admired the mystical way of Pythagoras, and the secret magic of Numbers. Beware of philosophy is a precept not to be received in too large a sense, for in this mass of nature there is a set of things that carry in their front, though not in capital letters, yet in stenography and short characters, Something of Divinity, which, to wiser reasons, serve as luminaries in the abyss of knowledge, and to judicious beliefs, as scales and roundels, to mount the pinnacles and highest pieces of Divinity.

The severe schools shall never laugh me out of the philosophy of Hermes. That this visible world is but a picture of the invisible, wherein, as in a portrait, things are not truly but in equivocal shapes, and as they counterfeit some more real substance in that invisible fabric.

Thirteen. That other attribute wherewith I recreate my devotion is his wisdom, in which I am happy, and for the contemplation of this only Do not repent me that I was bred in the way of study.

The advantage I have of the vulgar with the content and happiness I conceive therein is an ample recompense for all my endeavours in what part of knowledge soever.

Wisdom is his most beauteous attribute. No man can attain unto it. Yet Solomon pleased God when he desired it.

He is wise because he knows all things, and he knoweth all things because he made them all. But his greatest knowledge is in comprehending that he made not, that is, himself.

And this is also the greatest knowledge in man. For this do I honour my own profession, and embrace the counsel even of the devil himself. Had he read such a lecture in Paradise as he did at Delphos, we had better known ourselves. Nor had we stood in fear to know him.

I know he is wise in all, wonderful in what we conceive, but far more in what we comprehend not. For we behold him but a squint upon reflex or shadow. Our understanding is dimmer than Moses' eye. We are ignorant of the back parts or lower side of his divinity. Therefore to pry into the maze of his counsels is not only folly in man, but presumption even in angels. Like us, they are his servants, not his senators. He holds no counsel but that mystical one of the Trinity, wherein, though there be three persons, there is but one mind that decrees without contradiction Nor needs he any. His actions are not begot with deliberation. His wisdom naturally knows what's best. His intellect stands ready, fraught with the superlative and purest ideas of goodness.

Consultation and election, which are two motions in us, make but one in him. His actions, springing from his powers, at the first, Touch of his will.

These are contemplations metaphysical. My humble speculations have another method, and are content to trace and discover those expressions he hath left in his creatures, and the obvious effects of nature. There is no danger to profound these mysteries, no sanctum sanctorum in philosophy. The world was made to be inhabited by beasts, but studied and contemplated by man. Tis the debt of our reason we owe unto God, and the homage we pay for not being beasts. Without this, the world is still as though it had not been, or as it was before the sixth day, when as yet there was not a creature that could conceive, or so there was a world. The wisdom of God receives small honour from those vulgar heads that rudely stare about, and with a gross rusticity admire his works.

Those highly magnify him whose judicious inquiry into his acts, and deliberate research into his creatures, return the duty of a devout and learned admiration.

Therefore, Search while thou wilt, and let thy reason go to ransom truth, even to the abyss below. Rally the scattered causes, and that line which nature twists be able to untwine. It is thy maker's will, for unto none but unto reason can he e'er be known. The devils do know thee, but those damned meteors build not thy glory, but confound thy creatures. Teach my endeavours so thy works to read, that, learning them, in thee I may proceed. Give thou my reason that instructive flight, whose weary wings may on thy hands still light. Teach me to soar aloft. Yet ever so were near the sun to stoop again below. Thus shall my humble feathers safely hover, and though near earth, more than the heavens discover.

And then at last, when homeward I shall drive rich with the spoils of nature to my hive, there will I sit like that industrious fly. Buzzing thy praises, We shall never die till death abrupts them, And succeeding glory bid me go on in a more lasting story.

And this is almost all wherein an humble creature may endeavour to requite, and some way to retribute unto his creator.

For if not he that saith, Lord, Lord, But the heed that doth the will of his father shall be saved. Certainly our wills must be our performances, and our intents make out our actions.

Otherwise our pious labors shall find anxiety in our graves, and our best endeavors not hope, but fear a resurrection.

There is but one first cause, and four second causes of all things. Some are without efficient as God, others without matter as angels, some without form as the first matter, but every essence, created or uncreated, hath its final cause and some positive end, both of its essence and operation. This is the cause I grope after in the works of nature. On this hangs the providence of God. To raise so beauteous a structure as the world and the creatures thereof was but his art. But their sundry and divided operations, with their predestined ends, are from the treasure of his wisdom. In the causes, nature, and affections of the eclipses of the sun and moon there is Most excellent speculation. But to profound father, and to contemplate a reason why his providence hath so disposed and ordered their motions in that vast circle as to conjoin and obscure each other, is a sweeter piece of reason, and a diviner point of philosophy.

Therefore sometimes, and in some things, there appears to me as much divinity in Galen, His books, De Usu Partium, as in Suarez's Metaphysics. Had Aristotle been as curious in the inquiry of this cause as he was of the other, he had not left behind him an imperfect piece of philosophy, but an absolute tract of divinity. 15. Nature nicher agat frustra is the only indisputed axiom in philosophy. There are no grotesques in nature. Not anything framed to fill up empty cantons and unnecessary spaces in the most imperfect creatures, and such as were not preserved in the ark, but having their seeds and principles in the womb of nature, are everywhere where the power of the sun is, In these is the wisdom of his hand discovered.

Out of this rank, Solomon chose the object of his admiration. Indeed, what reason may not go to school to the wisdom of bees, ants, and spiders? What wise hand teacheth them to do what reason cannot teach us?

Ruder heads stand amazed at those prodigious pieces of nature, Whales, elephants, andromedaries, and camels. These, I confess, are the colossus and majestic pieces of her hand. But in these narrow engines there is more curious mathematics. And the civility of these little citizens more neatly sets forth the wisdom of their maker.

Who admires not Regiomontanus' fly beyond his eagle? Or wonders not more at the operation of two souls in those little bodies than but one in the trunk of a cedar.

I could never content my contemplation with those general pieces of wonder, the flux and reflux of the sea, the increase of the Nile, the conversion of the needle to the north, and have studied to match and parallel those In the more obvious and neglected pieces of nature, which, without further trouble, I can do in the cosmography of myself. We carry with us the wonders we seek without us. There is all Africa and her prodigies in us. We are that bold and adventurous piece of nature, which he that studies wisely learns in a compendium what others labour at, In a divided piece, and endless volume.

3 03 - Religio Medici - Pt 1: 14-22 30:26

Religia Medici.

Thus there are two books from which I collect my divinity, besides that written one of God, another of his servant, Nature, That universal and publick manuscript that lies expansed under the eyes of all. Those that never saw him in the one have discovered him in the other. This was the scripture and theology of the heathens. The natural motion of the sun made them more admire him than its supernatural station did the children of Israel. The ordinary effects of nature wrought more admiration in them than in the other all his miracles. Surely the heathens knew better how to join and read these mystical letters than we Christians, who cast a more careless eye on these common hieroglyphics, and disdain to suck divinity from the flowers of nature.

Nor do I so forget God as to adore the name of nature, which I define not with the schools to be the principle of motion and rest, but that straight and regular line, that settled and constant course. The wisdom of God hath ordained the actions of his creatures according to their several kinds.

To make a revolution every day is the nature of the sun. Because of that necessary course which God hath ordained it, from which it cannot swerve, but by a faculty from that voice which first did give it motion.

Now this course of nature, God seldom alters or perverts, but like an excellent artist, had so contrived his work that with the selfsame instrument, without a new creation, he may affect his obscurest designs. Thus he sweeteneth the water with a word, preserveth the creatures in the ark, which the blast of his mouth might have as easily created.

For God is like a skilful geometrician, who, when more easily and with one stroke of his compass he might describe or divide a right line, had yet rather do this in a circle or longer way. According to the constituted and forelaid principles of his art.

Yet this rule of his he doth sometimes pervert, to acquaint the world with his prerogative, lest the arrogancy of our reason should question his power, and conclude he could not. And thus I call the effects of nature the works of God, whose hand and instrument she only is, And therefore to ascribe his actions unto her is to devolve the honour of the principal agent upon the instrument, which, if with reason we may do, then let our hammers rise up and boast, they have built our houses, and our pens receive the honour of our writings.

I hold there is a general beauty in the works of God, And therefore no deformity in any kind of species of creature whatsoever.

I cannot tell by what logic we call a toad, a bear, or an elephant ugly, they being created in those outward shapes and figures which best express the actions of their inward forms.

And having passed that general visitation of God, who saw that all that he had made was good, that is, Conformable to his will, which abhors deformity, and is the rule of order and beauty. There is no deformity, but in monstrosity. Wherein, notwithstanding, there is a kind of beauty.

Nature, so ingeniously, contriving the irregular parts, as they become sometimes more remarkable than the principal fabric.

To speak, yet more narrowly, there was never anything ugly or misshapen but the chaos, wherein, notwithstanding to speak strictly, there was no deformity, because no form, nor was it yet impregnant by the voice of God. Now nature was not at variance with art, nor art with nature, they being both servants of his providence, art is the perfection, of Nature. Were the world now as it was the sixth day, there were yet a chaos. Nature hath made one world, and art another. In brief, all things are artificial, for nature is the art of God. Nine. This is the ordinary and open way of his providence. Which art and industry have in a good part discovered, whose effects we may foretell without an oracle.

To foreshow these is not prophecy, but prognostication.

There is another way, full of meanders and labyrinths, whereof the devil and spirits have no exact ephemerides, and that is a more particular and obscure method of his providence, Directing the operations of individuals and single essences. This we call fortune, that serpentine and crooked line whereby he draws those actions his wisdom intends in a more unknown and secret way.

This cryptic and involved method of his providence have I ever admired. Nor can I relate the history of my life, the occurrences of my days, The escapes of dangers, and hints of chance, with a besa la manos to fortune, or a bearer mercy to my good stars.

Abraham might have thought the ram in the thicket came thither by accident. Humane reason would have said that mere chance conveyed Moses in the ark to the sight of Pharaoh's daughter. What a labyrinth is there in the story of Joseph, able to convert a Stoic!

Surely there are in every man's life certain rubs, doublings, and wrenches, which pass a while under the effects of chance, but at the last, well examined, prove the mere hand of God.

"'Twas not dumb chance that, to discover the Fugard or Paderplot, contrived a miscarriage in the letter. I like the victory of eighty-eight the better, For that one occurrence which our enemies imputed to our dishonour, and the partiality of fortune, to wit, the tempests and contrariety of winds. King Philip did not detract from the nation when he said, He sent his armado to fight with men, and not to combat with the winds. Where there is a manifest disproportion between the powers and forces of two several agents, upon a maxim of reason, We may promise the victory to the superior, but when unexpected accidents slip in, and unthought-of occurrences intervene, these must proceed from a power that owes no obedience to those axioms, whereas in the writing upon the wall we may behold the hand, but see not the spring that moves it.

The success of that petty province of Holland, Of which the grand seigneur proudly said, If they should trouble him as they did the spaniard, he would send his men with shovels and pickaxes, and throw it into the sea. I cannot altogether ascribe to the ingenuity and industry of the people, but the mercy of God, that hath disposed them to such a thriving genius, and to the will of his providence, that Disposeth her favour to each country in their pre-ordinate season.

All cannot be happy at once, for because the glory of one state depends upon the ruin of another, there is a revolution and vicissitude of their greatness, and must obey the swing of that wheel not moved by intelligences, but by the hand of God. Whereby all estates arise to their zenith and vertical points, according to their predestinated periods.

For the lives not only of men, but of commonwealths and the whole world, run not upon the helix that still enlargeth, but on a circle where, arriving to their meridian, they decline in obscurity, and fall under the horizon again.

18th these must not therefore be named the effects of fortune, but in a relative way, and as we term the works of nature. It was the ignorance of man's reason that begat this very name, and by a careless term miscalled the providence of God. For there is no liberty for causes to operate in a loose and straggling way. Nor any effect whatsoever, but hath its warrant from some universal or superior cause.

Tis not a ridiculous devotion to say a prayer before a game at tables, for even in solelegies and matters of greatest uncertainty there is a settled and pre-ordered course of effects. It is we that are blind, not fortune. Because our eye is too dim to discover the mystery of her effects, we foolishly paint her blind, and hoodwink the providence of the Almighty.

I cannot justify that contemptible proverb, that fools only are fortunate, or that insolent paradox, that a wise man is out of the reach of fortune, Much less those opprobrious epithets of poets, hoar, bored, and strumpet. Tis I confess the common fate of men of singular gifts of mind to be destitute of those of fortune, which doth not any way deject the spirit of wiser judgments, who thoroughly understand the justice of this proceeding, and being enriched with higher donatives, Cast a more careless eye on these vulgar parts of felicity.

It is a most unjust ambition to desire to engross the mercies of the Almighty, not to be content with the goods of mind, without a possession of those of body or fortune, and it is an error worse than heresy to adore these complemental and circumstantial pieces of felicity. And undervalue those perfections and essential points of happiness wherein we resemble our maker.

To wiser desires, it is satisfaction enough to deserve, though not to enjoy, the favours of fortune. Let providence provide for fools. Tis not partiality but equity in God, who deals with us but as our natural parents. Those who were able a body and mind, he leaves to their deserts. To those of weaker merits, he imparts a larger portion, and pieces out the defect of one by the access of the other.

Thus have we no just quarrel with nature, for leaving us naked, or to envy the horns, hoofs, skins, and furs of other creatures, being supplied with reason, can supply them all.

We need not labour with so many arguments to confute judicial astrology, for, if there be a truth therein, it doth not injure divinity. If to be born under Mercury disposeth us to be witty, under Jupiter to be wealthy, I do not owe a knee unto those, but under that merciful hand that hath ordered my indifferent and uncertain nativity unto such benevolous aspects.

Those that hold that all things are governed by fortune, had not erred, had they not persisted there. The Romans, that erected a temple to fortune, acknowledged therein, though in a blinder way, somewhat of divinity, For in a wise supputation all things begin and end in the Almighty. There is a nearer way to Heaven than Homer's chain. An easy logic may conjoin Heaven and Earth in one argument, and with less than a serenities resolve all things unto God. For though we christen effects by their most sensible and nearest causes, Yet is God, the true and infallible cause of all, whose concourse, though it be general, yet doth it subdivide itself into the particular actions of everything. And is that spirit by which each singular essence not only subsists, but performs its operation.

The bad construction and perverse comment on these pair of second causes, or visible hands of God, have perverted the devotion of many unto atheism, who, forgetting the honest advisers of faith, have listened under the conspiracy of passion and reason. I have therefore always endeavoured to compose those feuds and angry dissensions between affection, faith, and reason, For there is in our soul a kind of triumvirate, or triple government of three competitors, which distracts the peace of this our commonwealth not less than did that other, the state of Rome.

As reason is a rebel unto faith, so pattern unto reason.

As the propositions of faith seem absurd unto reason, So the theorems of reason unto passion, and both unto reason.

Yet a moderate and peaceable discretion may so state and order the matter that they may be all kings, and yet make but one monarchy, every one exercising his sovereignty and prerogative in a due time and place, according to the restraint and limit of circumstance.

There is As in philosophy, so in divinity, sturdy doubts and boisterous objections were with the unhappiness of our knowledge too nearly acquainteth us.

More of these no man hath known than myself, which I confess I conquered not in a martial posture, but on my knees.

For our endeavours are not only to combat with doubts, but always to dispute with the devil. The villainy of that spirit takes a hint of infidelity from our studies, and by demonstrating a naturality in one way, makes us mistrust a miracle in another.

Thus, having perused the archedoxies, and read the secret sympathies of things, he would dissuade my belief from the miracle of the brazen serpent, make me conceit that image worked by sympathy. And was but the Egyptian treat to cure their diseases without a miracle.

Again, having seen some experiments of bitumen, and having read far more of Naphtha, he whispered to my curiosity, the fire of the altar might be natural, and bid me mistrust a miracle in Elias, when he entrenched the altar round with water. For that inflammable substance yields not easily unto water, but flames in the arms of its antagonist.

And thus would he inveigle my belief to think the combustion of Sodom might be natural, and that there was an asphaltic and bituminous nature in that lake before the fire of Gomorrah.

I know that manna is now plentifully gathered in Calabria, And Josephus tells me in his days it was as plentiful in Arabia. The devil therefore made the quirey. Where was then the miracle in the days of Moses? The Israelite saw but that in his time the natives of those countries behold in ours.

Thus the devil played at chess with me, and yielding a pawn. Thought to gain a queen of me, taking advantage of my honest endeavours, and whilst I laboured to raise the structure of my reason, he strived to undermine the edifice of my faith. 20. Neither had these, or any other, ever such advantage of me as to incline me to any point of infidelity or desperate positions of atheism. For I have been these many years of opinion, there was never any.

Those that held religion was the difference of man from beasts, have spoken probably, and proceed upon a principle as inductive as the other.

That doctrine of Evercurus that denied the providence of God was no atheism, but a magnificent and high-strained conceit of His Majesty, which He deemed too sublime to mind the trivial actions of those inferior creatures.

That fatal necessity of the Stoics is nothing but the immutable law of his will.

Those that heretofore denied the divinity of the Holy Ghost have been condemned but as heretics. And those that now deny our Saviour, though more than heretics, are not so much as atheists, For though they deny two persons in the Trinity, they hold, as we do, there is but one God.

That villain and secretary of Hell, that composed that miscreant piece of the three impostors, Jesus, Moses, and Mohammed, though divided from all religions, and was neither Jew, Turk, nor Christian, was not a positive atheist.

I confess every country hath its Machiavelle, every age its Lucian, whereof common heads must not hear, nor more advance judgments to rashly venture on. It is the rhetoric of Satan, and may pervert a loose or prejudicate belief. 21. I confess I have perused them all, And can discover nothing that may startle a discreet belief.

Yet there are heads carried off with the wind and breath of such motives. I remember a doctor in Physique of Italy, who could not perfectly believe the immortality of the soul, because Galen seemed to make a doubt thereof.

With another, I was familiarly acquainted in France, a divine and a man of singular parts. That on the same point was so plunged and gravelled with three lines of Seneca, that all our antidotes, drawn from both Scripture and philosophy, could not expel the poison of his error.

There are a set of heads that can credit the relations of mariners, yet question the testimonies of St Paul, and peremptorily maintain the traditions of Ilion or Pliny, yet in histories of scripture raise queries and objections, believing no more than they can parallel inhumane authors.

I confess there are in scripture stories that do exceed the fables of poets, and to a captious reader sound like Gargantua or Bevis, So to all the legends of times past, and the fabulous conceits of these present, and it will be hard to find one that deserves to carry the buckler unto Samson.

Yet is all of this of an easy possibility if we conceive a divine concourse, or an influence but from the little finger of the Almighty.

It is impossible that, either in the discourse of man or in the infallible voice of God, to the weakness of our apprehensions, there should not appear irregularities, contradictions, and antimonies. Myself could show a catalogue of doubts, never yet imagined nor questioned, as I know, which are not resolved at the first hearing, not fantastic queries or objections of air, For I cannot hear of atoms in divinity.

I can read the history of the pigeon that was sent out of the ark and returned no more, yet not question how she found out her mate that was left behind.

That Lazarus was raised from the dead, yet not demand where in the interim his soul awaited, or raise a law-case. Whether his heir might lawfully detain his inheritance bequeathed unto him by his death, and he, though restored to life, have no plea or title unto his former possessions. Whether Eve was framed out of the left side of Adam, I dispute not, because I stand not yet assured which is the right side of a man, or whether there be any such distinction in nature. That she was edified out of the rib of Adam, I believe. Yet raise no question, who shall arise with that rib at the resurrection? Whether Adam was an hermaphrodite, as the rabbins contend upon the letter of the text, because it is contrary to reason.

There should be an hermaphrodite before there was a woman, or a composition of two natures before there was a second composed.

Likewise, whether the world was created in autumn, summer, or the spring, because it was created in them all, for whatsoever sign the sun possesseth, those four seasons are actually existent. It is the nature of this luminary to distinguish the several seasons of the year, all which it makes at one time in the whole earth, and successive in any part thereof. There are a bundle of curiosities not only in philosophy, but in divinity, proposed and discussed by men of most supposed abilities, which, indeed, are not worthy our vacant hours, much less our serious studies. Pieces only fit to be placed in Pantagoule's library, or bound up with Tartaretus de Twenty-two.

These are niceties that become not those that peruse so serious a mystery. There are others more generally questioned and called to the bar, yet methinks of an easy and possible truth.

Tis ridiculous to put off or down the general flood of Noah in that particular inundation of Deucalion. That there was a deluge once seems not to me so great a miracle as that there is not one always. How all the kinds of creatures, not only in their own bulks, but with a competency of food and sustenance, might be preserved in one arc, and within the extent of three hundred cubits, to a reason that rightly examines it will appear very feasible. There is another. Secret not contained in the scripture, which is more hard to comprehend and put the Honest Father to the refuge of a miracle, and that is not only how the distinct pieces of the world and divided islands should be first planted by men, but inhabited by tigers, panthers, and bears.

How America, Abounded with beasts of prey and noxious animals, yet contained not in it that necessary creature, a horse, is very strange.

By what passage those, not only birds, but dangerous and unwelcome beasts came over? How there be creatures there which are not found in this triple continent?

Or which must needs be strange? Unto us that hold but one ark, and that the creatures began their progress from the mountains of Ararat.

They who to self this would make the deluge particular proceed upon a principle that I can in no way grant, not only upon the negative of holy scriptures, but of mine own reason, whereby I can make it probable that the world was as well-peopled in the time of Noah as in ours, and Fifteen hundred years to people the world, as full a time for them as four thousand years since have been to us.

There are other assertions and common tenets drawn from Scripture, and generally believed as Scripture. Whereunto notwithstanding, I would never betray the liberty of my reason.

Tis a paradox to me that Methuselam was, the longest lived of all the children of Adam, And no man will be able to prove it. When from the process of the text I can manifest, it may be otherwise. That Judas perished by hanging himself, there is no certainty in Scripture, though in one place it seems to affirm it, and by a doubtful word has given occasion to translate it, yet in another place, in a more punctual description, it makes it improbable, and seems to overthrow it.

That our fathers, after the flood, erected the Tyre of Babel to preserve themselves against a second deluge is generally opinioned and believed. Yet is there another intention of theirs expressed in Scripture? Besides, it is improbable from the circumstance of the place, that is a plain in the land of Shinar. These are no points of faith, and therefore may admit a free dispute. There are yet others, and those familiarly concluded from the text were in under favour. I see no consequence. The church of Rome confidently proves the opinion of tutelary angels from that answer when Peter knocked at the door, "'Tis not he but his angel," that is, might some say, his messenger, or somebody from him. For so the original signifies, and is as likely to be the doubtful family's meaning.

This exposition I once suggested to a young divine that answered upon this point, to which I remember the Franciscan opponent replied no more but that it was a new and no authentic interpretation.

4 04 - Religio Medici - Pt 1: 23-35 37:43

Religio Medici. Twenty-three.

These are but the conclusions and fallible discourses of man upon the word of God. For such I do believe the holy scriptures, yet Were it a man, I could not choose but say it was the singularest and superlative piece that hath been extant since the creation. Were I a pagan, I should not refrain the lecture of it, and cannot but commend the judgment of Ptolemy, that thought not his library complete without it. The old Koran of the Turks, I speak without prejudice, is an ill-composed piece. containing in it vain and ridiculous errors in philosophy, impossibilities, fictions, and vanities beyond laughter, maintained by evident and open sophisms, the policy of ignorance, deposition of universities, and banishment of learning, that hath gotten foot by arms and violence.

This, without a blow, Hath disseminated itself throughout the whole earth.

It is not unremarkable what Philo first observed, that the law of Moses continued two thousand years without the least alteration. Whereas we see the laws of other commonweals do alter with occasions, and even those that pretended their original from some divinity To have vanished without trace or memory.

I believe, besides Zoroaster, there were divers that writ before Moses, who, notwithstanding, have suffered the common fate of time. Men's works have an age like themselves, and though they outlive their authors, yet have they a stint and period to their duration. This only is a work too hard for the teeth of time, and cannot perish but in the general flames, when all things shall confess their ashes.

Twenty four.

I have heard some with deep sighs lament the lost lines of Cicero. Others with as many groans deplore the combustion of the library of Alexandria. For my own part, I think there be too many in the world, and could with patience behold the urn and ashes of the Vatican. Could I with a few others recover the perished leaves of Solomon? I would not omit a copy of Enoch's Pillars, had they many nearer authors than Josephus, and did not relish somewhat of the fable.

Some men have written more than others have spoken. Pineda quotes more authors in one work than are necessary in a whole world. Of those three great inventions in Germany, there are two which are not without their incommodities. It is not a melancholy utinam of my own, but the desires of better heads, that there were a general synod, not To unite the incompatible difference of religion, but for the benefit of learning, to reduce it, as it lay at first in a few and solid authors, and to condemn to the fire those swarms and millions of rhapsodies begotten only to distract and abuse the weaker judgments of scholars, and to maintain the trade and mystery of typographers.

XXV.

I cannot but wonder with what exception the Samaritans could confine their belief to the Pentateuch, or five books of Moses. I am ashamed at the rabbinical interpretation of the Jews upon the Old Testament as much as their defection from the New, and truly it is beyond wonder had that contemptible and degenerate issue of Jacob, once so devoted to ethnic superstition, and so easily seduced to the idolatry of their neighbours, should now in such an obstinate and peremptory belief adhere unto their own doctrine, expect impossibilities, and in the face and eye of the church persist without the least hope of conversion. This is a vice in them that were a virtue in us, for obstinacy in a bad cause is but constancy in a good.

And herein I must accuse those of my own religion, for there is not any of such a fugitive faith, such an unstable belief as a Christian, none that do so oft transform themselves not unto several shapes of Christianity and of the same species, but into more unnatural and contrary forms of Jew and Mohammedan, that From the name of Saviour can condescend to the bare term of prophet, and from an old belief that he has come, fall to a new expectation of his coming.

It is the promise of Christ to make us all one flock, but how and when this union shall be is as obscure to me as the last day. Of those four members of religion, we hold a slender proportion. There are, I confess, some new additions. It is small to those which accrue to our adversaries, and those only drawn from the revolt of pagans, men of but negative impieties, and such as deny Christ, but because they never heard of him.

But the religion of the Jew is expressly against the Christian. And the Mahometan against both. For the Turk in the bulk he now stands, he is beyond all hope of conversion.

If he fall asunder, there may be conceived hopes, but not without strong improbabilities.

The dew is obstinate in all fortunes. The persecution of fifteen hundred years. Hath but confirmed them in their error. They have already endured whatsoever may be inflicted, and have suffered in a bad cause even unto the condemnation of their enemies.

Persecution is a bad and indirect way to plant religion. It hath been the unhappy method of angry devotions not only to confirm honest religion, but wicked heresies and Extravagant Opinions.

It was the first stone and basis of our faith none can more justly boast of persecutions and glory in the number and valour of martyrs, for, to speak properly, those are true and almost only examples of fortitude. Those that are fetched from the field or drawn from the actions of the camp Are not oft time so truly precedents of valor as audacity, and at the best attain but to some bastard piece of fortitude.

If we shall strictly examine the circumstances and requisites which Aristotle requires to true and perfect valor, we shall find the name only in his master Alexander, and as little in that Roman worthy Julius Caesar.

And if any in that easy and active way have done so nobly as to deserve that name, yet in the passive and more terrible piece these have surpassed, and in a more heroical way may claim the honour of that title. Tis not in the power of every honest faith to proceed thus far or pass to heaven through the flames. Every one Hath it not in that full measure, nor in so audacious and resolute a temper, as to endure those terrible tests and trials, who notwithstanding in a peaceable way, do truly adore their Saviour, and have no doubt a faith acceptable in the eyes of God. 26. Now, as all that die in the war are not termed soldiers, So neither can I properly term all those that suffer in matters of religion martyrs.

The Council of Constance condemns John Huss for a heretic. The stories of his own party style him a martyr.

He must needs offend the divinity of both that says he was neither the one nor the other.

There are many questioners canonized on earth that shall never be saints in heaven, and have their names in histories and martyrologies, who, in the eyes of God, are not so perfect martyrs as was the wise heathen Socrates, that suffered on a fundamental point of religion, the unity of God. I have often pitied the miserable bishop that suffered in the cause of Antipodes, It cannot choose but accuse him of as much madness for exposing his living on such a trifle as those of ignorance and folly that condemned him.

I think my conscience will not give me the lie if I say there are not many extant that in a noble way fear the face of death less than myself. Yet from the moral duty I owe to the commandment of God, The natural respects that I tender unto the conservation of my essence and being. I would not perish upon a ceremony, politic points, or indifferency. Nor is my belief of that untractable temper as not to bow at their obstacles, or connive at matters wherein there are not manifest impieties. The leaven, therefore, and ferment of all, not only civil but religious actions, is wisdom. Without which, to commit ourselves to the flames is homicide, and I fear but to pass through one fire into another. 27.

That miracles are ceased, I can neither prove nor absolutely deny. Much less define the time and period of their cessation. That they survived Christ is manifest upon the record of scripture. That they outlived the apostles also, and were revived at the conversion of nations many years afterwards. We cannot deny, if we shall not question, those writers whose testimonies we do not controvert in points that make for our own opinions. Therefore, that may have some truth in it that is reported by the Jesuits of their miracles in the Indies.

I could wish it were true, or had any other testimony than their own pens.

They may easily believe those miracles abroad who daily conceive a greater at home, the transmutation of those visible elements into the body and blood of our Saviour, For the conversion of water into wine, which he wrought in Cana, or what the devil would have had him do in the wilderness of stones into bread, compared to this, will scarce deserve the name of a miracle.

Though, indeed, to speak properly, there is not one miracle greater than another, they being the extraordinary effects of the hand of God, To which all things are of equal facility, and to create the world as easy as one single creature. For this is also a miracle, not only to produce effects against or above nature, but before nature, and to create nature as great a miracle as to contradict or transcend her.

We do too narrowly define the power of God, restraining it to our capacities. I hold that God can do all things. How he should work contradictions, I do not understand, yet dare not therefore deny. I cannot see why the angel of God should question Estras to recall the time past, if it were beyond his own power. Or that God should pose mortality in that which he was not able to perform himself. I will not say God cannot, but he will not perform many things which we plainly affirm he cannot. This, I am sure, is the mannerliest proposition, wherein, notwithstanding, I hold no paradox, for strictly his power is the same with his will. And they both, with all the rest, do make but one God.

Twenty eight.

Therefore, that miracles have been, I do believe, that they may yet be wrought by the living, I do not deny, but have no confidence in those which are fathered on the dead. And this hath ever made me suspect the efficacy of relics. To examine the bones, question the habits and appurtenances of saints, and even of Christ himself.

I cannot conceive why the cross that Helena found, and whereon Christ himself died, should have power to restore others unto life.

I excuse not Constantine from a fall off his horse, or a mischief from his enemies upon the wearing Those nails on his bridle which our Saviour bore upon the cross in his hands, I compute among P.I. Fraudes, not many degrees before consecrated swords and roses, that which Baldwin, King of Jerusalem, returned the Genovese for their cost and pains in his war, to wit the ashes of John the Baptist.

Those that hold The sanctity of their souls doth leave behind a tincture and sacred faculty on their bodies, speak naturally of miracles. Do not solve the doubt. Now one reason I tender so little devotion unto relics is, I think, the slender and doubtful respect I have always held unto antiquities. For that indeed which I admire is far before antiquity, that is, eternity. And that is, God himself, who, though he be styled the ancient of days, cannot receive the adjunct of antiquity, who was before the world, and shall be after it, yet is not older than it. For in his years there is no climacter, his duration is eternity, and far more venerable than antiquity.

Twenty-nine.

But above all things, I wonder how the curiosity of wiser heads could pass that great and indisputable miracle, the cessation of oracles. And what swoon their reasons lay to content themselves and sit down with such a far-fetched and ridiculous reason as Plutarch allegeth for it?

The Jews that can believe the supernatural solstice of the sun in the days of Joshua, have yet the impudence to deny the eclipse which every pagan confessed at his death. But for this it is evident beyond all contradiction. The devil himself confessed it.

Certainly, it is not a warrantable curiosity to examine the verity of Scripture by the concordance of humane history, or seek to confirm the chronicle of Hester or Daniel by the authority of Megasthenes or Herodotus. I confess, I have had an unhappy curiosity this way, till I laughed myself out of it with a piece of Justin. where he delivers that the children of Israel for being scabbed were banished out of Egypt. And truly, since I have understood the occurrences of the world, and know in what counterfeit shapes and deceitful vizards times present represent on the stage things past, I do believe them little more than things to come.

Some have been of my opinion, and endeavoured to Write the history of their own lives, wherein Moses hath outgone them all, and left not only the story of his life, but, as some will have it, of his death also. 30. It is a riddle to me how this story of oracles hath not wormed out of the world that doubtful conceit of spirits and witches, how so many learned heads should so far forget their metaphysics, and Destroy the ladder and scale of creatures, as to question the existence of spirits. For my part, I have ever believed, and do now know, that there are witches. They that doubt of these do not only deny them, but spirits, and are obliquely and upon consequence a sort not of infidels, but atheists.

Those that, to compute their incredulity, desire to see apparitions, shall questionless never behold any, nor have the power to be so much as witches. The devil hath them already in a heresy as capital as witchcraft, and to appear to them were but to convert them.

Of all the delusions wherewith he deceives mortality, there is not any that puzzleth me more. Than the legedomain of changelings.

I do not credit those transformations of reasonable creatures into beasts, or that the devil hath a power to transpeciate a man into a horse, who tempted Christ as a trial of his divinity to convert but stones into bread.

I could believe that spirits use with man the act of carnality, and that in both sexes. I conceive they may assume, steal, or contrive a body, wherein there may be an action enough to content decrepit lust, or passion to satisfy more active veneries, yet in both without a possibility of generation. And therefore that opinion that Antichrist should be born of the tribe of Dan by conjunction with the devil is ridiculous, and a conceit fitter for a rabin than a Christian.

I hold that the devil doth really possess some men, the spirit of melancholy others, the spirit of delusion others, that as the devil is concealed and denied by some, so God and good angels Are pretended by others, whereof the late defection of the maid of Germany hath left a pregnant example. 31. Again, I believe that all that use sorceries, incantations and spells are not witches, or as we term them, magicians. I conceive there is a traditional magic not learned immediately from the devil, but at second hand from his scholars, who, having once the secret betrayed, are able, and to empirically practice without his advice, they both proceeding upon the principles of nature, where actives, aptly conjoined to disposed passives, will under any master produce their effects.

Thus I think at first, A great part of philosophy was witchcraft, which being afterward derived to one another proved but philosophy, and was indeed no more but the honest effects of nature.

What invented by us is philosophy learned from him is magic.

We do surely owe the discovery of many secrets to the discovery of good and bad angels. I could never pass that sentence of Paracelsus without an asterisk or annotation. Ascendens astrum multa revelat quarentibus magnalia naturae, id est opera dei.

I do think that many mysteries ascribed to our own inventions have been the courteous revelations of spirits. For those noble essences in heaven bear a friendly regard unto their fellow-natures on earth, and therefore believe that those many prodigies and ominous prognostics which forerun the ruin of states, princes, and private persons, are the charitable premonitions of good angels, which more careless enquiries term but the effects of chance and nature. 32. Now, besides these particular and divided spirits, there may be, for aught I know, an universal and common spirit to the whole world. It was the opinion of Plato, and it is yet of the hermetical philosophers. If there be a common nature that unites and ties the scattered and divided individuals into one species, why may there not be one that unites them all?

However, I am sure there is a common spirit that plays within us, yet makes no part of us, and that is the spirit of God. The fire and scintillation of that noble and mighty essence which is the life and radical heat of spirits, and those essences that know not the virtue of the sun.

A fire quite contrary to the fire of hell. This is that gentle heat that brooded on the waters, and in six days hatched the world. This is that irradiation that dispels the mists of hell, the clouds of horror, fear, sorrow, despair, and preserves the region of the mind in serenity. Whosoever feels not the warm gale and gentle ventilation of this spirit, Though I feel his pulse, I dare not say he lives, for truly without this, to me, there is no heat under the tropic, nor any light, though I dwelt in the body of the sun.

As, when the labouring sun hath wrought his track up to the top of lofty cancer's back, the icy ocean cracks, the frozen pole thaws with the heat of the celestial coal. So when thy absent beams begin to impart again assaults to some my frozen heart, my winter's over, my drooping spirits sing, and every part revives into a spring.

But if thy quickening beams awhile decline, and with their light bless not this orb of mine, naturally frost surpriseth every member, and in the midst of June I feel December.

Oh, how this earthly temper doth debase the noble soul in this her humble place! Whose wingy nature ever doth aspire to reach that place whence first it took its fire.

These flames, I feel, which in my heart do dwell, are not thy beams, but take their fire from hell. O quench them all, and let thy light divine be as the sun to this poor orb of mine. And to thy sacred spirit convert those fires whose earthly fumes choke. My devout aspires.

Therefore, for spirits, I am so far from denying their existence, that I could easter believe that not only whole countries, but particular persons, have their tutelary and guardian angels. It is not a new opinion of the church of Rome, but an old one of Pythagoras and Plato. There is no heresy in it, and if not manifestly defined in scripture, yet it is an opinion of a good and wholesome use in the course and actions of a man's life, and would serve as an hypothesis to solve many doubts, for of common philosophy affordeth no solution.

Now, if you demand my opinion and metaphysics of their natures, I confess them very shallow, most of them in a negative way, like that of God, or in a comparative between ourselves and fellow-creatures. For there is in this universe a stair, or manifest scale, of creatures, rising not disorderly or in confusion, but with comely method and proportion. Between creatures of mere existence and things of life, There is a large disproportion of nature. Between plants and animals or creatures of sense, a wider difference. Between them and man, a far greater.

And if the proportion hold one between man and angels, there should be yet a greater.

We do not comprehend their natures, who retain the first definition of porphyry, And distinguished them from ourselves by immortality. For before his fault his thought man also was immortal. Yet we must needs affirm that he had a different essence from the angels. Having therefore no certain knowledge of their natures, there is no bad method of the schools. Whatsoever perfection we find obscurely in ourselves, In a more complete and absolute way, to ascribe unto them.

I believe they have an extemporary knowledge, and upon the first motion of their reason do what we cannot without study or deliberation, that they know things by their forms, and define by a specifical difference what we describe by accidents and properties, and therefore Probabilities unto us may be demonstrations unto them.

That they have knowledge not only of the specifical but numerical forms of individuals, and understand by what reserved difference each single hypostasis, besides the relation to its species, becomes its numerical self.

That as the soul hath a power to move the body it informs, So there is a faculty to move any, though in form none. Hours upon a restraint of time, place, and distance, but that invisible hand that conveyed Habakkuk to the lion's den, or Philip to Azotus, infringeth this rule, and hath a secret conveyance wherewith mortality is not acquainted.

If they have that intuitive knowledge whereby As in reflection, they behold the thoughts of one another, I cannot peremptorily deny but that they know a great part of ours.

They that to refute the invocation of saints have denied that they have any knowledge of our affairs below, have proceeded too far, and must pardon my opinion till I can thoroughly answer that piece of scripture, at the conversion of a sinner, The angels in heaven rejoice.

I cannot, with those in that great father, securely interpret the work of the first day, fiat lux, to the creation of angels, though I confess there is not any creature that had so near a glimpse of their nature as light in the sun and elements. We style it a bare accident. But where it subsists alone, tis a spiritual substance, and may be an angel. In brief, conceive light invisible, and that is a spirit. 34. These are certainly the magisterial and masterpieces of the Creator, the flower, or, as we may say, the best part of nothing. Actually existing. What we are but in hopes and probability. We are only that amphibious piece between a corporal and a spiritual essence, that middle form that links those two together, and makes good the method of God and nature that jumps not from extremes, but unites the incompatible distances by some middle and participating natures.

That we are the breadth and similitude of God, it is indisputable, and upon record of Holy Scripture. But to call ourselves a microcosm or little world, I thought it only a pleasant trope of rhetoric. Till my near judgment and second thoughts told me that there was a real truth therein. For first, We are a rude mass, and in the rank of creatures which only are, and have a dull kind of being, not yet privileged with life, or preferred to sense or reason. Next, we live the life of plants, the life of animals, the life of men, and at last, the life of spirits. Running on in one mysterious nature those five kinds of existences, Which comprehend the creatures not only of the world, but of the universe.

Thus is man that great and true amphibium, whose nature is disposed to live not only like other creatures in divers elements, but in divided and distinguished worlds. For though there be but one to sense, there are two to reason. The one visible, the other invisible, Whereof Moses seems to have left description, and of the other so obscurely that some parts thereof are yet in controversy. And truly for the first chapters of Genesis I must confess a great deal of obscurity. Though divines have, to the power of human reason, endeavoured to make all go in a literal meaning, yet those allegorical interpretations are also probable. And perhaps The mystical method of Moses bred up in the hieroglyphical schools of the Egyptians.

35. Now for that immaterial world, methinks we need not wander so far beyond the first movable, for even in this material fabric the spirits walk as freely exempt from the affection of time, place, and motion as beyond the extremist circumference. Do but extract from the corpulency of bodies, or resolve things beyond their first matter, and you discover the habitation of angels, which, if I call the ubiquitary and omnipresent essence of God, I hope I shall not offend divinity. For before the creation of the world, God was really all things. For the angels he created no new world, or determinate mansion, and therefore they are everywhere where is his essence, and delivered a distance even in himself.

But God made all things for man is in some sense true, yet not so far as to subordinate the creation of those purer creatures unto ours, though as ministering spirits they do, and are willing to. Fulfilled the will of God in these lower and sublunary affairs of man. God made all things for himself, and it is impossible he should make them for any other end than his own glory. It is all he can receive, and all it is without himself. For honor being an external adjunct, and in the honorer rather than in the person honored, It was necessary to make a creature from whom he might receive this homage, and that is in the other world, angels in this man, which, when we neglect, we forget the very end of our creation, and may justly provoke God not only to repent that he hath made the world, but that he hath sworn he would not destroy it.

That there is but one world, is a conclusion of faith.

Aristotle, with all his philosophy, hath not been able to prove it, and as weakly, that the world was eternal. That dispute much troubled the pen of the philosophers, but Moses decided that question, and all is solved with the new term of a creation, that is, a production of something out of nothing. And what is that? Whatsoever is opposite to something, or more exactly, that which is truly contrary unto God, for he only is. All others have an existence with dependency, and are something but by distinction.

And herein is divinity conformant unto philosophy. And generation not only founded on contrarieties, but also creation.

God being all things, is contrary unto nothing, out of which were made all things. And so nothing became something, and omniety informed nullity into an essence.

5 05 - Religio Medici - Pt 1: 26-45 29:36

V. Selections from the works of Sir Thomas Brown.

The whole creation is a mystery, and particularly that of man. At the blast of his mouth were the rest of the creatures made, and at his bare word they started out of nothing, But in the frame of man, as the text describes it, he played the sensible operator, and seemed not so much to create as make him. When he had separated the materials of other creatures, there consequently resulted a form and soul, but having raised the walls of man, he has driven to a second and harder creation of a substance like himself, an incorruptible and immortal soul. With these two affections we have the philosophy and opinion of the heathens, the flat affirmative of Plato, and not a negative from Aristotle.

There is another scruple cast in by Divinity concerning its production, much disputed in the German auditories, and with that indifferency and equality of arguments, as leave the controversy undetermined.

I am not of Paracelsus mind, that boldly delivers a receipt to make a man without conjunction, yet cannot but wonder at the multitude of heads that do deny traduction, having no other argument to confirm their belief, than that rhetorical sentence and antimetathesis of Augustine. Creando infunditor infundendo Either opinion will consist well enough with religion, yet I would rather incline to this. Did not one objection haunt me? Not wrung from speculations and subtleties, but from common sense and observation, not picked from the leaves of any author, but bred amongst the weeds and tares of mine own brain. And this is a conclusion from the equivocal and monstrous productions in the copulation of man with beast.

For if the soul of man be not transmitted and transfused in the seed of the parents, why are not those productions merely beasts, but have also an impression and tincture of reason, in as high a measure as it can evidence itself in those improper organs?

Nor truly can I peremptorily deny that the soul in this her sublunary estate is wholly, and in all exceptions, inorganical, but that for the performance of her ordinary actions there is required not only a symmetry and proper disposition of organs, but a crisis and temper correspondent to its operations. Yet is not this mass of flesh and visible structure The instrument and proper course of the soul, but rather of sense, and that the hand of reason.

In our study of anatomy there is a mass of mysterious philosophy, and such has reduced the very heathens to divinity. Yet amongst all those rare discourses and curious pieces I find in the fabric of man I do not so much content myself, As in that I find not. There is no organ or instrument for the rational soul. For in the brain, which we term the seat of reason, there is not anything of moment more than I can discover in the cranny of a beast. And this is a sensible and knowing considerable argument of the inorganity of the soul, at least in that sense we usually so conceive it.

Thus, We are men, and we know not how. There is something in us that can be without us, and will be after us, though it is strange that it hath no history what it was before us, nor cannot tell how it entered in us. 37. Now, for these walls of flesh wherein the soul doth seem to be immured before the resurrection, It is nothing but an elemental composition, and a fabric that must fall to ashes. All flesh is grass is not only metaphorically, but literally true. For all those creatures we behold are but the herbs of the field digested into flesh in them, or more remotely carnified in ourselves. Nay, further, we are what we all abhor, anthropopigy and cannibals. Devourers, not only of men, but of ourselves, and that not in an allegory, but a positive truth.

For all this mass of flesh which we behold came in at our mouths. This frame we look upon hath been upon our trenches. In brief we have devoured ourselves.

I cannot believe the wisdom of Pythagoras did ever positively and in a literal sense affirm his metempsychosis or impossible transmigration of the souls of men into beasts. Of all metamorphoses or transmigrations, I believe only one, that of Lot's wife. For that of Nebuchadonnesor proceeded not so far In all others, I conceive, there is no further verity than is contained in their implicit sense and morality. I believe that the whole frame of a beast doth perish, and is left in the same state after death as before it was materialled unto life, that the souls of men know neither contrary nor corruption, that they subsist beyond the body, and outlive death by the privilege of their proper natures, And without a miracle.

That the souls of the faithful, as they leave earth, take possession of heaven. That those apparitions and ghosts of departed persons are not the wandering souls of men, but the unquiet walks of devils, prompting and suggesting us unto mischief, blood, and villainy. Instilling and stealing into our hearts that the blessed spirits are not at rest in their graves, But wander solicitous of the affairs of the world. But that those phantasms appear often, and do frequent cemeteries, charnel-houses, and churches, it is because those are the dormitories of the dead, where the devil, like an insolent champion, beholds with pride the spoils and trophies of his victory in Adam. 38. This is that dismal conquest we all deplore, that makes us so often cry, Adam quid fe kisti.

I thank God I have not those straight ligaments or narrow obligations to the world as to dote on life, or be convulsed and tremble at the name of death.

Not that I am insensible of the dread and horror thereof. Or, by raking into the bowels of the deceased, continual sight of anatomy, skeletons, or cadaverous relics. Like for spilloes or grave-makers, I am become stupid, or have forgot the apprehension of mortality. But that, marshalling all the horrors, and contemplating the extremities thereof, I find not anything therein able to daunt the courage of a man, much less a well-resolved Christian, And therefore am not angry at the error of our first parents, or unwilling to bear a part of this common fate, and like the best of them, to die, that is, to cease to breathe, to take a farewell of the elements, to be a kind of nothing for a moment, to be within one instant of a spirit.

When I take a full view and circle of myself without this reasonable moderator and equal piece of justice death, I to conceive myself the miserablest person extant. Were there not another life that I hoped for, all the vanities of this world should not entreat a moment's breath from me. Could the devil work my belief to imagine I could never die? I would not outlive that very thought. I have so abject a conceit of this common way of existence, this retaining to the sun and elements. I cannot think this to be a man, or to live according to the dignity of humanity.

In expectation of a better, I can with patience embrace this life, yet in my best meditations do often defy death.

I honour any man that contemns it. Nor can I highly love any that is afraid of it. This makes me naturally love a soldier, and honour those tattered and contemptible regiments that will die at the command of a sergeant.

For a pagan there may be some motives to be in love with life, but for a Christian to be amazed at death, I see not how he can escape this dilemma, that he is too sensible of this life, or Hopeless of the life to come.

Some divines count Adam thirty years old at his creation, because they suppose him created in the perfect age and stature of man. Surely we are all out of the computation of our age, and every man is some months elder than he bethinks him. We live, move, have a being, and are subject to the actions of the elements and the malice of diseases in that other world, the truest microcosm, the womb of our mother. For, besides that general and common existence we are conceived to hold in our chaos, and whilst we sleep within the bosom of our causes, we enjoy a being and life in three distinct worlds. wherein we receive most manifest graduations. In that obscure world and womb of our mother, our time is short, computed by the moon, yet longer than the days of many creatures that behold the sun.

Ourselves being, not yet, without life, sense, and reason, though for the manifestation of its actions it awaits the opportunity of objects, Seems to live there but on its root and soul of vegetation.

Entering afterwards upon the scene of the world, we arise up and become another creature, performing the reasonable actions of man, and obscurely manifesting that part of divinity in us, but not in complement and perfection, till we have once more cast our second iron, that is this loaf of flesh, And are delivered into the last world, that is, that ineffable place of Paul, that proper Ubi of spirits.

The smattering I have of the philosopher's stone, which is something more than the perfect exaltation of gold, hath taught me a great deal of divinity, and instructed my belief, how that immortal spirit and incorruptible substance of my soul, May lie obscure and sleep a while within this house of flesh.

Those strange and mystical transmigrations that I have observed in silkworms, turned my philosophy into divinity. There is in these works of nature, which seem to puzzle reason, something divine, and hath more in it than the eye of a common spectator doth discover.

I am naturally bashful, nor hath conversation, age, or travel been able to affront or enharden me, yet I have one part of modesty which I have seldom discovered in another, that is, to speak truly. I am not so much afraid of death as ashamed thereof. Tis the very disgrace and ignominy of our natures that at a moment can so disfigure us That our nearest friends, wife, and children, stand afraid and start at us.

The birds and beasts of the field, that before in a natural fear obeyed us, forgetting all allegiance, begin to prey upon us.

This very conceit hath in a tempest disposed, and left me willing to be swallowed up in the abyss of waters, wherein I had perished unseen, unpitied, Without wondering eyes, tears of pity, lectures of mortality, and none hath said, Quanta mutata sabilo.

Not that I am ashamed of the anatomy of my parts, or can accuse nature of playing the bungler in any part of me, or my own vicious life for contracting any shameful disease upon me, whereby I might not call myself As wholesome a morsel for the worms as any.

Some, upon the courage of a fruitful issue, wherein, as in the truest chronicle, they seem to outlive themselves, come 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 memory of my name to be found anywhere 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 Rhodomontodo of Lucan.

Cello tegituo qui non habet urnam. He that unburied lies wants not his hearse, for unto him attombs the universe.

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 oars, nor the numerous and weary days of our fathers before the flood. If there be any truth in astrology, I may outlive the 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 underground all the kings of Europe, have been contemporary to three Emperors, four Grand Signiors, and as many Popes. Methinks I have outlived myself, and begin to be weary of the sun. I have shaken 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 antics.

To my severer contemplations. 42. It is not, I confess, an unlawful prayer to desire to surpass the days of our Saviour, Or wished to outlive that age wherein he thought fit us to die. Yet if, as divinity affirms, there shall be no grey 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 appoint 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 worse 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 make but our sins innumerable. The same vice committed at sixteen is not the same, though would agree in all other circumstances, at forty, but swells and doubles from the 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 arithmetic, the last stands for more than all that went before it. And though I think no man can live well once, but that he 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 vidiosity 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 stands in need of Eason's bath before threescore. 43. And truly There goes a great deal of providence to produce a man's life under threescore. There is more required than an able temper for those years. Though the radical humour contain in its 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 gloam or bottom of our days. Tis his wisdom to determine them, but his perpetual and waking providence that fulfils and accomplisheth them. We're in the spirits, ourselves, and all the creatures of God, in a secret and disputed way, to execute his will.

Let them not therefore complain of immaturity that die about thirty. They fall but like the whole world, whose solid and well-composed 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. 44. 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.

Victoros quae dei, che lontur vivere durent, Felix esse mori.

We are all deluded, vainly searching ways to make us happy by the length of days. For cunningly, to makes protract this breath, the gods conceal the happiness of death. There be many excellent strains in that poet, wherewith his Stoical genius hath liberally supplied him. And truly there are singular pieces in the philosophy of Zeno and the doctrine of the Stoics, which, I perceive, delivered in a pulpit, pass for current divinity. Yet herein, Are they in extremes that can allow a man to be his own assassin, and so highly extol the end and suicide of Cato? This is indeed not to fear death, but yet to be afraid of life. It is a brave act of valour to contemn death, but where life is more terrible than death, it is then the truest valour to dare to live.

And herein religion hath taught us a noble example. For all the valiant acts of Curtius, Saevalor, or Codrus, do not parallel or match that one of Jove, and sure there is no torch to the rack of a disease, nor any poniards in death itself, like those in the way or prologue to it. Emori Nolo, sed me esse mortuum, nicio curo. I would not die, but care not to be dead.

Were I of Caesar's religion, I should be of his desires, and wish rather to go off at one blow than to be sawed in pieces by the grating torture of a disease.

Men that look no farther than their outsides think health and appurtenance unto life, and quarrel with their constitutions for being sick. But I that have examined the parts of man, and know upon what tender filaments that fabric hangs, Do wonder that we are not always so, and considering the thousand doors that lead to death, to thank my God that we can die but once.

Tis not only the mischief of diseases and villainy of poisons that make an end of us. We vainly accuse the fury of guns and the new inventions of death. It is in the power of every hand to destroy us, and we are beholding unto every one we meet He doth not kill us. There is but one comfort left, that though it be in the power of the weakest arm to take away life, it is not in the strongest to deprive us of death.

God would not exempt himself from that, the misery of immortality in the flesh, he undertook not, that was immortal. Certainly there is no happiness within this circle of flesh, nor is it in the optics of these eyes to behold felicity. The first day of our jubilee is death. The devil hath therefore failed of his desires. We are happier with death than we should have been without it. There is no misery but in himself, where there is no end of misery, and so indeed in his own sense the stoic is in the right. He forgets that he can die who complains of misery. We are in the power of no calamity, while death is in our own. 45 Now, besides the literal and positive kind of death, there are others whereof divines make mention, and those I think not merely metaphorical, as mortification, dying unto sin in the world.

Therefore I say every man hath a double horoscope, one of his humanity, his birth, another of his Christianity, his baptism, and from this do I compute or calculate my nativity, not reckoning those horai combusti and odd days, or esteeming myself any thing before I was my saviours, and enrolled in the register of Christ.

Whosoever enjoys not this life, I count him but an apparition, though he were about him the sensible affections of flesh. In these moral exceptions, the way to be immortal is to die daily. Nor can I think I have the true theory of death, when I contemplate a skull, or behold a skeleton with those vulgar imaginations it casts upon us. I have therefore enlarged that common memento mori into a more Christian memorandum. Memento quoto noissima. Those four inevitable points of us all. Death, judgment, heaven, and hell.

Neither did the contemplations of the heathens rest in their graves without further thought of rudder manth, or some judicial proceeding after death. Though in another way, and upon suggestion of their natural reasons. I cannot but marvel from what sybil or oracle they stole the prophecy of the world's destruction by fire, or whence Lucan learned to say, communis mundo super estrogus, ossibus astra misturus. And yet remains to the world one common fire, wherein our bones with stars shall make one pyre.

I believe the world grows near its end, yet is neither old nor decayed, nor shall ever perish upon the ruins of its own principles. As the work of creation was above nature, so its adversary annihilation, Without which the world hath not its end, but its mutation.

Now, what force shall be able to consume it thus far without the breath of God, which is the tourist consuming flame? My philosophy cannot inform me. Some believe there went not a minute to the world's creation, nor shall there go to its destruction. Those six days, so punctually described, Make not to them one moment, but rather seemed to manifest the method and idea of the great work of the intellect of God, than the manner how he proceeded in its operation.

I cannot dream that there should be at the last day any such judicial proceeding or calling to the bar, as indeed the scripture seems to imply, and the literal commentators do conceive. For unspeakable mysteries in the scriptures are often delivered in a vulgar and illustrative way, and being written unto man are delivered not as they truly are, but as they may be understood. Wherein, notwithstanding the different interpretations according to different capacities, may stand firm without devotion, nor be any way prejudicial to each single edification.

6 06 - Religio Medici - Pt 1: 46-51 20:32

In those days there shall come liars and false prophets.

Now, to determine the day and year of this inevitable time, is not only convincible and statute madness, but also manifest impiety. How shall we interpret Elias's six thousand years, or imagine the secret communicated to a rabbi, which God hath denied unto his angels?

It had been an excellent query to opposed the devil of Delphus, and must needs have forced him to some strange amphibology. It hath not only mocked the predictions of sundry astrologers in ages past, but the prophecies of many melancholy heads in these present, who, neither understanding reasonably things past or present, pretend a knowledge of things to come, heads ordained only to manifest the incredible effects of melancholy, and to fulfil old prophecies. Rather than be the authors of new. In those days there shall come wars, and rumours of wars. To me seems no prophecy, but a constant truth in all times verified since it was pronounced. There shall be signs in the moon and stars. How comes he then like a thief in the night, when he gives an item of his coming?

That common sign drawn from the revelation of Antichrist is as obscure as any. In our common compute he hath been come these many years. But for my own part, to speak freely, I am half of opinion that Antichrist is the philosopher's stone in divinity. For the discovery and invention thereof, though there be prescribed rules and probable inductions, Yet had hardly any man attained the perfect discovery thereof, that general opinion that the world grows near its end hath possessed all ages past as nearly as ours. I am afraid that the souls that now depart cannot escape that lingering expostulation of the saints under the altar. Quo usque Domine, how long, O Lord, And groan in the expectation of that great jubilee.

47. This is the day that must make good that great attribute of God, his justice, that must reconcile those unanswerable doubts that torment the wisest understandings, and reduce those seeming inequalities and respective distributions in this world to an equality And recompense of justice in the next. This is that one day that shall include and comprehend all that went before it, wherein, as in the last scene, all the actors must enter to complete and make up the catastrophe of this great peace.

This is the day whose memory hath only power to make us honest in the dark, and to be virtuous without a witness.

Ipsa sui praetium virtus sibi, that virtue is her own reward, is but a cold principle, and not able to maintain our variable resolutions in a constant and settled way of goodness.

I have practised that honest artifice of Seneca, and in my retired and solitary imaginations, to detain me from the foulness of vice, have fancied to myself The presence of my dear and worthiest friends, before whom I should lose my head rather than be vicious. Yet herein I found that there was nought but moral honesty, and this was not to be virtuous for his sake who must reward us at the last. I have tried, if I could reach that great resolution of his, to be honest without a thought of heaven or hell. And, indeed, I found, upon a natural inclination and inbred loyalty unto virtue, that I could serve her without a livery, yet not in that resolved and venerable way, but that the frailty of my nature upon easy temptation might be induced to forget her.

The life, therefore, and spirit of all our actions, is the resurrection, and a stable apprehension that our ashes shall enjoy the fruit of our pious endeavours. Without this, all religion is a fallacy, and those impieties of Lucian, Euripides, and Julian are no blasphemies, but subtle verities, and atheists have been the only philosophers.

48. How shall the dead arise, is no question of my faith. To believe only possibilities is not faith, but mere philosophy. Many things are true in divinity, which are neither inducible by reason nor confirmable by sense, and many things in philosophy confirmable by sense, yet not inducible by reason. Thus it is impossible by any solid or demonstrative reasons to persuade a man to believe the conversion of the needle to the north, though this be possible and true, and easily credible upon a single experiment unto the sense.

I believe that our estranged and divided ashes shall unite again. That our separated dust, after so many pilgrimages and transformations into the parts of minerals, plants, animals, elements, shall, at the voice of God, return into their primitive shapes, and join again to make up their primary and predestinate forms. As of the creation, there was a separation of that confused mass into its pieces, So at the destruction thereof there shall be a separation into its distinct individuals. As at the creation of the world, all the distinct species that we behold lay involved in one mass, till the fruitful voice of God separated this united multitude into its several species. So at the last day, when those corrupted relics shall be scattered in the wilderness of forms, Seem to have forgot their proper habits.

God, by a powerful voice, shall command them back into their proper shapes, and call them out by these single individuals. Then shall appear the fertility of Adam, and the magic of that sperm that hath dilated into so many millions.

I have often beheld as a miracle that Artificial resurrection and revivification of mercury. How, being mortified into a thousand shapes, it assumes again its own, and returns into its numerical self.

Let us speak naturally and like philosophers.

The forms of alterable bodies in these sensible corruptions perish not. Nor, as we imagine, wholly quit their mansions, but retire and contract themselves into their secret and inaccessible parts, where they may best protect themselves from the action of their antagonist.

A plant or vegetable consumed to ashes by a contemplative and school philosopher seems utterly destroyed, and the form to have taken his leave forever. But to a sensible artist, the forms are not perished, but withdrawn into their incombustible part, where they lie secure from the action of that devouring element.

This is made good by experience, which can, from the ashes of a plant, revive the plant, and from its cinders, record it into its stalkened leaves again. What the art of man can do in these inferior pieces? What blasphemy is it to affirm the finger of God cannot do in these more perfect and sensible structures?

This is that mystical philosophy from whence no true scholar becomes an atheist, but from the visible effects of nature grows up a real divine, and beholds not in a dream, as Ezekiel, But in an ocular and visible object, the types of his resurrection.

Now, the necessary mansions of our restored selves are those two contrary and incompatible places we call heaven and hell. To define them, or strictly to determine what and where these are, surpasseth my divinity. That elegant apostle, who seemed to have a glimpse of heaven, hath left but a negative description thereof, which neither eye hath seen, nor ear hath heard, nor can enter into the heart of man.

He was translated out of himself to behold it, but being returned into himself could not express it.

St. John's description by Emeralds, chrysolites, and precious stones, is too weak to express the material heaven we behold. Briefly, therefore, where the soul hath the full measure and complement of happiness, where the boundless appetite of that spirit remains completely satisfied that it can neither desire addition nor alteration, that, I think, is truly heaven. And this can only be in the enjoyment of that essence whose infinite goodness is able to terminate the desires of itself and the unsatiable wishes of ours.

Wherever God will thus manifest himself, there is heaven, though within the circle of this sensible world. Thus the soul of man may be in heaven anywhere, even within the limits of his own proper body. And when it ceaseth to live in the body, it may remain in its own soul, that is, its creator.

And thus we may say that St. Paul, whether in the body or out of the body, was yet in heaven.

To place it in the imperial, or beyond the tenth sphere, is to forget the world's destruction, for when this sensible world shall be destroyed, All shall then be here, as it is now there. An imperial heaven, a quasi-bacuity, when to ask where heaven is, is to demand where the presence of God is, or where we have the glory of that happy vision.

Moses, that was bred up in all the learning of the Egyptians, committed a gross absurdity in philosophy, when, with these eyes of flesh, He desired to see God, and petitioned his Maker, that is truth itself, to a contradiction.

Those that imagine heaven and hell neighbors, and conceive a vicinity between those two extremes, upon consequence of the parable where Deves discoursed with Lazarus in Abraham's bosom, do too grossly conceive of those Glorified creatures, whose eyes shall easily upsee the sun, and behold, without a perspective, the extremest distances. For if there shall be in our glorified eyes the faculty of sight and reception of objects, I should think the visible species there to be in as unlimitable a way as now the intellectual.

I grant that two bodies placed beyond the tenth sphere, or inner vacuity, according to Aristotle's philosophy, could not behold each other, because there wants a body or medium to hand and transport the visible rays of the object unto the sense. But when there shall be a general defect of either medium to convey, or light to prepare and dispose that medium, and yet a perfect vision, We must suspend the rules of our philosophy, and make all good by a more absolute piece of optics.

I cannot tell how to say that fire is the essence of hell. I know not what to make a purgatory, or conceive a flame that can either prey upon or purify the substance of a soul. Those flames of sulphur mentioned in the scriptures I take not to be understood of this present hell, but of that to come, where fire shall make up the complement of our torches, and have a body or subject wherein to manifest its tyranny.

Some who have had the honour to be textury in divinity are of opinion that it shall be the same specifical fire with ours. This is hard to conceive. Yet I can make good how even that may prey upon our bodies, and yet not consume us. For in this material world there are bodies that persist invincible in the powerfulest flames, and though by the action of fire they fall into ignition and liquation, yet they will never suffer a destruction. I would gladly know how Moses, with an actual fire, calcined or Burnt the golden calf into powder. For that mystical metal of gold, whose solery and celestial nature I admire, exposed under the violence of fire, grows only hot and liquifies, but consumeth not.

So when the consumable and volatile pieces of our bodies shall be refined into a more impregnable and fixed temper like gold, Though they suffer from the action of flames, they shall never perish, but lie immortal in the arms of fire.

And surely, if this frame must suffer only by the action of this element, there will be many bodies escape. And not any heaven, but earth, will not be at an end, but rather a beginning. For at present it is not earth, But a composition of fire, water, earth, and air. But at that time, spoiled of these ingredients, it shall appear in a substance more like itself, its ashes.

Philosophers that opinioned the world's destruction by fire, did never dream of annihilation, which is beyond the power of sublunary causes. For the last Last and proper, sixteen seventy two, action of that element is but vitrification, or a reduction of a body into glass. And therefore, some of our chimics facetiously affirm that, at the last fire, all shall be crystallized and reverberated into glass, which is the utmost action of that element. Nor need we fear this term annihilation. Or wonder that God will destroy the works of his creation, for man subsisting, who is, and will then truly appear, a microcosm, the world cannot be said to be destroyed. For the eyes of God, and perhaps also of our glorified selves, shall as really behold and contemplate the world in its epitome or contracted essence, as now it doth at large, and in its dilated substance.

In the seed of a plant to the eyes of God, and to the understanding of man, there exists, though in an invisible way, the perfect leaves, flowers, and fruit thereof. For things that are imposse to the sense are actually existent to the understanding. Thus God beholds all things, Who contemplates as fully his works in their epitome as in their full volume, and beheld as amply the whole world in that little compendium of the sixth day as in the scattered and dilated pieces of those five before. Men commonly set forth the torments of Hell by fire, and the extremity of corporal afflictions, and describe Hell in the same method that Mahomet doth Heaven. This, indeed, makes a noise, and drums in popular ears.

But if this be the terrible peace thereof, it is not worthy to stand in diameter with Heaven. Whose happiness consists in that part that is best able to comprehend it, that immortal essence, that translated divinity and colony of God, the soul. Surely, though we place hell under earth, the devil's walk and purlieu is about it. Men speak too popularly, who place it in those flaming mountains which, to grosser apprehensions, represent hell. The heart of man is the place the devil dwells in. I feel sometimes a hell within myself. Lucifer keeps his court in my breast. Legion is revived in me.

There are as many hells as Anaxarchus conceited worlds. There was more than one hell in Magdalene when there were seven devils, for every devil is unhell unto himself. He holds an offer of torture in his own ube, and needs not the misery of circumference to afflict him. And thus a distracted conscience here is a shadow or introduction unto hell hereafter. Who can but pity The merciful intention of those hands that do destroy themselves. The devil, were it in his power, would do the like, which, being impossible, his miseries are endless, and he suffers most in that attribute wherein he is impassible, his immortality.

7 07 - Religio Medici - Pt 1: 52-60 19:37

Selection from the Works of Sir Thomas Brown.

I thank God, and with joy I mention it, I was never afraid of Hell, nor never grew pale at the description of that place. I have so fixed my contemplations on heaven, that I have almost forgot the idea of hell, and am afraid rather to lose the joys of the one, than endure the misery of the other. To be deprived of them is a perfect hell, and needs, methinks, no addition to complete our afflictions.

That terrible old term hath never detained me from sin, Nor do I owe any good action to the name thereof. I fear God, yet I am not afraid of Him. His mercies make me ashamed of my sins before His judgments, afraid thereof. These are the forced and secondary method of His wisdom, which He useth but as the last remedy, and upon provocation. A course rather to deter the wicked than incite the virtuous to his worship.

I can hardly think there was ever any scared into heaven. They go the fairest way to heaven that would serve God without a hell. Other mercenaries that crouch unto him in fear of hell, though they term themselves the servants, are indeed but The slaves of the Almighty. 53. And to be true and to speak my soul, when I survey the occurrences of my life, and call into account the finger of God, I can perceive nothing but an abyss and mass of mercies, either in general to mankind, or in particular to myself.

Whether out of the prejudice of my affection, or an inverting and partial conceit of his mercies, I know not but those which others term crosses, afflictions, judgments, misfortunes. To me, who enquire farther into them than their visible effects, they both appear, and in event have ever proved, the secret and dissembled favours of his affection.

It is a singular piece of wisdom to apprehend truly and without passion the works of God, and so well to distinguish his justice from his mercy, as not miscall those noble attributes. Yet it is likewise an honest piece of logic, so to dispute and argue the proceedings of God, as to distinguish even his judgments into mercies. For God is merciful unto all, because better to the worst than the best deserve. And to say he punisheth none in this world, though it be a paradox, is no absurdity. To one that hath committed murder, if the judge would only ordain a fine, it were a madness to call this a punishment, and to repine at the sentence, rather than admire the clemency of the judge, Thus our offences, being mortal, and deserving not only death, but damnation, if the goodness of God be content to traverse and pass them over with a loss, misfortune, or disease, what frenzy were it to term this a punishment, rather than an extremity of mercy, and to groan under the rod of his judgments, rather than admire the sceptre of his mercies!

Therefore, to adore, honour, and admire him is a debt of gratitude due from the obligation of our nature, states, and conditions. And with these thoughts, he that knows them best, will not deny that I adore him.

That I obtain heaven and the bliss thereof is accidental, and not the intended work of my devotion, it being a felicity I can neither think to deserve, nor scarce in modesty to expect. For these two ends of us all, neither as rewards or punishments, are mercifully ordained, and disproportionately disposed unto our actions, the one being so far beyond our deserts, the other so infinitely below our demerits. 54. There is no salvation to those that believe not in Christ. That is, say some, since his nativity, and as divinity affirmeth before also, which makes me much apprehend the ends of those honest worthies and philosophers, which died before his incarnation.

It is hard to place those souls in hell, Whose worthy lives do teach us virtu on earth, bethinks amongst those many subdivisions of hell, there might have been one limbo left for these.

What a strange vision will it be to see their poetical fictions converted into verities, and their imagined and fancied furies into real devils.

How strange to them will sound the history of Adam, when they shall suffer for him they never heard of. When they who derive their genealogy from the gods shall know they are the unhappy issue of sinful man.

It is an insolent part of reason to controvert the works of God, or question the justice of his proceedings. Could humility teach others, as it hath instructed me, to contemplate the infinite and incomprehensible distance between the creator and the creature, or did we seriously prepend that one simile of St. Paul, Shall the vessel say to the potter, Why hast thou made me thus? It would prevent these arrogant disputes of reason. Nor would we argue the definitive sentence of God, either to Heaven or to Hell.

Men that live according to the right rule and law of reason, live but in their own kind, as beasts do in theirs, who justly obey the prescript of their natures, and therefore cannot reasonably demand a reward of their actions, as only obeying the natural dictates of their reason.

It will therefore, and must at last appear, that all salvation is through Christ, which verity I fear these great examples of virtue must confirm, and make it good how the perfectest actions of earth have no title or claim unto heaven. 55. Nor truly do I think the lives of these, or of any other, were ever correspondent Or in all points conformable unto their doctrines. It is evident that Aristotle transgressed the rule of his own ethics. The Stoics, that condemn passion and command man to laugh in Phalaris his bull, could not endure without a groan of it at the stone or colic. The sceptics, that affirmed they knew nothing, even in that opinion, confute themselves And thought they knew more than all the world beside.

Diogenes, I hold, to be the most vainglorious man of his time, and more ambitious in refusing all honours, than Alexander in rejecting none.

Vice and the devil put a fallacy upon our reasons, and provoking us too hastily to run from it, entangle and profound us deeper in it.

The Duke of Venice, that weds himself unto the sea by a ring of gold, I will not argue of prodigality, because it is a solemnity of good use and consequence in the state. But the philosopher that threw his money into the sea to avoid avarice was a notorious prodigal.

There is no road or ready way to virtue. It is not an easy point of art to disentangle ourselves from this riddle or web of sin. To perfect virtue, as to religion, there is required a panoplia or complete armor, that whilst we lie at close ward against one vice, we lie not open to the venee of another. And indeed, wiser discretions that have the thread of reason to conduct them, Offend without pardon, whereas underheads may stumble without dishonour.

There go so many circumstances to piece up one good action, that it is a lesson to be good, and we are forced to be virtuous by the book. Again, the practice of men holds not an equal pace, and often runs counter to their theory. We naturally know what is good, but naturally pursue what is evil.

The rhetoric wherewith I persuade another cannot persuade myself. There is a depraved appetite in us that will with patience hear the learned instructions of reason, and yet perform no farther than agrees to its own irregular humour.

In brief, we all are monsters. That is, a composition of man and beast. Wherein we must endeavour to be as the poets fancy that wise man Chiron, that is, to have the region of man above that of beast, and sense to sit but at the feet of reason.

Lastly I do desire with God that all, but yet affirm with men that few shall know salvation, That the bridges narrow the passage straight unto life. Yet those who do confine the church of God either to particular nations, churches, or families, have made it far narrower than our Saviour ever meant it. 56. The vulgarity of those judgments that wrap the church of God in Strabo's cloak and restrain it under Europe, Seemed to me as bad geographus as Alexander, who thought he had conquered all the world, when he had not subdued the half of any part thereof. For we cannot deny the church of God, both in Asia and Africa, if we do not forget the peregrinations of the apostles, the deaths of the martyrs, the sessions of many, and even in our reformed judgment, lawful.

Councils held in those parts in the minority and nonage of ours.

Nor must a few differences, more remarkable in the eyes of man than perhaps in the judgment of God, excommunicate from heaven one another, much less those Christians who are, in a manner, all martyrs, maintaining their faith in the noble way of persecution, and serving God in the fire. Whereas we honour him in the sunshine.

Tis true, we all hold there is a number of elect, and many to be saved. Yet take our opinions together, and from the confusion thereof there will be no such thing as salvation, nor shall any one be saved. For first, the church of Rome condemneth us, we likewise them. The sub-reformists and sectaries sentence the doctrine of our Church as damnable. The atomist, or famalist, reprobates all these, and all these them again.

Thus, while the mercies of God do promise us heaven, our conceits and opinions exclude us from that place. There must be, therefore, more than one St. Peter. Particular churches and sects usurp the gates of heaven, and turn the key against each other. And thus we go to heaven against each other's wills, conceits, and opinions, and with as much uncharity as ignorance, do err, I fear, in points not only of our own, but one another's salvation. I believe many are saved who to man seem reprobated, and many are reprobated who, in the opinion and sentence of man, stand elected. There will appear at the last day strange and unexpected examples, both of his justice and his mercy, and therefore to define either is folly in man, and insolency even in the devils.

Those acute and subtle spirits in all their sagacity can hardly divine who shall be saved, which, if they could prognostic, their labour were at an end. Nor need they encompass the earth seeking whom they may devour.

Those who, upon a rigid application of the law, sentenced Solomon unto damnation, condemn not only him, but themselves and the whole world, For by the letter and written word of God, we are without exception in the state of death. But there is a prerogative of God, and an arbitrary pleasure above the letter of his own law, by which alone we can pretend unto salvation, and through which Solomon might be as easily saved as those who condemn him. The number of those who pretend unto salvation, and those infinite swarms who think to pass through the eye of this needle, have much amazed me. That name and compilation of little flock doth not comfort but deject my devotion, especially when I reflect upon my own unworthiness, wherein, according to my humble apprehensions, I am below them all.

I believe there shall never be an anarchy in heaven, but as there are hierarchies amongst the angels, so shall there be degrees of priority amongst the saints. Yet it is I protest beyond my ambition to aspire unto the first ranks. My desires only are, and I shall be happy therein, to be but the last man, and bring up the rear in heaven. 59. Again, I am confident and fully persuaded, yet dare not take my oath of my salvation. I am, as it were, sure, and to believe without all doubt, that there is such a city as Constantinople. Yet for me to take my oath thereon were a kind of perjury, because I hold no infallible warrant from my own sense to confirm me in the certainty thereof. And truly, though many pretend an absolute certainty of their salvation, yet, when an humble soul shall contemplate her own unworthiness, she shall meet with many doubts, and suddenly find how little we stand in need of the precept of St.

Paul, work out your salvation with fear and trembling. That which is the cause of my election, I hold to be the cause of my salvation, Was the mercy and beneplacit of God before I was, or the foundation of the world? Before Abraham was, I am, is the saying of Christ. Yet it is true in some sense, if I say it of myself, for I was not only before myself, but Adam, that is, in the idea of God. And the decree of that synod held from all eternity, And in this sense I say, the world was before the creation, and at an end before it had a beginning. And thus I was dead before I was alive. Though my grave be England, my dying-place was paradise, and Eve miscarried of me before she conceived of Cain.

Incident zeals that do decry good works, and rely only upon faith, take not away merit, for depending upon the efficacy of their faith, they enforce the condition of God, and in a more sophistical way, do seem to challenge Heaven.

It was decreed by God that only those that lapped in the water like dogs should have the honour to destroy the Midianites, yet None of those justly challenge or imagine he deserved that honour thereupon.

I do not deny but that true faith, and such as God requires, is not only a mark or token, but also a means of our salvation. And where to find this is as obscure to me as my last end.

And if our Saviour could object unto his own disciples and favourites a faith that, to the quantity of a grain of mustard seed, is able to move mountains, surely that which we boast of is not anything or at the most but a remove from nothing.

This is the tenour of my belief wherein, though there be many things singular, and to the humour of my irregular self, Yet if they square not with maturer judgments, I disclaim them, and do no further favor them than the learned and best judgments shall authorize them.

8 08 - Religio Medici - Pt 2:1-3 18:25

Religio Medici, the second part one. Now, for that other virtue of charity, without which faith is a mere notion, and of no existence, I have ever endeavoured to nourish the merciful disposition and humane inclination abode from my parents, and regulated to the written and prescribed laws of charity, and if I hold the true anatomy of myself, I am delineated and naturally framed to such a piece of virtue, for I am of a constitution so general that it consorts and sympathiseth with all things, I have no antipathy, or rather idiosyncrasy, in diet, humour, air, anything.

I wonder not at the French, for their dishes of frogs, snails, and toad-stools, nor at the Jews, for locusts and grasshoppers, but being amongst them, make them my common viands. But I find they agree with my stomach as well as theirs. I could digest a salad gathered in a churchyard as well as in a garden. I cannot start at the presence of a serpent, scorpion, lizard, or salamander. At the sight of a toad or viper, I find in me no desire to take up a stone to destroy them.

I feel not in myself those common antipathies that I can discover in others. Those national repugnances do not touch me, nor do I behold with prejudice the French, Italian, Spaniard, or Dutch, but where I find their actions in balance with my countrymen's, I honour, love, and embrace them in the same degree.

I was born in the eighth climate, but seem for to be framed and constellated unto all.

I am no plant. That will not prosper out of a garden. All places, all airs, make unto me one country. I am in England everywhere, and under any meridian.

I have been shipwrecked, yet am not enemy with the sea or winds. I can study, play, or sleep in a tempest. In brief, I am averse from nothing. My conscience would give me the lie if I should absolutely detest or hate any essence but the devil, or so at least abhor any thing but that we might come to composition.

If there be any among those common objects of hatred I do contemn and laugh at, it is that great enemy of reason, virtue, and religion, the multitude, That numerous piece of monstrosity which, taken asunder, seem men and the reasonable creatures of God, but confused together, make but one great beast, and a monstrosity more prodigious than Hydra.

It is no breach of charity to call these fools. It is the style all holy writers have afford them, set down by Solomon in canonical scripture. And a point of our faith, to believe so. Neither in the name of multitude do I only include the base and minor sort of people. There is a rabble even amongst the gentry, a sort of plebeian heads, whose fancy moves with the same wheel as these, men in the same level with mechanics, though their fortunes do somewhat gild their infirmities, and their purses compound for their follies.

But as in casting a count, three or four men together come short in a count of one man placed by himself below them. So neither are a troop of these ignorant dorados of that true esteem and value as many a forlorn person whose condition doth place him below their feet. Let us speak like politicians. There is a nobility without Heraldry. A natural dignity, whereby one man is rank'd with another, another filed before him according to the quality of his desert, and pre-eminence of his good parts. Though the corruption of these times, and the bias of present practice, wheel another way. Thus it was in the first and primitive commonwealths, and is yet In the integrity and cradle of well-ordered polities, till corruption getteth ground, ruder desires labouring after that which wiser considerations contemn, every one having a liberty to amass and heap up riches, and they a license or faculty to do or purchase anything.

Two.

This general and indifferent Temper of mine doth more nearly dispose me to this noble virtue. It is a happiness to be born and framed unto virtue, and to grow up from the seeds of nature, rather than the inoculation and forced grafts of education. Yet, if we are directed only by our particular natures, and regulate our inclinations by no higher rule than that of our reasons, we are but moralists. Divinity. Will still call us heathens. Therefore this great work of charity must have other motives, ends, and impulsions.

I must give no arms to satisfy the hunger of my brother, but to fulfill and accomplish the will and command of my God.

I draw not my purse for his sake that demands it, but his that enjoined it.

I believe no man upon the rhetoric of his miseries, nor to content mine own commiserating disposition, for this is still but moral charity, and an act that oweth more to passion than reason. He that relieves another upon the bare suggestion and bowels of pity doth not this so much for his sake as for his own, for by compassion we make Others' misery, our own, and so by relieving them we relieve ourselves also.

It is as erroneous a conceit to redress other men's misfortunes upon the common considerations of merciful natures, that it may be one day our own case, for this is a sinister and politic kind of charity, whereby we seem to bespeak the pities of men in the like occasions. And truly I have observed that those professed Eleomocenaries, though in a crowd or multitude, to yet direct and place their petitions on a few and selected persons. There is surely a physiognomy which those experienced and master mendicants observe, whereby they instantly discover a merciful aspect, and will single out a face wherein they spy the signatures and marks of mercy.

For there are mystically in our faces certain characters which carry in them the motto of our souls, wherein he that cannot read A B C may read our natures.

I hold, moreover, that there is a phytonomy or physiognomy not only of men, but of plants and vegetables, and in every one of them some outward figures, Which hang as signs or bushes of their inward forms. The finger of God hath left an inscription upon all his works, not graphical or composed of letters, but of their several forms, constitutions, parts and operations, which aptly join together to make one word, that doth express their natures.

By these letters, God calls the stars by their names. By this alphabet, Adam assigned to every creature a name peculiar to its nature. Now there are, besides these characters in our faces, certain mystical figures in our hands, which I dare not call mere dashes, strokes à la volée, or at random, because delineated by a pencil, it never works in vain. And hereof I take more particular notice, because I carried that in mine own hand, which I could never read or discover in another. Aristotle, I confess, in his acute and singular book of physiognomy hath made no mention of chyromancy. Yet I believe the Egyptians, who were nearer addicted to those abstruse and mystical sciences, had a knowledge therein.

To which those vagabond and counterfeit Egyptians did after pretend, and perhaps retained a few corrupted principles which sometimes might verify their prognostics.

It is the common wonder of all men how among so many millions of faces there shall be none alike. Now, contrary, I wonder as much how there shall be any. He that shall consider how many thousand several words have been carelessly and without study composed out of twenty-four letters, withal how many hundred lines there are to be drawn in the fabric of one man shall easily find that this variety is necessary, and it will be very hard that they shall so concur as to make one portrait like another. Let a painter, A million of faces, and you shall find them all different. Yea, let him have his copy before him, yet after all his art there will remain a sensible distinction. For the pattern or example of everything is the perfectest in that kind, whereof we still come short, though we transcend or go beyond it, because herein it is wide, and agrees not in all points unto its copy.

Nor doth the similitude of creatures disparage the variety of nature, nor in any way confound the works of God. For even in things alike there is diversity, and those that do seem to accord do manifestly disagree. And thus is man like God. For in the same things that we resemble him, we are utterly different from him.

There was never anything so like another as in all points to concur. There will ever some reserved difference slip in to prevent the identity, without which two several things would not be alike, but the same, which is impossible. 3. But to return from philosophy to charity. I hold not so narrow The children have conceited this virtue as to conceive that to give alms is only to be charitable, or think a piece of liberality can comprehend the total of charity.

Divinity hath wisely divided the act thereof into many branches, and hath taught us in this narrow way many paths unto goodness. As many ways as we may do good, so many ways we may be charitable.

There are infirmities not only of body, but of soul and fortunes, which do require the merciful hand of our abilities.

I cannot contemn a man for ignorance, but behold him with as much pity as I do Lazarus.

It is no greater charity to clothe his body than apparel the nakedness of his soul. It is an honourable object. To see the reasons of other men wear our liveries, and their borrowed understandings do homage to the bounty of ours.

It is the cheapest way of beneficence, and like the natural charity of the sun, illuminates another without obscuring itself.

To be reserved and caitiff in this part of goodness is the sordidest piece of covetousness, And more contemptible than pecuniary avarice.

To this, as calling myself a scholar, I am obliged by the duty of my condition. I make not therefore my head a grave, but a treasure of knowledge. I intend no monopoly, but a community in learning. I study not only for my own sake, but for theirs that study not for themselves.

I envy no man that knows more than myself, but pity them that know less. I instruct no man as an exercise of my knowledge, or with an intent rather to nourish and keep it alive in mine own head, than beget and propagate it in his.

And in the midst of all my endeavours, there is but one thought that dejects me, that my acquired parts must perish with myself, Nor can be legacied among my honoured friends.

I cannot fall out or contemn a man for an error, or conceive why a difference in opinion should divide an affection.

For controversies, disputes, and argumentations, both in philosophy and in divinity, if they meet with discrete and peaceable natures, Do not infringe the laws of charity.

In all disputes, so much as there is of passion, so much there is of nothing to the purpose. For then, reason, like a bad hound, spends upon a false scent, and forsakes the question first started.

And this is one reason why controversies are never determined. For though they be amply proposed, they are scarce at all handled. They do so swell with unnecessary digressions, and the parenthesis on the party is often as large as the main discourse upon the subject.

The foundations of religion are already established, and the principles of salvation subscribed unto by all. There remains not many controversies worth the passion. And yet never any disputed without. Not only in divinity, but inferior arts.

What about Trachomia Machia and hot skirmishes betwixt S and T in Lucian? How do grammarians hack and slash for the gent of Case in Jupiter? How do they break their own pates to solve that of Pritian?

Si for it in teris ridere democritus.

Yea, even among wiser militants, how many wounds have been given, and credit slain for the poor victory of an opinion, or beggarly conquest of a distinction.

Scholars, some in a piece, they bear no arms, but their tongues are sharper than Actus his razor. Their pens carry farther, and give a louder report than thunder. I had rather stand the shock of a basilisco than the fury of a merciless pen.

It is not mere zeal to learning or devotion to the muses that wiser princes patron the arts, and carry an indulgent aspect unto scholars. But a desire to have their names eternized by the memory of their writings, and a fear of the revengeful pen of succeeding ages. For these are the men that, when they have played their parts and had their exits, must step out and give the moral of their scenes, and deliver unto posterity inventory of their virtues and vices.

And surely there goes a great deal of Conscience to the compiling of an history.

There is no reproach to the scandal of a story. It is such an authentic kind of falsehood that with authority belies our good names to all nations and posterity.

9 09 - Religio Medici - Pt 2:4-6 15:22

Religio Medici. The second part.

There is another offence unto charity, which no author hath ever written of, and few take notice of, and that's the reproach Not of whole professions, mysteries, and conditions, but of whole nations, wherein by opprobrious epithets we miscall each other, and by an uncharitable logic, from a disposition in a few, conclude a habit in all. Le moutin anglois et le bravage écossois, le bourg-ritalien et le faux francois, Le poutron romain, le larron de Gascogne, l'espagnol superbe, et l'allemand ivron.

St. Paul, that calls the Cretians liars, doth it but indirectly, and upon quotation of their own poet. It is as bloody a thought in one way as Nero's was in another. For by a word we wound a thousand, and at one blow assassin the honor of a nation.

It is as complete a piece of madness to miscall and rave against the times, or think to recall men to reason by a fit of passion. Democritus, that thought to laugh the times into goodness, Seems to me as deeply hypochondriacus Heraclitus that bewailed them.

It moves not my spleen to behold the multitude in their proper humours, that is, in their fits of folly and madness, as well understanding that wisdom is not profaned unto the world, and is at the privilege of a few to be virtuous.

They that endeavour to abolish vice, destroy also virtue. For contraries, though they destroy one another, are yet in life of one another. Thus virtue, abolish vice, is an idea. Again, the community of sin doth not disparage goodness, for when vice gains upon the major part, Virtue in whom it remains, becomes more excellent, and being lost in some, multiplies its goodness in others, which remain untouched, and persist entire in the general inundation.

I can therefore behold vice without a satyr, content only with an admonition or instructive reprehension, For noble natures, and such as are capable of goodness, are railed into vice that might as easily be admonished into virtue. And we should be all so far the orators of goodness as to protract her from the power of vice, and maintain the cause of injured truth.

No man can justly censure or condemn another, because, indeed, no man truly knows another.

This I perceive in myself. For I am in the dark to all the world, and my nearest friends behold me but in a cloud.

Those that know me but superficially think less of me than I do of myself. Those of my near acquaintance think more. God, who truly knows me, knows that I am nothing. For he only beholds me and all the world, who looks not on us through a derived ray or a trajection of sensible species, but beholds the substance, without the helps of accidents and the forms of things, as we Their operations.

Further, no man can judge another, because no man knows himself. For we censure others, but as they disagree with that humour which we fancy laudable in ourselves, and commend others but for that wherein they seem to quadrate and consent with us.

So that, in conclusion, All is but that we all condemn. Self-love.

Tis the general complaint of these times, and perhaps of those past, that charity grows cold, which I perceive most verified in those which most do manifest the fires and flames of zeal. For it is a virtue that best agrees with coldest natures. And such is our complexion for humility.

But how shall we expect charity towards others, when we are uncharitable to ourselves?

Charity begins at home, is the voice of the world, yet is every man his greatest enemy, and, as it were, his own executioner. Non ockides is the commandment of God, Yet scarce observed by any man, for I perceive every man as his own atropos, and lends a hand to cut the thread of his own days.

Cain was not therefore the first murderer, but Adam, who brought in death, whereof he beheld the practice and example in his own son Abel, and saw that verified in the experience of another, which faith could not persuade him. in the theory of himself. 5. There is, I think, no man that apprehends his own miseries less than myself, and no man that so nearly apprehends another's.

I could lose an arm without a tear, and with few groans methinks be courted into pieces. Yet, I can weep most seriously at a play, and receive with true passion the counterfeit grief of those known and professed impostures.

It is the barbarous part of inhumanity to add unto any afflicted parties misery, or endeavour to multiply in any man a passion whose single nature is already above his patience. This was the greatest affliction of Job, and those oblique expostulations of his friends a deeper injury than the downright blows of the devil.

It is not the tears of our own eyes only, but of our friends also, that do exhaust the current of our sorrows, Which, falling into many streams, runs more peaceably, and is contented with a narrower channel.

It is an act within the power of charity to translate a passion out of one breast into another, and to divide a sorrow almost out of itself. For an affliction like a dimension may be so divided as, if not indivisible, at least to become Insensible.

Now, with my friend, I desire not to share or participate, but to engross his sorrows, that by making them mine own, I may more easily discuss them, for in mine own reason and within myself I can command that which I cannot entreat without myself, and within the circle of another.

I have often thought those noble pairs and examples of friendship not so truly histories of what had been as fictions of what should be. But I now perceive nothing in them but possibilities, nor anything in the heroic examples of Daemon and Pythius, Achilles and Patroclus, which, me thinks, upon some grounds, I could not perform within the narrow compass of myself.

That a man should lay down his life for his friend seems strange to vulgar affections, and such as can find themselves within that worldly principle, charity begins at home. For mine own part, I could never remember the relations that I held unto myself, nor the respect that I owe unto my own nature in the cause of God, my country, and my friends.

Next, To these three I do embrace myself.

I confess, I do not observe that order that the schools ordain our affections, to love our parents, wives, children, and then our friends. For, accepting the injunctions of religion, I do not find in myself such a necessary and indissoluble sympathy to all those of my blood. I hope I do not break the fifth commandment, if I conceive I may love my friend before the nearest of my blood, even those to whom I owe the principles of life.

I never yet cast a true affection on a woman, but I have loved my friend as I do virtue my soul, my God.

From hence, methinks, I do conceive how God loves man. What happiness there is in the love of God! Omitting all other, there are three most mystical unions. Two natures in one person, three persons in one nature, one soul in two bodies. For though indeed they be really divided, yet they are so united as they seem but one, and make rather a duality than two distinct souls.

Sixth, there are wonders in true affection. It is a body of enigmas, mysteries, and riddles, wherein two so become one as they both become two.

I love my friend before myself, and yet methinks I do not love him enough. Some few months hence my multiplied affection will make me believe I have not loved him at all. When I am from him, I am dead till I be with him, and when I am with him, I am not satisfied, but would still be nearer him.

United souls are not satisfied with embraces, but desire to be truly each other, which being impossible, their desires are infinite, and must proceed without a possibility of satisfaction.

And of the misery there is in affection that whom we truly love like our own, we forget their looks, nor can our memory retain the idea of their faces.

And it is no wonder, for they are ourselves, and our affection makes their looks our own.

This noble affection falls not on vulgar and common constitutions, but on such as are marked for virtue. He that can love his friend with this noble ardour will, in a competent degree, affect all. Now, if we can bring our affections to look beyond the body, and cast an eye upon the soul, we have found out the true object, not only a friendship, But Charity. And the greatest happiness that we can bequeath the soul is that wherein we all do place our last felicity, Salvation, which though it be not in our power to bestow, it is in our charity and pious invocations to desire, if not to procure and further.

I cannot contentedly frame a prayer for myself in particular without a catalogue for my friends. No request to happiness wherein my sociable disposition doth not desire the fellowship of my neighbour.

I never hear the toll of a passing bell, though in my mirth, without my prayers and best wishes for the departing spirit.

I cannot go to cure the body of my patient, but I forget my profession, and call unto God for his soul.

I cannot see one say his prayers, but, instead of imitating him, I fall into a supplication for him, who, perhaps, is no more to me than a common nature. And if God hath vouchsafed an ear to my supplications, there are surely many happy. That never saw me, and enjoyed the blessings of mine unknown devotions.

To pray for enemies, that is, for their salvation, is no harsh precept, but the practice of our daily and ordinary devotions.

I cannot believe the story of the Italian. Our bad wishes and uncharitable desires proceed no further than this life. It is the devil and the uncharitable boats of hell that desire our misery in the world to come.

10 10 - Religio Medici - Pt 2:7-10 21:18

I. To do no injury nor take none was a principle which, to my former years and impatient affections, seemed to contain enough of morality. But my more settled years and Christian Constitution have fallen upon severer resolutions.

I can hold there is no such thing as injury, that, if there be, there is no such injury as revenge, and no such revenge as the contempt of an injury, that to hate another is to malign himself. That the truest way to love another is to despise ourselves. I were unjust unto mine own conscience, if I should say. I am at variance with any thing like myself.

I find there are many pieces in this one fabric of man. This frame is raised upon a mass of antipathies. I am one, methinks, but as the world, wherein Notwithstanding, there are a swarm of distinct essences, and in them and other world of contrarieties, we carry private and domestic enemies within, public and more hostile adversaries without.

The devil that did but buffet to St. Paul plays, methinks, at sharp with me. Let me be nothing if within the compass of myself I do not find the battle of Lepanto passion against reason, reason against faith, faith against the devil, and my conscience against all. There is another man within me that's angry with me, rebukes, commands, and dastards me. I have no conscience of marble to resist the hammer of more heavy offences. Nor yet too soft and waxen as to take the impression of each single peccadillo or scape of infirmity.

I am of a strange belief that it is as easy to be forgiven some sins as to commit some others. For my original sin, I hold it to be washed away in my baptism. For my actual transgressions, I compute and reckon with God but for my last repentance, sacrament, or general absolution, and therefore am not terrified with the sins or madness of my youth.

I thank the goodness of God. I have no sins that want a name. I am not singular in offenses. My transgressions are epidemical, and from the common breath of our corruption. For there are certain tempers of body which, matched with their numerous depravity of mind, do hatch and produce vidiosities whose in unison monstrosity of nature admits no name. This was the temper of that lecher that fell in love with the statue, and constitution of Nero in his Spintrian recreations. For the heavens are not only fruitful in new and unheard-of stars, the earth in plants and animals, but men's minds also in villainy and vices. Now the dullness of my reason, and the vulgarity of my disposition, never prompted my invention, nor solicited my affection unto any of those.

Yet even those Homin and Quotidian infirmities that so necessarily attend me, and do seem to be my very nature, have so dejected me, so broken the estimation that I should have otherwise of myself, that I repute myself the most abjectest piece of mortality. Divines prescribe a fit of sorrow to repentance. There goes indignation Anger, sorrow, hatred into mine. Passions of a contrary nature which neither seem to suit with this action nor my proper constitution.

It is no breach of charity to ourselves to be at variance with our vices, nor to abhor that part of us which is an enemy to the ground of charity, our God, wherein we do but imitate our great selves the world, Whose divided antipathies and contrary faces do yet carry a charitable regard unto the whole by their particular discords, preserving the common harmony, and keeping in fetters those powers whose rebellions once masters might be the ruin of all. 8. I thank God amongst those millions of vices I do inherit and hold from Adam, I have escaped one, and that a mortal enemy to charity, the first and farther sin, footnote, F.A.T.H.E.R. F.A.R.T.H.E.R. 1682, not only of man, but of the devil, pride, a vice whose name is comprehended in a monosyllable, but in its nature not circumscribed with a world.

I have escaped it in a condition that can hardly avoid it. Those petty acquisitions and reputed perfections that advance and elevate the conceits of other men add no feathers unto mine.

I have seen a grammarian tower and plume himself over a single line in Horace, and show more pride in the construction of one ode than the author in the composure of the whole book.

For my own part, besides the jargon and patois of several provinces, I understand no less than six languages. Yet I protest I have no higher conceit of myself than had our fathers before the confusion of Babel, when there was but one language in the world, and none to boast himself either linguist or critic.

I have not only seen several countries, beheld the nature of their climes, the chorography of their provinces, topography of their cities, but understood their several laws, customs, and policies. Yet cannot all this persuade the dullness of my spirit unto such an opinion of myself as I behold in nimbler and conceited heads that never look to degree beyond their nests?

I know the names, and somewhat more, of all the constellations in my horizon. Yet I have seen a prating mariner, that could only name the pointers and the north star, outtalk me, and conceit himself a whole sphere above me.

I know most of the plants of my country, and of those about me. Yet methinks I do not know so many as when I did but know a hundred. And had scarcely ever simpled further than Cheapside, for, indeed, heads of capacity, and such as are not full with a handful or easy measure of knowledge, think they know nothing till they know all, which, being impossible, they fall upon the opinion of Socrates, and only know they know not anything.

I cannot think that Homer pined away upon the riddle of the fisherman. Or that Aristotle, who understood the uncertainty of knowledge, and confessed so often the reason of man too weak for the works of nature, could ever drown himself upon the flux and reflux of Euripus.

We do but learn to-day what our better advanced judgments will unteach to-morrow. And Aristotle doth but instruct us, as Plato did him, that is, to confute himself.

I have run through all sorts, yet find no rest in any, though our first studies and junior endeavours may style us peripatetic, stoics, or academics, yet I perceive the wisest heads prove at last almost all sceptics, and stand like Janus in the field of knowledge.

I have therefore one common and authentic philosophy I learned in the schools, whereby I discourse and satisfy the reason of other men, another more reserved, and drawn from experience, where I content mine own.

Solomon, that complained of ignorance in the height of knowledge, hath not only humbled my conceits, but discouraged my endeavors. There is yet another conceit that hath sometimes made me shut my books, which tells me it is a vanity to waste our days in the blind pursuit of knowledge. It is but attending a little longer, and we shall enjoy that by instinct and infusion, which we endeavour at here by labour and inquisition.

It is better to sit 9. I was never yet once, and commend their resolutions, who never marry twice. Not that I disallow of second marriage, as neither in all cases of polygamy, which, considering some times and the unequal number of both sexes, may also be necessary.

The whole world was made for man, but the twelfth part of man for woman. Man is the whole world, and the breath of God. Woman the rib and crooked piece of man. If I could be content that we might procreate like trees, without conjunction, or that there were any way to perpetuate the world without this trivial and vulgar way of coition, it is the foolishest act a wise man commits in all his life. Nor is there anything that will more deject his cooled imagination, when he shall consider what an odd and unworthy piece of folly he hath committed. I speak not in prejudice, nor am averse from that sweet sex, but naturally amorous of all that is beautiful.

I can look a whole day with delight upon a handsome picture, though it be but of an horse. It is my temper. And I like it the better, to affect all harmony. And sure, there is music even in the beauty and the silent note which cupid strikes, far sweeter than the sound of an instrument. For there is music wherever there is harmony, order, or proportion. And thus far we may maintain the music of the spheres. For those well-ordered motions and regular paces Though they give no sound unto the ear, yet to the understanding they strike a note most full of harmony. Whatsoever is harmonically composed delights in harmony. Which makes me much distrust the symmetry of those heads which declaim against all church music.

For myself, not only from my obedience, but my particular genius, I do embrace it. For even that vulgar and tavern-musick, which makes one man merry another mad, strikes in me a deep fit of devotion, and profound contemplation of the first composer. There is something in it of divinity more than the ear discovers. It is an hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson of the whole world and creatures of God. Such a melody to the ear is the whole world well understood. Would afford to the understanding.

In brief, it is a sensible fit of that harmony which intellectually sounds in the ears of God. It unties the ligaments of my frame, takes me to pieces, dilates me out of myself, and by degrees, methinks, resolves me into heaven.

I will not say with Plato the soul is an harmony, but harmonical, and hath its nearest sympathy unto music. Thus some, whose temper of body agrees and humours the constitution of their souls, are born poets, though indeed all are naturally inclined unto rhythm.

This made Tacitus in the very first line of his story fall upon a verse, and Cicero, the worst of poets, but reclaiming for a poet, falls in the very first sentence upon a perfect exametar.

I feel not in me those sordid and unchristian desires of my profession. I do not secretly implore and wish for plagues, rejoice at famines, revolve alpha merides and almanacs in expectation of malignant aspects, fatal conjunctions, and eclipses. I rejoice not at unwholesome springs, nor unseasonable winters.

My prayer goes with the husbandman's. I desire everything in its proper season, and that neither men nor the times be put out of temper.

Let me be sick myself, if sometimes the malady of my patient be not a disease unto me. I desire rather to cure his infirmities. Than my own necessities. Were I do him no good, methinks it is scarce honest gain, though I confess, tis but the worthy salary of our well-intended endeavors. I am not only ashamed, but heartily sorry, that, besides death, there are diseases incurable. Yet not for my own sake, or that they be beyond my art. But for the general cause and sake of humanity, whose common cause I apprehend as mine own.

And to speak more generally, those three noble professions which all civil commonwealths do honour, are raised upon the fall of Adam, and are not exempt from their infirmities. There are not only diseases incurable in physic, but cases indissolvable in laws, vices incorrigible in divinity. If general counsels, Mayer, I do not see why particular courts should be infallible. Their perfectest rules are raised upon the erroneous reasons of man, and the laws of one do but condemn the rules of another. As Aristotle ofttimes the opinions of his predecessors, because though agreeable to reason, Yet were not consonant to his own rules and logic of his proper principles.

Again, to speak nothing of the sin against the Holy Ghost, his cure not only, but his nature is unknown. I can cure the gout or stone in some, sooner than Divinity, the pride or avarice in others. I can cure vices by physic, when they remain incurable by Divinity, and shall obey my pills. When they contemn their precepts.

I boast nothing but plainly say, we all labour against our own cure, for death is the cure of all diseases. There is no catholicon or universal remedy I know but this, which the nauseous to queasy stomachs, yet to prepared appetites, is nectar, and a pleasant potion of immortality.

X. For my conversation, it is like the sun's, with all men, and with a friendly aspect to good and bad. Methinks there is no man bad, and the worst best, that is, while they are kept within the circle of those qualities wherein they are good. There is no man's mind of such discordant and jarring a temper, to which a tunable disposition may not strike a harmony. Magna virtutes, nec minora vitia. It is a poesy of the best natures, and may be inverted on the worst. There are, in the most depraved and venomous dispositions, certain pieces that remain untouched, which, by an antiperistasis, become more excellent, or by the excellency of their antipathies, are able to preserve themselves from the contagion of their enemy vices, And persistent tire beyond the general corruption.

For it is also thus in nature. The greatest balsams do lie enveloped in the bodies of the most powerful corrosives. I say, moreover, and I ground upon experience, that poisons contain within themselves their own antidote, and that which preserves them from the venom of themselves, without which, though they were not deleterious to others only, But to themselves also.

But it is the corruption that I fear within me, not the contagion of commerce without me. Tis that unruly regiment within me that will destroy me. Tis I that do infect myself. The man without a navel yet lives in me. I feel that original canker corrode and devour me, and therefore Defendeme Dios de me, Lord deliver me from myself, is a part of my litany, and the first voice of my retired imaginations.

There is no man alone, because every man is a microcosm, and carries the whole world about him.

Nun qua minus solus, quam cum solus. Though it be the apotheem of a wise man, is yet true in the mouth of a fool. Indeed, though in a wilderness a man is never alone, not only because he is with himself and his own thoughts, but because he is with the devil, whoever consorts with our solitude, and is that unruly rebel that musters up those disordered motions which accompany our sequestered imaginations.

And to speak more narrowly, there is no such thing as solitude. Nor any thing that can be said to be alone and by itself, but God, who is his own circle, and can subsist by himself. All others, besides their dissimilar and heterogeneous parts, which in a manner multiply their natures, cannot subsist without the concourse of God, on the society of that hand, which doth uphold their natures. In brief. There can be nothing truly alone, and by itself which is not truly one, and such is only God. All others do transcend an unity, and so, by consequence, are many.

11 11 - Religio Medici - Pt 2:11-15 18:25

11. Now, for my life, it is a miracle of thirty years, which, to relate, were not a history but a piece of poetry, and would sound to common ears like a fable. For the world, I count it not an inn, but an hospital, and a place not to live, but to die in.

The world that I regard is myself. It is the microcosm of my own frame that I cast mine eye on. For the other, I use it but like my globe, and turn it round sometimes for my recreation.

Men that look upon my outside, perusing only my condition and fortunes, to err in my altitude, for I am above Atlas, his shoulders. The earth is a point, not only in respect of the heavens above us, but of that heavenly and celestial part within us.

That mass of flesh that circumscribes me, Limits not my mind. That surface that tells the heavens it hath an end cannot persuade me I have any. I take my circle to be above three hundred and sixty. Though the number of the ark do measure my body, it comprehendeth not my mind. Whilst I study to find how I am a microcosm or little world, I find myself something more than the great. There is surely a piece of divinity in us, something that was before the elements, and owes no homage unto the sun. Nature tells me I am the image of God as well as scripture. He that understands not thus much hath not his introduction or first lesson, and is yet to begin the alphabet of man.

Let me not injure the felicity of others, if I say I am as happy as any. Qua celum fiat voluntas tua salveth all, so that whatsoever happens, it is but what our daily prayers desire. In brief, I am content. And what should providence add more? Surely this is what we call happiness, and this do I enjoy. With this I am happy in a dream, and as content to enjoy our happiness in a fancy as others in a more apparent truth and realty.

There is surely a nearer apprehension of anything that delights us in our dreams than in our wakened senses. Without this I were unhappy, for my awakened judgment discontents me. Ever whispering unto me that I am from my friend, but my friendly dreams in the night requite me, and make me think I am within his arms. I thank God for my happy dreams, as I do for my good rest. For there is a satisfaction in them unto reasonable desires, and such as can be content with a fit of happiness. And surely it is not a melancholy conceit to think we are all asleep in this world. And that the conceits of this life are as mere dreams to those of the next as the phantasms of the night to the conceits of the day.

There is an equal delusion in both, and the one doth but seem to be the emblem or picture of the other. We are somewhat more than ourselves in our sleeps, and the slumber of the body seems to be but the waking of the soul. It is the legation of sense. But the liberty of reason and our waking conceptions do not match the fancies of our sleeps.

At my nativity, my ascendant was the watery sign of Scorpius. I was born in the planetary hour of Saturn, and I think I have a piece of that leaden planet in me. I am in no way facetious nor disposed for the merth and galliod eyes of company, yet in one dream I can compose a whole comedy, behold the action, and apprehend the jests, and laugh myself awake at the conceits thereof. Were my memory as faithful as my reason is then fruitful, I would never study but in my dreams, and this time also would I choose for my devotions. But our grosser memories have then so little hold of our abstracted understandings, That they forget the story, and can only relate to our awakened souls the confused and broken tale of that that hath passed.

Aristotle, who hath written a singular tract of sleep, hath not, methinks, thoroughly defined it, nor yet Galen, though he seemed to have corrected it. For those noctambulos and night-walkers, though in their sleep, do yet enjoy the action of their senses. We must therefore say that there is something in us that is not in the jurisdiction of Morpheus, and that those abstracted and ecstatic souls do walk about in their own corpse as spirits with the bodies, they assume, wherein they seem to hear, see, and feel, though indeed the organs are destitute of sense, and their natures of those faculties that should inform them.

Thus it is observed that men sometimes upon the hour of their departure do speak and reason above themselves. For then the soul, beginning to be freed from the ligaments of the body, begins to reason like herself, and to discourse in a strain above mortality. Twelve.

We term sleep at death. And yet it is waking that kills us and destroys those spirits that are the house of life. Tis indeed a part of life that best expresseth death. For every man truly lives so long as he acts his nature, or some way makes good the faculties of himself. The Mysticles, therefore, that slew his soldier in his sleep, was a merciful executioner. Tis a kinder punishment the mildness of no laws hath invented. I wonder the fancy of Lucan and Seneca did not discover it. It is that death by which we may be literally said to die daily, a death which Adam died before his mortality, a death whereby we live a middle and moderating point between life and death. In fine, so like death I dare not trust it without my prayers, and a half adieu unto the world, and take my farewell in a colloquy with God.

The night is come like to the day. Depart not, thou great God, away. Let not my sins black as the night eclipse the lustre of thy light. Keep still in my horizon, for to me the sun makes not the day, but thee, thou whose nature cannot sleep. On my temple's sentry keep. Guard me against those watchful foes whose eyes are open, while mine close. Let no dreams my head infest with such as Jacob's temples blest. While I do rest, my soul advance. Make my sleep a holy trance. That I may, my rest being wrought, awake into some holy thought. And with as active vigour run my course as doth the nimble sun. Sleep is a death. O make me try by sleeping what it is to die, and as gently lay my head on my grave as now my bed.

Howe'er I rest, great God, let me awake again at last with thee, and this assured, behold, I lie securely, or to awake, or die. These are my drowsy days, and in vain I do now wake to sleep again. For come that hour when I shall never sleep again, but wake for ever.

This is the dormitve I take to Beardwood. I need no other laudanum than this to make me sleep, after which I close mine eyes in security, content to take my leave of the sun, and sleep unto the resurrection.

Thirteen.

The method I should use in distributive justice I often observe in commutative, and keep a geometrical proportion in both, whereby, becoming equable to others, I become unjust to myself, and supererogate in that common principle to unto others, as thou wouldst be done unto thyself.

I was not born unto riches. Neither is it, I think, my star, to be wealthy, or, if it were, the freedom of my mind, and frankness of my disposition were able to contradict and cross my fates.

For to me, avarice seems not so much a vice as a deplorable piece of madness. To conceive ourselves Urinals ought to be persuaded that we are dead is not so ridiculous, nor so many degrees beyond the power of hellebore as this.

The opinion of theory and positions of men are not so void of reason as their practised conclusions. Some have held that snow is black, that the earth moves, that the soul is air, fire, and water, But all this is philosophy, and there is no delirium, if we do but speculate the folly and indisputable dotage of avarice to that subterraneous idol and god of earth.

I do confess, I am an atheist. I cannot persuade myself to honour that the world it was. Whatsoever virtue its prepared substance may have within my body, it hath no influence nor operation without. I would not entertain a base design or an action that should call me villain for the Indies, and for this only do I love and honour my own soul, and have me thinks two arms too few to embrace myself.

Aristotle is too severe that will not allow us to be truly liberal without wealth and the bountiful hand of fortune. If this be true, I am Must confess I am charitable only in my liberal intentions and bountiful well-wishers. But if the example of the might be not only an act of wonder, but an example of the noblest charity, surely poor men may also build hospitals, and the rich alone have not erected cathedrals?

I have a private method, which others observe not. I take the opportunity of myself to do good. I borrow occasion of charity from mine own necessities, and supply the wants of others when I am in most need myself. For it is an honest stratagem to make advantage of ourselves, and so to husband the acts of virtue, that, were they were defective in one circumstance, they may repay their want, and multiply their goodness in another.

I have not peroo In my desires, but a competence and ability to perform those good works to which he hath inclined my nature.

He is rich who hath enough to be charitable, and it is hard to be so poor that a noble mind may not find a way to this piece of goodness. He that giveth to the poor lendeth to the Lord. There is more rhetoric in that one sentence than in a library of sermons, and, indeed, if those sentences were understood by the reader with the same emphasis as they are delivered by the author, we needed not those volumes of instructions, but might be honest by an epitome.

Upon this motive only, I cannot behold a beggar without relieving his necessities with my purse, For his soul with my prayers. These cynical and accidental differences between us cannot make me forget that common and untouched part of us both. There is under these cantos and miserable outsides, these mutilate and semi-bodies, a soul of the same alloy with our own, whose genealogy is God as well as ours, and in as fairer way to salvation. as ourselves.

Statists that labour to contrive a commonwealth without our poverty take away the object of charity, not understanding only the commonwealth of a Christian, but forgetting the prophecy of Christ. 14. Now there is another part of charity which is the basis and pillar of this. And that is the love of God, for whom we love our neighbor. For this, I think, charity, to love God for himself, and our neighbor for God. All that is truly amiable is God, or, as it were, a divided piece of him that retains a reflex or shadow of himself.

Nor is it strange that we should place affection on that which is invisible, All that we truly love is thus. What we adore under affection of our senses deserves not the honour of so pure a title. Thus we adore virtue, though to the eyes of sense she be invisible. Thus that part of our noble friends that we love is not that part that we embrace, but that insensible part that our arms cannot embrace.

God being all goodness, and love nothing but himself and the traduction of his Holy Spirit. Let us call to assize the loves of our parents, the affection of our wives and children, and they are all dumb shows and dreams, without reality, truth, or constancy. For first, there is a strong bond of affection between us and our parents, yet how easily dissolved! We betake ourselves to a woman, and forget our mother in a wife, and the womb that bear us, and that that shall bear our image. This woman blessing us with children, our affection leaves the level it held before, and sinks from our bed, unto our issue and picture of posterity. Where affection holds no steady mansion, they, growing up in years, desire our ends, or applying themselves to a woman, Take a lawful way to love another better than ourselves.

Thus I perceive a man may be buried alive, and behold his grave in his own issue. 15. I conclude therefore and say, there is no happiness under, or as Copernicus will have it above, the Son, nor any crammed in that repeated verity and burthen of all the wisdom of Solomon, All is vanity and vexation of spirit.

There is no felicity in that the world adores. Aristotle, whilst he labours to refute the ideas of Plato, falls upon one himself, for his summum bonum is a chimera, and there is no such thing as his felicity.

That wherein God himself is happy, the holy angels are happy, in whose defect The devils are unhappy. That, dare I call happiness, whatsoever conduceth unto this, may with an easy metaphor deserve that name. Whatsoever else the world terms happiness, is to me a story out of Pliny, a tale of Poccaccio or Malazpini, an apparition or neat delusion wherein there is no more of happiness than the name.

Bless me in this life with but peace of my conscience, command of my affections, the love of thyself of my dearest friends, and I shall be happy enough to pity Caesar.

These are, O Lord, the humble desires of my most reasonable ambition, and all that I dare call happiness on earth, wherein I set no rule or limit to thy hand or providence. Dispose of me, According to the wisdom of thy pleasure, thy will be done, though in my own undoing Finis. End of section 11. End of Religio Medici.

12 12 - Letter to a Friend - 1 19:37

A letter to a friend upon the occasion of the death of his intimate friend. Get me leave to wonder that news of this nature should have such heavy wings that you should hear so little concerning your dearest friend. And that I must make that unwilling repetition to tell you that portam erigidos calcese extended, that he is dead and buried, and by this time no puny among the mighty nations of the dead, for though he left this world not very many days past, yet every hour, you know, largely addeth unto that dark society, And considering the incessant mortality of mankind, you cannot conceive their diet in the whole earth, so few as a thousand an hour.

Although at this distance you had no early account or particular of his death, yet your affection may cease to wonder that you had not some secret sense or intimation thereof by dreams, thoughtful whisperings, Aery nuncios or sympathetic of insinuations, which many seem to have had at the death of their dearest friends, for since we find in that famous story that spirits themselves were fain to tell their fellows at a distance that the great Antonio was dead, we have a sufficient excuse for our ignorance in such particulars, and must rest content with the common road and the Appian way of Knowledge by Information.

Though the uncertainty of the end of this world hath confounded all human predictions, yet they who shall live to see the sun and moon darkened, and the stars to fall from heaven, will hardly be deceived in the advent of the last day. And therefore strange it is that the common fallacy of consumptive persons Who feel not themselves dying, and therefore still hope to live, should also reach their friends in perfect health and judgment. That you should be so little acquainted with Plautus's sick complexion, or that almost an Hippocratical face should not alarm you to higher fears, or rather despair of his continuation in such an emaciated state, wherein medical predictions fail not. for sometimes in acute diseases, and wherein tis as dangerous to be sentenced by a physician as a judge.

Upon my first visit I was bold to tell them who had not let fall all hopes of his recovery that, in my sad opinion, he was not like to behold a grasshopper, much less to pluck another fig, and in no long time after seemed to discover that odd mortal symptom in him Not mentioned by Hippocrates, that is, to lose his own face and look like some of his near relations. For he maintained not his proper countenance, but looked like his uncle, the lines of whose face lay deep and invisible in his healthful visage before. For as from our beginning we run through variety of looks before we come to consistent and settled faces, So before our end, by sick and languishing alterations, we put on new visages, and in our retreat to earth may fall upon such looks which, from community of seminal originals, were before latent in us.

He was fruitlessly put in hope of advantage by change of air, and imbibing the pure aerial nitre of these parts, and therefore being so far spent He quickly found Sardinia in Tivoli. And the most healthful air of little effect where death had set her broad arrow, for he lived not unto the middle of May, and confirmed the observation of Hippocrates at that mortal time of the year, when the leaves of the fig-tree resemble a dawe's claw, In the king's forests, they set the figure of a broad arrow upon trees that are to be cut down. Hippocrates Epidemics.

He is happily seated who lives in places whose air, earth, and water promote not the infirmities of his weaker parts, or is early removed unto regions that correct them. He that is tabardly inclined were unwise to pass his days in Portugal. Collegial persons will find little comfort in Austria or Viena. He that is weak-legged must not be in love with Rome, nor an infirm head with Venice or Paris.

Death hath not only particular stars in Heaven, but malevolent places on Earth which Single out our infirmities, and strike at our weaker parts, in which concerned passenger and migrant birds have the great advantages, who are naturally constituted for distant habitations, whom no seas nor places limit, but in their appointed seasons will visit us from Greenland and Mount Atlas, and, as some think, even from the Antipodes.

Though we could not have his life, yet we missed not our desires in his soft departure, which was scarce in expiration, and his end not unlike his beginning, when the salient point scarce affords a sensible notion, and his departure so like unto sleep, that he scarce needed the civil ceremony of closing his eyes, contrary to the common way wherein death draws up, Sleep let fall the eyelids. With what strift and pains we came into the world we know not, but tis commonly no easy matter to get out of it. Yet if it could be made out that such who have easy nativities have commonly hard deaths, and, contrarily, his departure was so easy that we might justly suspect his birth was of another nature, And that some juno sat cross-legged at his nativity.

Besides his soft death, the incurable state of his disease might somewhat extenuate your sorrow. Who know that monsters but seldom happen miracles more rarely in physic.

Monstra contingunt e medicina Hippocrates. Angulus victorius gives a serious account of a consumptive, heterical, physical woman who was suddenly cured by the intercession of Ignatius.

Strange and rare escapes they happen sometimes in physic. Anguli victorii, we read not of any in scripture who in this case applied unto our saviour. Though some may be contained in that large expression, that he went about galilee healing all manner of sickness and all manner of diseases. Amulets, bells, sigils, and incantations practised in other diseases are seldom pretended in this, and we find no sigil in the Archidoxus of Paracelsus to cure an extreme consumption or mirasmus which If other diseases fail, will put a period unto long livers, and at last makes dust of all.

And therefore the Stoics could not but think that the fiery principle would wear out all the rest, and at last make an end of the world which, notwithstanding, without such a lingering period, the Creator may affect at his pleasure. And to make an end of all things on earth, And our planetical system of the world, he need but put out the sun.

I was not so curious to entitle the stars unto any concern of his death, yet could not but take notice that he died when the moon was in motion from the meridian, at which time an old Italian long ago would persuade me that the greatest part of men died, But herein, I confess, I could never satisfy my curiosity, although from the time of tides in places upon or near the sea there may be considerable deductions, and Pliny hath an odd and remarkable passage concerning the death of men and animals upon the recess or ebb of the sea.

Aristoteles nullum animal nisi aistur recedente expirare affirmat. Observatum immultum in gallico, Oceano et dungtas in homine, Comeretum, chapter one, O one, however, certain it is he died in the dead and deep part of the night, when Knox might be most apprehensibly said to be the daughter of chaos, the mother of sleep and death, according to old genealogy, And so went out of this world about that hour when our blessed Saviour entered it, and about what time many conceive he will return again unto it.

Carden hath a peculiar and no hard observation from a man's hand to know whether he was born in the day or night, which I confess holdeth in my own, and Scaliger to that purpose hath another from the tip of the year.

Aures pas pendula lobis dicitor non omnibus ea pas est augibus, non elevis qui noctum natisunt, sed qui inter diu maxima ex parte commentaria en aristotle de animalicus liber unis.

Most men are begotten in the night, animals in the day. But where the more persons have been born in the night or the day were a curiosity undecidable. Though more have perished by violent deaths in the day, yet in natural disillusions both times may hold an indifferency, at least but contingent inequality. The whole course of time runs out in the nativity and death of things, Which, whether they happen by succession or coincidence, are best computed by the natural, not artificial, day.

That Charles V was crowned upon the day of his nativity, it being in his own power so to order it, makes no singular animadversion. But that he should also take King Francis prisoner upon that day was an unexpected coincidence which made the same remarkable. Antipater, who had an anniversary fever every year upon his birthday, needed no astrological revolution to know what day he should die on. When the fixed stars have made a revolution unto the points from whence they first set out, some of the ancients thought the world would have an end, which was a kind of dying upon the day of its nativity.

Now the disease Prevailing and swiftly advancing about the time of his nativity, some were of opinion that he would leave the world on the day he entered into it. But this being a lingering disease, and creeping softly on, nothing critical was found or expected, and he died not before fifteen days after.

Nothing is more common with infants than to die on the day of their nativity. To behold the worldly hours, and but the factions thereof, and even to perish before their nativity in the hidden world of the womb, and before their good angel is conceived to undertake them.

But in persons who outlive many years, and when there are no less than three hundred and sixty-five days to determine their lives in every year, That the first day should make the last, that the tail of the snake should return into its mouth precisely at that time, and that they should wind up on the day of their nativity, is indeed a remarkable coincidence, which, though astrology hath taken witty pains to solve, yet hath it been very wary in making predictions of it, In this consumptive condition and remarkable extenuation, he came to be almost half himself, and left a great part behind him, which he carried not to the grave.

And though that story of Duke John Ernestus Mansfield be not so easily swallowed, that at his death his heart was found not to be so big as a nut, Yet if the bones of a good skeleton weigh little more than twenty pounds, his inwards and flesh remaining would make no bouffage but a light bit for the grave. I never more lively beheld the starved characters of Dante, in the poet Dante, his description, in any living face, and our respects might have read a lecture upon him without exteneration. His flesh being so consumed, that he might in a manner have discerned his bowels without opening of him. So that to be carried sextorum caerficae to the grave was but a civil unnecessary, and the compliments of the coffin might outweigh the subject of it.

Omnibonus ferrarius, in Mortal Dysentries of Children, Looks for a spot behind the ear. In consumptive diseases, some eye the complexion of moles. Caron eagerly views the nails, some the lines of the hand, the thena, or muscle of the thumb. Some are so curious as to observe the depth of the throat-pit, how the proportion varieth of the small of the legs unto the calf, or the compass of the neck unto the circumference of the head. But all these, with many more, were so drowned in a mortal visage and last face of Hippocrates, that a weak physiognomist might say at first I, this was a face of earth, and that Morta, the deity of death or fate, had set her hard seal upon his temples, easily perceiving what caricatura draughts death makes upon pined faces.

The Italians call it, to be drawn in caricatura, and unto what an unknown degree a man may live backward.

Though the beard be only made a distinction of sex and a sign of masculine heat by Ulmus, yet the precocity and early growth thereof in him was not to be liked in reference unto long life. Louis, that virtuous but unfortunate king of Hungary, who lost his life at the battle of Mohatch, was said to be born without a skin, to have bearded at fifteen, put in at almost the ursus babai humanai, and to have shown some grey hairs about twenty, from whence the diviners conjectured that he would be spoiled of his kingdom, and have but a short life.

But hairs make fallible predictions. And many temples early gray have outlived the psalmist's period. The life of a man is threescore and ten. Hears which are most amused me have not been in the face or head, but on the back, and not in men, but children, as I long ago observed in that endymial distemper of little children in Longodoc, called the modulans. Sipocotus de Rheumatismo. wherein they critically break up with harsh hairs on their backs, which takes off the unquiet symptoms of the disease, and delivers them from coughs and convulsions. The Egyptian mummies that I have seen have had their mouths open and somewhat gaping, which affordeth a good opportunity to view and observe their teeth, wherein it is not easy to find any wanting or decayed.

And therefore, in Egypt, where one man practised one operation, o'er the diseases but of single parts, it must needs be a barren profession to confine unto that of drawing of teeth, and little better than to have been tooth-drawer under King Pyrrhus, who had but two in his head, his upper and lower jaw being solid and without distinct rows of teeth. How the banyans of India maintain the integrity of those parts, I find not particularly observed, who, notwithstanding, have an advantage of their preservation by abstaining from all flesh, and employing their teeth in such food, unto which they may seem at first framed, from their figure and confirmation.

But sharp and corroding rooms had so early moulded those rocks and hardest parts of his fabric, That a man might well conceive that his years were never light to double or twice tell over his teeth, never lived to threescore years. Corruption had dealt more severely with them than sepulchral fires and smart flames with those of burnt bodies of old. For in the burnt fragments of urns which I have enquired into, Although I seem to find few incisors or shearers, yet the dog-teeth and grinders do notably resist those fires.

13 13 - Letter to a Friend - 2 21:16

Letter to a Friend.

In the years of his childhood he had languished under the disease of his country, the Ricketts, after which, notwithstanding, many have become strong and active men, but whether any have attained unto very great years, The disease is scarce so old as to afford good observation. Whether the children of the English plantations be subject under the same infirmity may be worth the observing. Whether lameness and halting do still increase among the inhabitants of Rovigno in Istria, I know not. Yet, scarce twenty years ago, M. de Loire observed that a third part of that people halted. But too certain it is that the rickets increase among us, the smallpox grows more pernicious than the great, the king's purse knows that the king's evil grows more common, court and agues are become no strangers in Ireland, or common and mortal in England, and though the ancients gave that disease very good words, Asphalestotos caragistos securissima et Faginima, Hippocrates.

Yet now that bell makes no strange sound, which rings out for the effects thereof.

Profebre catana rara sonnet campana.

Some think there were few consumptions in the old world when men lived much upon milk, and that the ancient inhabitants of this island were less troubled with coughs, When they went naked and slept in caves and woods, than men now in chambers and feather beds. Plato will tell us that there was no such disease as catarrh in Homer's time, and that it was but new in Greece in his age. Polydore Virgil delivereth that pleurices were rare in England, who lived but in the days of Henry VIII. Some will allow no diseases to be new. Others think that many old ones are ceased. And that such which are esteemed new will have but their time. However, the mercy of God hath scattered the great heap of diseases, and not loaded any one country with all.

Some may be new in one country, which have been old in another. New discoveries of the earth discover new diseases, for, besides the common swarm, There are endemial and local infirmities proper unto certain regions, which in the whole earth make no small number, and if Asia, Africa and America should bring in their list, Pandora's box would swell, and there must be a strange pathology.

Most men expected to find a consumed kell, empty and bladder-like guts, Liverd and marbled lungs, and a withered pericardium in this sex-sucker's corpse. But some seemed too much to wonder that two lobes of his lungs adhered unto his side, for the like I had often found in bodies of no suspected consumptions or difficulty of respiration. And the same more often happeneth in men than other animals, and some think in women than in men. But the most remarkable I have met with Was in a man, after a cough of almost fifty years, in whom all the lobes adhered unto the pleura, and each lobe unto another, who, having also been much troubled with the gut, brake the rule of Carden, and died of stone in the bladder, put it.

Carden, in his encomian podugri, reckoneth this among the donor, podugri, that they are delivered thereby from the physis and stone in the bladder. Aristotle makes a query why some animals cough as man, and some not as oxen. If coughing be taken as it consisteth of a natural and voluntary motion, including expectoration and spitting out, it may be as proper unto man as bleeding at the nose. Otherwise we find that vegetious and rural writers have not left so many medicines in vain against the coughs of cattle. And men who perish by coughs die the deaths of sheep, cats, and lions. And though birds have no midriff, yet we meet with divers remedies in arianus against the coughs of hawks.

And though it might be thought that all animals who have lungs do cough, yet incitatious fishes who have large and strong lungs, the same is not observed, nor yet in oviparous quadrupeds, And in the greatest thereof, the crocodile, although we read much of their tears, we find nothing of that motion.

From the thoughts of sleep, when the soul was conceived nearest unto divinity, the ancients erected an art of divination, wherein, while they too widely expatiated in loose and inconsequent conjectures, Hippocrates wisely considered dreams as they presaged alterations in the body. Put note Hippocrates, de Insomniis, and so afforded hints towards the preservation of health and prevention of diseases, and therein was so serious as to advise alteration of diet, exercise, sweating, bathing, and vomiting, and also so religious as toward prayers and supplications under respect of deities, And in good dreams, unto Sol, Jupiter, Celestis, Jupiter, Opulentus, Minerva, Mercurius, and Apollo. In bad, unto Tellus, and the heroes.

And therefore, I could not but take notice how his female friends were irrationally curious so strictly to examine his dreams, and in this low state to hope for the phantasms of health. He was now past the healthful dreams of the sun, moon, and stars in their clarity and proper courses. "'Twas too late to dream of flying over limpid fountains, smooth waters, white festments, and fruitful green trees, which are the visions of healthful sleeps, and at a good distance from the grave.

And they were all so too deeply dejected that he should dream of his dead friends. Inconsequently divining that he would not be long from them. For strange it was not that he should sometimes dream of the dead, whose thoughts run always upon death. Beside to dream of the dead, so they appear not in dark habits, and take nothing away from us. In Hippocrates his sense was of good signification. For we live by the dead, and everything is, or must be so, before it becomes our nourishment. And Carden. Who dreamed that he discoursed with his dead father in the moon, made thereof no mortal interpretation, and even to dream that we are dead was no condemnable phantasm in old Onara criticism, as having a signification of liberty, acuity from cares, exemption and freedom from troubles unknown unto the dead.

Some dreams, I confess, may admit of easy and feminine exposition. He who dreamed that he could not see his right shoulder might easily fear to lose the sight of his right eye. He that before a journey dreamed that his feet were cut off had a plain warning not to undertake his intended journey. But why to dream of lettuce should presage some ensuing disease? Why, to eat figs should signify foolish talk, why, to eat eggs great trouble, and to dream of blindness should be so highly commended, according to the eneurocritical verses of Astrum psychus and Lycophorus, I shall leave unto your divination.

He was willing to quit the world alone and altogether, leaving no earnest behind him for corruption or aftergrave, Having small content in that common satisfaction to survive or live in another, but amply satisfied that his disease should die with himself, nor revive in a posterity to puzzle physic, and make sad mementoes of their parent hereditary. Leprosy awakes not sometimes before forty, the gout and stone often later, but consumptive and tabard roots Sprout more early, and at the fairest make seventeen years of our life doubtful before that age.

They that enter the world with original diseases as well as sin, have not only common mortality, but sick traductions to destroy them. Make commonly short courses. And live not at length but in figures, so that a sound caesarian nativity, a sound child cut out of the body of the mother, may outlast a natural birth, and a knife may sometimes make way for a more lasting fruit than a midwife, which makes so few infants now able to endure the old test of the river.

Natos ad flumina primum deferimus, avoque gelud ramo sedundis. And many to have feeble children, who scarce have been married at Sparta than those provident states who studied strong and healthful generations, which happened but contingently in mere pecuniary matches or marriages made by the candle, wherein notwithstanding There is little redress to be hoped from an astrologer or a lawyer, and a good discerning physician were likely to prove the most successful counsellor. Julius Scaliger, who, in a sleepless fit of the gout, could make two hundred verses in a night, would have but five plain words upon his tomb.

Juli caesari scaligeri quod fuit. See Joseph Scaliger in Vita Patris. And this serious person, though no minor wit, left the poetry of his epitaph unto others, either unwilling to commend himself, or to be judged by a district. And perhaps considering how unhappy great poets have been in versifying their own epitaphs, wherein Petrarca, Dante, and Ariosto have so unhappily failed, that if their tombs should outlast their works, Posterity would find so little of Apollo on them as to mistake them for Ciceronian poets.

In this deliberate and creeping progress under the grave, he was somewhat too young and of too noble a mind to fall upon that stupid symptom observable in divers persons near their journey's end, and which may be reckoned among the mortal symptoms of their last disease. That is, to become more narrow-minded, miserable, and tenacious, unready to part with anything, when they are ready to part with all, and afraid to want, when they have no time to spend. Meanwhile, physicians, who know that many are mad, but in a single depraved imagination, and one prevalent discipiancy, and that beside and out of such single deliriums, a man may meet with sober actions and good sense in bedlam, Cannot but smile to see the airs and concern'd relations gratulating themselves on the sober departure of their friends, and though they behold such mad covetous passages, content to think they die in good understanding and in their sober senses.

Avarice, which is not only infidelity, but idolatry, either from covetous progeny or questory education, Had no root in his breast, who made good works, the expression of his faith, and was big with the desires unto publick and lasting charities. And surely, where good wishes and charitable intentions exceed abilities, the oracle beneficiancy may be more than a dream. They build not castles in the air who would build churches on earth, And though they leave no such structures here, may lay good foundations in heaven. In brief, his life and death were such that I could not blame them who wished the like, and almost to have been himself. Almost, I say, for though we may wish the prosperous appurtenances of others, or to be another in his happy accidents, yet so intrinsical is every man unto himself, that some doubt may be made whether Any would exchange his being, or substantially become another man.

He had wisely seen the world, at home and abroad, and thereby observed under what variety men are deluded in the pursuit of that which is not here to be found. And though he had no opinion of reputed felicities below, and apprehended men widely out in the estimate of such happiness, Yet his sober contempt of the world wrought no democratism or cynicism, no laughing or snarling at it, as well understanding there are not felicities in this world to satisfy a serious mind, and therefore to soften the stream of our lives we are fain to take in the reputed contentions of this world to unite with the crowd in their beatitudes, and to make ourselves happy by consortium, opinion, or coexistimation. For strictly to separate from received and customary felicities, and to confine unto the rigor of realities, were to contract the consolation of our beings unto two uncomfortable circumscriptions.

Not to fear death, nor desire it. Summum nec metoas diem nec optes, was short of his resolution, To be dissolved and be with Christ was his dying ditty. He conceived his thread long, in no long course of years, and when he had scarce outlived the second life of Lazarus, who, upon some accounts and tradition, is said to have lived thirty years after he was raised by our saviour, Baronius, esteeming it enough to approach the years of his saviour, who so ordered his own human state as not to be old. Upon earth.

But to be content with death may be better than to desire it. A miserable life may make us wish for death, but a virtuous one to rest in it. Which is the advantage of those resolved Christians who, looking on death not only as the sting, but the period and end of sin, the horizon and isthmus between this life and better, And the death of this world, but as nativity of another, do contentedly submit unto the common necessity, and envy not Enoch or Elias.

Not to be content with life is the unsatisfactory state of those which destroy themselves.

In the speech of Wiltius in Lucan, animating his soldiers in a great struggle to kill one another, All fear is over. Do but resolve to die, and make your desires meet necessity.

State of those which destroy themselves, who, being afraid to live, run blindly upon their own death, which no man fears by experience. And the Stoics had a notable doctrine to take away the fear thereof, that is, in such extremities, to desire that which is not to be avoided, and wish what might be feared. And so made evils voluntary, and to suit with their own desires, which took off the terror of them.

But the ancient martyrs were not encouraged by such fallacies, who, Though they feared not death, were afraid to be their own executioners, and therefore thought it more wisdom to crucify their lusts than their bodies, to circumcise than stab their hearts, and to mortify than kill themselves.

His willingness to leave this world about that age when most men think they may best enjoy it, though paradoxical unto worldly ears, Was not strange unto mine, who have so often observed that many, though old, oft stick fast unto the world, and seem to be drawn like Carcass's oxen, backward with great struggling and reluctancy unto the grave. The long habit of living makes mere men more hardly depart with life, and all to be nothing but what is to come. To live at the rate of the old world, and some could scarce remember themselves young, May afford no better digested death than a more moderate period.

Many would have thought it unhappiness to have had their lot in life in some notable conjunctures of ages past, but the uncertainty of future times hath tempted few to make a part in ages to come. And surely he that hath taken the true altitude of things, and rightly calculated the degenerate state of this age, Is not like to envy those that shall live in the next, much less three or four hundred years hence, when no man can comfortably imagine what face this world will carry. And therefore, since every age makes a step into the end of all things, and the scripture affords so hard a character of the last times, quiet minds will be content with their generations, and rather bless ages past. than be ambitious of those to come.

Though age had set no seal upon his face, yet a dim eye might clearly discover fifty in his actions, and therefore since wisdom is the gray hair and an unspotted life old age, although his years came short, he might have been said to have held up with longer livers, and to have been Solomon's old man. footnote wisdom chapter four and surely if we deduct all those days of our life which we might wish unlived and which abate the comfort of those we now live, if we reckon up only those days which god hath accepted of our lives, a life of good years will hardly be a span long. The son in this sense may outlive the father, and none be climacterically old, He that early arriveth under the parts and prudence of age is happily old, without the uncomfortable attendance of it, and is superfluous to live under grey hairs, when in a precocious temper we anticipate the virtues of them.

In brief, he cannot be accounted young who outliveth the old man. He that hath early arriv'd under the measure of a perfect stature in Christ, Hath already fulfilled the prime and longest intention of his being, and one day lived after the perfect rule of piety is to be preferred before sinning immortality.

14 14 - Letter to a Friend - 3 17:29

Letter to a Friend.

Although he attained not unto the years of his predecessors, yet he wanted not those preserving virtues which confirm the threat of weaker constitutions. Courtless chastity and crafty sobriety were far from him. Those duels were paragon without flaw, here I saw cloud in him, which affords me an hint to proceed in these good wishes and few mementoes unto you.

Tread softly and circumspectly in this funambulous track and narrow path of goodness. Pursue virtue virtuously. Be sober and temperate not to preserve your body in a sufficiency to wanton ends, nor to spare your purse, nor to be free from the infamy of common transgressors that way, and thereby to balance or palliate obscure and closer vices, nor simply to enjoy health, by all which you may leaven good actions, and render virtues disputable. But in one word, That you may truly serve God, which every sickness will tell you you cannot well do without health.

The sick man's sacrifice is but a lame oblation.

Pious treasures laid up in healthful days excuse the defect of sick non-performances, without which we must needs look back with anxiety upon the lost opportunities of health, They may have cause rather to envy than pity the ends of penitent malefactors, who go with clear paths unto the last act of their lives, and in the integrity of their faculties, return their spirit unto God that gave it.

Consider whereabout thou art in Sibes his table, or that old philosophical Pinax of the life of man, whether thou art still in the road of uncertainties, Whether thou hast yet entered the narrow gate, got up the hill and asperous way which leadeth unto the house of sanity, or taken that purifying potion from the hand of sincere erudition, which may send for clear and purer way unto a virtuous and happy life.

In this virtuous voyage let not disappointment cause despondency nor difficulty despair. Think not that you are sailing from Lima to Manilia, through the Pacific Sea with a constant gale from the east, wherein thou may'st tie up the rudder and sleep before the wind, but expect rough seas, floors, and contrary blasts, and as well if by many cross-tacks and veerings thou arriv'st at thy port.

Sit not down in the popular seats and common levels of virtues, But endeavour to make them heroical. Offer not only peace-offerings, but holocausts unto God. To serve Him singly to serve ourselves were too partial a piece of piety, nor likely to place us in the highest mansions of glory.

He that is chaste and continent not to impair his strength or terrified by contagion will hardly be heroically virtuous. Adjourn not that virtue unto those years when Cato could lend out his wife, and impotent satyrs write satyrs against lust, but be chaste in thy flaming days, when Alexander dared not trust his eyes upon the fair daughters of Darius, and when so many men think there is no other way but origins. Who is said to have castrated himself?

Be charitable before wealth makes thee covetous, and lose not the glory of the mitre. If riches increase, let thy mind hold pace with them, and think it not enough to be liberal, but munificent. Though a cup of cold water from some hand may not be without its reward, yet stick not thou for wine and oil for the wounds of the distressed, and treat the poor as our Saviour did the multitude. To the relics of some baskets.

Trust not to the omnipotency of gold, or say unto it, Thou art my confidence. Kiss not thy hand, when thou beholdest that terrestrial sun, nor bore thy ear unto its servitude. A slave unto mammon makes no servant unto God. Covetousness cracks the sinews of faith, Numbs the apprehension of anything above sense, and only affect it with the certainty of things present. Makes a peradventure of things to come. Lives but unto one world, nor hopes but fears another. Makes our own death sweet unto others, bitter unto ourselves. Lives a dry funeral, cynical morning, and no wet eyes at the grave.

If avarice be thy vice, yet make it not thy punishment. Miserable men commiserate not themselves, boweless unto themselves, and merciless unto their own bowels. Let the fruition of things bless the possession of them, and take no satisfaction in dying but living rich. For since thy good works, not thy goods, will follow thee, since riches are an appurtenance of life, And no dead man is rich. To famish in plenty, and live poorly to die rich were a multiplying improvement in madness, and use upon use in folly.

Persons lightly dipt, not grained in generous honesty, are but pale in goodness, and faint-hued in sincerity, But be thou what thou virtuously art, and let not the ocean wash away thy tincture. Stand magnetically upon that axis where prudent simplicity hath fixed thee, and let no temptation invert the poles of thy honesty. That vice may be uneasy and even monstrous unto thee, let iterated good acts and long-confirm'd habits make virtue natural, or a second nature in thee. And since few or none prove eminently virtuous, but from some advantageous foundations in their temper and natural inclinations, study thyself betimes, and early find what nature bids thee to be, or tells thee what thou mayest be.

They who thus timely descend into themselves cultivating the good seeds which nature hath set in them, and improving their prevalent inclinations to perfection, Become not shrubs, but cedars in their generation, and to be in the form of the best of the bad or the worst of the good will be no satisfaction unto them.

Let not the law of thy country be the non alterer of thy honesty, nor think that always good enough which the law will make good. Narrow not the law of charity, equity, mercy, Join gospel righteousness with legal right. Be not a mere gamaliel in thy faith, but let the sermon in the mount be thy targum unto the law of Sinai.

Make not the consequences of virtue the ends thereof. Be not beneficent for a name or symbol of applause, nor exact and punctual in commerce for the advantages of trust and credit. Which attend the reputation of just and true dealing. For such rewards, though unsought for, plain virtue will bring with her whom all men honour, though they pursue not. To have other by-ends in good actions, sours laudable performances, which must have deeper roots, motions, and instigations to give them the stamp of virtues.

Though human infirmity may betray thy heedless days into the popular ways of extravagancy, yet let not thine own depravity, or the torrent of vicious times, carry thee into desperate enormities in opinions, manners, or actions. If thou hast dipped thy foot in the river, yet venture not over Rubicon. Run not into extremities from whence there is no regression. Nor be ever so closely shut up within the holds of vice and iniquity, as not to find some escape by a postern of reciprocency.

Owe not thy humility unto humiliation by adversity, but look humbly down in that state when others look upward upon thee. Be patient in the age of pride and days of will and impatiency. Where men live but by intervals of reason under the sovereignty of humour and passion, and tis in the power of every one to transform thee out of thyself, and put thee into the short madness.

If you cannot imitate Job, yet come not short of Socrates and those patient pagans who tired the tongues of their enemies, While they perceived, they spet their malice at brazen walls and statues.

Let age, not envy, draw wrinkles on thy cheeks. Be content to be envied, but envy not. Emulation may be plausible, and indignation allowable, but omit no treaty with that passion which no circumstance can make good. A displacency of the good of others, because they enjoy it although we do not want it, is an absurd depravity, sticking fast unto human nature from its primitive corruption, which he that can well subdue were a Christian of the first magnitude, and for aught I know may have one foot already in heaven.

While thou so hotly disclaim'st the devil, be not guilty of diabolism. Fall not into one name with that unclean spirit, nor act his nature, whom thou so abhorrest, that is, to accuse, calumniate, backbite, whisper, detract, or sinisterly interpret others, degenrous depravities, and narrow-minded vices, not only below St. Paul's noble Christian, but Aristotle's true gentleman.

See Aristotle's Ethics, chapter, Magnanimity.

Trust not with some, that the Episcola of St James is apocryphal, and so read with less fear that stabbing truth, that, in company with this vice, thy religion is in vain.

Moses broke the tables without breaking of the law, but where charity is broke, the law itself is shattered, which cannot be whole without love. That is the fulfilling of it. Look humbly upon thy virtues, Though thou art rich in some, yet think thyself poor and naked without that crowning grace which thinketh no evil, which envieth not, which beareth, believeth, hopeth, endureth all things. With these sure graces, while busy tongues are crying out for a drop of cold water, youths may be in happiness, and sing the tracyum in heaven. Holy, holy, holy.

Let not the sun in Capricorn go down upon thy wrath, even when the days are shortest. But right thy wrongs in water. Draw the curtain of night upon injuries. Shut them up in the tower of oblivion, and let them be as though they had not been.

Alluding to the tower of oblivion mentioned by Procopius, which was the name of a tower of imprisonment among the Persians, Whosoever was put therein, he was, as it were, buried alive, and it was death for any but to name it. Forgive thine enemies totally, and without any reserve of hope that, however, God will revenge thee.

Be substantially great in thyself, and more than thou appearest unto others, and let the world be deceived in thee, as they are in the lights of heaven. Hang early plummets upon the heels of pride, and let ambition have but an epicycle or narrow circuit in thee. Measure not thyself by thy mourning shadow, but by the extent of thy grave, and reckon thyself above the earth by the line thou must be contented with under it.

Spread not into boundless expansions, either to designs or desires, Think not that mankind liveth but for a few, and that the rest are born but to serve the ambition of those who make but flies of men, and wildernesses of whole nations.

Swirl not into actions which embroil and confound the earth, but be one with those violent ones which force the kingdom of heaven.

If thou must needs reign, be zeno king. And enjoy that empire which every man gives himself.

Certainly the iterated injunctions of Christ unto humility, meekness, patient, and that despised train of virtues, cannot but make pathetical impressions upon those who have well considered the affairs of all ages, wherein pride, ambition, and vain-glory have led up the worst of actions, and whereunto confusion, tragedies, And acts denying all religion do owe their originals.

Rest not in an ovation, but a triumph over thy passions. Chain up the unruly legion of thy breast. Behold thy trophies within thee, not without thee. Lead thine own captivity captive, and be Caesar unto thyself.

Give no quarter unto those vices. which are of thy nimwood family, and having a root in thy temper, lead a right and property in thee. Examine well thy complexional inclinations. Raise early batteries against those strongholds built upon the rock of nature, and make this a great part of the militia of thy life. The politic nature of vice must be opposed by policy, And therefore, wiser honesties project and plot against sin. Wherein notwithstanding we are not to rest in generals or the trite stratagems of art, that may succeed with one temper, which may prove successless with another. There is no community or commonwealth of virtue. Every man must study his own economy, and erect these rules under the figure of himself.

Lastly, if length of days be thy portion, make it not thy expectation. Reckon not upon long life, but live always beyond thy account. He that so often surviveth his expectation lives many lives, and will hardly complain of the shortness of his days. Time past is gone like a shadow. Make times to come present. Conceive that near which may be far off. Approximate thy last times by present apprehensions of them. Live like a neighbour unto death, and think there is but little to come. And, since there is something in us that must still live on, join both lives together. Unite them in thy thoughts and actions, and live in one but for the other. He who thus ordereth the purposes of this life Will never be far from the next, and is in some manner already in it, by an happy conformity and close apprehension of it.

End of letter to a friend.

15 15 - Hydriotaphia - Dedication 7:49

Hydea taffia, Urn, burial, or a discourse of the sepulchral urns lately found in Norfolk. To my worthy and honoured friend, Thomas La Grosse of Costwick, Escl.

When the funeral pie was out, and the last valediction over, men took a lasting adieu of their interred friends, little expecting the curiosity of future ages should comment upon their ashes, and having no old experience of the duration of their relics, held no opinion of such after considerations. But who knows the fate of his bones? Or how often he is to be buried. Who hath the oracle of his ashes, or whither they are to be scattered? The relics of many lie like the ruins of Pompeys in all parts of the earth. And when they arrive at your hands, these may seem to have wandered far, Who, in a direct and meridian travel, have but few miles of known earth between yourself and the pole. That the bones of Theseus should be seen again in Athens was not beyond conjecture and hopeful expectation.

But that these should arise so opportunely to serve yourself was an hit of fate and honour beyond prediction.

We cannot but wish these urns might have the effect of theatrical vessels and great Hippodrome urns in Rome, to resound the acclamations and honour due unto you. The great urns in the Hippodrome at Rome conceived to resound the voices of people at their shows. But these are sad and sepulchral pictures, which have no joyful voices, silently expressing old mortality, the ruins of forgotten times, and can only speak with life how long in this corruptible frame some parts may be uncorrupted, yet able to outlast bones long unborn, and noblest pile among us. Worthily possessed by that true gentleman, Sir Horatio Townsend, my honoured friend.

We present not these as any strange sight or spectacle unknown to your eyes, who have beheld the best of urns, and noblest variety of ashes, who are yourself no slender master of antiquities, and can daily command the view of so many imperial faces. Which raises Your thoughts unto old things, and consideration of times before you, when even living men were antiquities, when the living might exceed the dead. Unto depart, this world could not be properly said to go unto the greater number, and so run up your thoughts upon the ancient of days, the antiquary's truest object, unto whom the eldest parcels are young, and earth itself An infant. And without Egyptian account, footnote which makes the world so many years old, makes but small noise in thousands.

We were hinted by the occasion, not catched the opportunity to write of old things, or intrude upon the antiquary. We are coldly drawn unto discourses of antiquities, who have scarce time before us to comprehend new things, Or make out learned novelties. But seeing they arose, as they lay, almost in silence among us, at least in short account suddenly passed over, we were very unwilling they should die again, and be buried twice among us. Beside, to preserve the living, and make the dead to live, to keep men out of their urns, and discourse of human fragments in them, Is not impertinent unto our profession, who study as life and death, who daily behold examples of mortality, and of all men least need artificial mementos, or coffins by our bedside, to mind us of our graves.

Tis time to observe occurrences, and let nothing remarkable escape us. The supinity of elder-days hath left so much in silence, Or time hath so martyred the records, that the most industrious heads do find no easy work to erect a new Britannia, wherein Mr. Dugdale hath excellently well endeavoured, and worthy to be countenanced by ingenuous and noble persons.

Tis opportune to look back upon old times and contemplate our forefathers, Great examples grow thin, and to be fetched from the past world. Simplicity flies away, and iniquity comes at long strides upon us. We have enough to do to make up ourselves from present and past times, and the whole stage of things scarce serveth for our instruction. A complete piece of virtue must be made up from the kentos of all ages. As all the beauties of Greece could make but one handsome Venus.

When the bones of King Arthur were digged up, in the time of Henry, the old race might think they beheld therein some originals of themselves. Unto these of our urns none here can pretend relation, and can only behold the relics of those persons who in their life, giving the laws unto their predecessors, After long obscurity, now lie at their mercies. But remembering the early civility they brought upon these countries, and forgetting long-past mischiefs, we mercifully preserve their bones, and piss not upon their ashes.

In the offer of these antiquities we drive not at ancient families, so long outlasted by them, We are far from erecting your worth upon the pillars of your forefathers, whose merits you illustrate. We honour your old virtues, conformable unto times before you, which are the noblest armoury. And having long experience of your friendly conversation, void of empty formality, full of freedom, constant and generous honesty, I look upon you as a gem of the old rock. footnote, Adamus de rupe vetere, trastantissimus, and must profess myself even to earn an ashes. Your ever-faithful friend and servant, Thomas Brown. Norwich made the first.

16 16 - Hydriotaphia - Chapter 1 17:57

XVI of selections from the works of Sir Thomas Brown. This is a LibriVox recording, or LibriVox recordings from the public domain. Hygiotaphia earned burial.

On sum quodicitus quinquae levato onus propitious. Chapter One. In the deep discovery of the subterranean world, a shallow part would satisfy some inquirers, Who, if two or three yards were open about the surface, would not care to rack the bowels of Potersea regions towards the centre, could note the rich mountains of Peru. Nature hath furnished one part of the earth, and man another. The treasures of time lie high in urns, coins, and monuments, scarce below the roots of some vegetables. Time hath endless rarities, and shows of all varieties, which reveals old things in heaven, makes new discoveries in earth, and even earth itself a discovery. That great antiquity America lay buried for thousands of years, and a large part of the earth is still in the urn unto us.

If Adam were made out of an extract of the earth, all parts might challenge a restitution, yet few have returned their bones far lower than they might receive them. Not affecting the graves of giants under hilly and heavy coverings, but content with less than their own depth, have wished their bones might lie soft, and the earth be light upon them. Even such as hoped to rise again would not be content with central interment, or so desperately to place their relics as to lie beyond discovery, and in no way to be seen again. Which happy contrivance hath made communication with our forefathers, and left unto our view some parts which they never beheld themselves?

Tho earth hath engrossed the name, Yet water hath proved the smartest grave, which in forty days swallowed almost mankind and the living creation. Fissures not wholly escaping except the salt ocean were handsomely contemplered by a mixture of the fresh element.

Many have taken voluminous pains to determine the state of the soul upon disunion, but men have been most fantastical. in the singular contrivances of their corporal dissolution, whilst the soberest nations have rested in two ways, of simple inhumation and burning. That carnal interment, or burying, was of the elder date, the old examples of Abraham and the patriarchs are sufficient to illustrate, and were without competition. If it could be made out that Adam was buried near Damascus, or Mount Calvary, According to some tradition.

God himself, that buried but one, was pleased to make choice of this way, collectible from scripture expression, and the hot contest between Satan and the Archangel about discovering the body of Moses. But the practice of burning was also of great antiquity, and of no slender extent. For not to derive the same from Hercules, Noble descriptions there are hereof in the Grecian funeral of Homer, in the formal obsequies of Patroclus and Achilles, and somewhat elder in the Theban war, and solemn combustion of Manetius and Archimurus, contemporary unto Ger, the eighth judge of Israel. Confirmable also among the Trojans from the funeral pyre of Hector, burnt before the gates of Troy, and the burning of Pencilia, the Amazonian queen.

Quintus, caliber, liber, unis, and long continuance of that practice in the inward countries of Asia, while as low as the reign of Julian we find that the king of Chionia, Ammianus Macelinus, cumbrates, king of Chionia, a country near Persia, burnt the body of his son, and interred the ashes in a silver urn.

The same practice extended also far west, footnote Arnoldus Montanus in Caesar's commentaries, L.L. Giraldo's Cagmanus, and besides Herulians, Getes, and Thracians, was in use with most of the Celti, Sarmatians, Germans, Gauls, Danes, Swedes, Norwegians, not to omit some use thereof among Carthaginians and Americans. Of greater antiquity among the Romans than most opinion or pliny seems to allow. For beside the old table-laws of burning or burying within the city, or of making the funeral pyre with plain wood, or quenching the fire with wine, footnote twelve tabulae part one de iurisacro homine morto minurbe ne sepulito Neve urito titulus tu rogum ascia ne polito titulus fo item viganeri. Annotated in Livium et alex, ab alex cum terra quello, Ruscines cum demstero.

Manlius the consul burnt the body of his son. Numa by special clause of his will was not burnt, but buried. And Remus was solemnly buried, according to the description of Ovid.

Ultima prollato subdita flamma rogo De fasti. Cornelius Sulla was not the first whose body was burned in Rome, but of the Cornelian family, which being indifferently, not frequently used before, from that time spread, and became the prevalent practice. Not totally pursued in the highest run of cremation, for when even crows were funerally burnt, Poppeia, the wife of Nero, found a peculiar grave interment.

Now, as all customs were founded upon some bottom of reason, so there wanted not grounds for this, according to several apprehensions of the most rational dissolution. Some, being of the opinion of Thales, that water was the original of all things, thought it most equal to submit under the principle of putrefaction, and conclude in a moist relentment.

Others conceived it most natural to end in fire, as due to the master principle in the composition according to the doctrine of Heraclitus. And therefore heaped up large piles more actively to waft them toward that element, whereby they also declined a visible degeneration into worms, and left a lasting parcel of their composition.

Some apprehended a purifying virtue and fire, refining the grosser commixture, and firing out the ethereal particles so deeply immersed in it. And such as, by tradition or rational conjecture, held any hint of the final pyre of all things, or that this element at last must be too hard for all the rest, might conceive most naturally of the fiery dissolution. Others, pretending no natural grounds, politically declined the malice of enemies upon their buried bodies. Which consideration led Sulla unto this practice, who, Having thus served the body of Marius, could not but fear a retaliation upon his own, entertained after in the civil wars and revengeful contentions of Rome.

But as many nations embraced, and many left it indifferent, so others too much affected, or strictly declined this practice. The Indian Brahmins seemed two great friends unto fire, who burnt themselves alive, And thought it the noblest way to end their days in fire, according to the expression of the Indian burning himself at Athens, in his last words upon the fire, and to the amazed spectators, Thus I make myself immortal, and therefore the inscription of his tomb was made accordingly. Nicolaus of Damascus.

For the Chaldeans, the great idolaters of fire, abhorred The burning of their carcasses as a pollution of that deity. The Persian magi declined it upon the like scruple, and being only solicitous about their bones, exposed their flesh to the prey of birds and dogs. And the Perses, now in India, which expose their bodies unto vultures, and endure not so much as a ferretra, or beers of wood, the proper fuel of fire, are led on with such niceties.

But whether the ancient Germans who burned their dead held any such fear to pollute their deity of Herthus or the earth, we have no authentic conjecture. The Egyptians were afraid of fire, not as a deity, but a devouring element, mercilessly consuming their bodies and leaving too little of them. And therefore, by precious embalments, depositor in dry earths, or handsome enclosure in glasses, Contrived the notablest ways of integral conservation. And from such Egyptian scruples imbibed by Pythagoras, it may be conjectured that Numa and the Pythagorical sect first waved the fiery solution.

The Scythians, who swore by wind and sword, that is, by life and death, was so far from burning their bodies that they declined all interment and made their grave in the air, and the Ichthyophage or fish-eating nations about Egypt affected the sea for their grave, thereby declining visible corruption and restoring the debt of their bodies. Whereas the old heroes in Homer dreaded nothing more than water or drowning, probably upon the old notion of the Fiery substance of the soul only extinguishable by that element. And therefore the poet emphatically implies the total destruction in this kind of death, which happened to Ajax Oilius.

The old Balearians had a peculiar mode, for they used great urns and much wood, but no fire. in their burials, while they bruised the flesh and bones of the dead, crowded them into urns, and laid heaps of wood upon them. And the chinois, footnote, Remusius in Navigations, without cremation or urnal interment of their bodies, make use of trees and much burning, while they plant a pine-tree by their grave, and burn great numbers of printed draughts of slaves and horses over it, Civilly content with their companies in effigy, which barbarous nations exact unto reality.

Christians abhorred this way of obsequies, and though they sticked not to give their bodies to be burnt in their lives, detested that mode after death, affecting rather a depositor than assumption, and properly submitting under the sentence of God to return Not unto ashes, but unto dust again. Conformable unto the practice of the patriarchs, the interment of our Saviour, of Peter, Paul, and the ancient martyrs. And so far at last declining promiscuous interment with pagans, that some , have suffered ecclesiastical censures for making no scruple thereof.

The mussulman believers will never admit this fiery resolution, for they hold a present trial from their black and white angels in the grave, which they must have made so hollow that they may rise upon their knees.

The Jewish nation, though they entertained the old way of inhumation, yet sometimes admitted this practice, for the men of Jabesh burnt the body of Saul. And by no prohibited practice, to avoid contagion or pollution in time of pestilence, burnt the bodies of their friends.

And when they burnt not their dead bodies, yet sometimes used great burnings near and about them, deducible from the expressions concerning Giorum, Siddichius, and the sumptuous pyre of Asher, And for so little a verse from pagan burning, that the Jews, lamenting the death of Caesar, their friend, and revenger on Pompey, frequented the place where his body was burnt for many nights together. And thus they raised noble monuments and mausoleums for their own nation, as that magnificent sepulchral monument erect by Simon, Maccabees Chapter One. So they were not scrupulous in erecting some for others, according to the practice of Daniel, who left that lasting sepulchral pile an ecbatana for the Median and Persian kings.

Whereof a Jewish priest had always the custody unto Josephus his days. But even in times of subjection and hottest use, they conformed not unto the Roman practice of burning, whereby the prophecy was secured concerning the body of Christ, that it should not see corruption, or a bone should not be broken, which we believe was also providentially prevented from the soldiers, spear, and nails that passed by. the little bones, both in his hands and feet, nor of ordinary contrivance, that it should not corrupt on the cross according to the law of Roman crucifixion, or in hair of his head perish, though observable in Jewish customs, to cut the hairs of malefactors.

Nor in their long cohabitation with the Egyptians crept into a custom of their exact embalming, wherein, deeply slashing the muscles, and taking out the brains and entrails, they had broken the subject of so entire a resurrection, nor fully answered the types of Enoch, Goliath, or Jonah, which yet, to prevent or restore, was of equal facility unto that rising power, able to break the fasciations and bands of death, to get clear out of the sear-cloth, and an hundred pounds of ointment, And out of the sepulchre, before the stone was rolled from it.

But though they embraced not this practice of burning, yet entertained they many ceremonies agreeable unto Greek and Roman obsequies. And he that observeth their funeral feasts, their lamentations of the grave, their music and weeping mourners, how they closed the eyes of their friends, how they washed, anointed, and kissed the dead, May easily conclude these were not mere pagan civilities. But whether that mournful burthen and treble calling out after Absalon had any reference unto the last conclamation and triple valediction used by other nations, we hold but a wavering conjecture.

Civilians make sepulture but of the law of nations. Others do naturally found it, and discover it also in animals. They that are so thick-skinned as still to credit the story of the phoenix, may say something for animal burning. More serious conjectures find some examples of sepulture in elephants, cranes, the sepulchral cells of pismires, and practice of bees. Which civil society carryeth out their dead, And hath execuies, if not interments.

17 17 - Hydriotaphia - Chapter 2 24:05

Hydra Taffia in burial. Chapter Two. The solemnities, ceremonies, rites of their cremation or interment, so solemnly delivered by authors, we shall not disparage our reader to repeat, Only the last and lasting part in their urns collected bones and ashes we cannot wholly omit, or decline that subject which occasion lately presented in some discovered among us.

In a field of old Walsingham, not many months past, were digged up between forty and fifty urns, deposited in a dry and sandy soil not a yard deep, nor far from one another. Not all strictly of one figure, but most answering these described. Some containing two pounds of bones, distinguishable in skull, ribs, jaws, thigh-bones, and teeth, with fresh impressions of their combustion. Besides, the extraneous substances, like pieces of small boxes or combs, handsomely wrought Handles of small brass instruments, brazen nippers, and in one, some kind of opal. In one sent me by my worthy friend, Dr. Thomas Witherley of Walsingham.

Near the same plot of ground, for about six yards compass, were digged up coals and incinerated substances, which begat conjecture that this was the Ustrina, or place of burning their bodies, or some sacrificing place unto the Manes, which was properly below the surface of the ground, as the Arai and altars unto the gods and heroes above it.

That these were the urns of Romans, from the common custom and place where they were found, is no obscure conjecture. Not far from a Roman garrison, but five miles from Brankester, set down by ancient record, under the name of Brannadunum, and where the adjoining town, containing seven parishes, in no very different sound but Saxon termination, still retains the name of Burnham, which, being an early station, it is not improbable the neighbour parts were filled with habitations, Either of Romans themselves, or Britons Romanized, which observed the Roman customs.

Nor is it improbable that the Romans early possessed this country, for though we meet not with such strict particulars of these parts before, the new institution of Constantine, and military charge of the Count of the Saxon shore, and that About the Saxon invasions, the Dalmatian horsemen were in the garrison of Brankester, yet in the time of Claudius Vespasian and Severus, we find no less than three legions dispersed throughout the province of Britain. And as high as the reign of Claudius, a great overthrow was given under the Iceni by the Roman Lieutenant Not long after, the country was so molested that, in hope of a better state, Prostaticus bequeathed his kingdom unto Nero and his daughters, and Bodicea his queen fought the last decisive battle with Paulinus.

After which time, and conquest of Grigola, the lieutenant of Vespasian, probable it is they wholly possessed this country, Ordering it into garrisons or habitations best suitable with their securities. And so some Roman habitations, not improbable in these parts, as high as the time of Vespasian, where the Saxons are defeated, in whose thin-filled maps we yet find the name of Wolseum. Now if the Iceni were but Gamadens and Conians, Or men that lived in an angle, wedge, or elbow of Britain, according to the original etymology. This country will challenge the emphatical appellation as most properly making the elbow, or I-can, of Icenio.

That Britain was notably populous is undeniable from that expression of Caesar.

Hominum infinita multitudo est. Creberima que edificia ferre gallicus consimilia. Cesar de bello Gallico. One five.

That the Romans themselves were early in no small numbers, Seventy thousand with their associates slain by Bodicea affords a sure account, and though many Roman habitations are now unknown, yet some, by old works, rampiers, coins, and urns, to testify their possessions. Some urns have been found at Castor, some also about South Creek, and not many years past, no less than ten in a field at Buxton, not near any recorded garrison.

In the ground of my worthy friend, Robert Jaggen, Esquire, wherein some things contained were preserved by the most worthy Sir William Paston, Baronet.

Nor is it strange to find Roman coins of copper and silver among us of Vespasian, Trajan, Adrian, Commodus, Antoninus, Severus, etc., but the greater number of Dioclesian, Constantine, Constans, Valens, with many of Victorinus Posthumus, Tetrachus, and Thirty Tyrants, and the reign of Gellianus, and some as high as Adrianus, have been found about Thetford. or Citimagus, mentioned in the itinerary of Antoninus as the way from Venter or Castor unto London.

From Castor to Thetfund, the Romans accounted thirty-two miles, and from thence observed not our common road to London, but passed by Comeditonium and Ansum, Canonium, Caesar, Magnus, etc., by Bredenum, Coggeschold, Chelmford, Burntwood, etc., But the most frequent discovery is made at the two castors by Norwich and Yarmouth.

Most at Castor by Yarmouth, found in a place called East Bloodyburg Furlong, belonging to Mr. Thomas Wood, a parson of civility, industry, and knowledge in this way, who hath made observation of remarkable things about him, and from whom we have received divers, silver and copper coins.

But the most frequent discovery is made at the two casters by Norwich and Yarmouth at Burgcastle and Brankersto. Belonging to that noble gentleman and true example of worth, Sir Ralph Hare, baronet, my honoured friend.

Besides, the Norman, Saxon, and Danish pieces of Cuthrood, Canutis, William, Matilda, and others, A piece of wood the empress said to be found at Buckingham Castle with this inscription, El Nael, besides, etc. Some British coins of gold have been dispersively found in no small number of silver pieces near Norwich, at Thorpe, with a rude head upon the obverse, and an ill-formed horse on the reverse, with inscriptions, reader's note, spelled I.C.D.U.R.O. T. Whether implying Aesinae, Duraerigis, Tachio, or Trenobantes, we leave to higher conjecture.

Vulgar chronology will have Norwich Castle as old as Julius Caesar, but his distance from these parts, and its gothic form of structure abridges such antiquity. The British coins afford conjecture of early habitation in these parts, though the city of Norwich arose from the ruins of Venter, and although perhaps not without some habitation before, was enlarged, builded, and nominated by the Saxons. In what bulk or populosity it stood in the old East-Angle monarchy, tradition and history are silent. Considerable it was in the Danish eruptions, When Swainow burnt Tetford and Norwich, and Ulf Kettle, a governor thereof, was able to make some resistance, and after endeavoured to burn the Danish navy.

How the Romans left so many coins in countries of their conquest seems of hard resolution, except we consider How they buried them underground, when upon barbarous invasions they were fain to desert their habitations in most parts of their empire, and the strictness of their laws forbidding them to transfer them to any other uses. Wherein the Spartans were singular, footnote Plutarch, in V. IX, who, to make their copper money useless, contemplated with vinegar.

That the Britons Left any some wonder, since their money was iron and iron rings before Caesar, and those of after-stamp by permission, and but small in bulk and bigness. That so few of the Saxons remain, because, overcome by succeeding conquerors upon the place, their coins by degrees passed into other stamps and the marks of after-ages.

That the time of these urns deposited, or precise antiquity of these relics, nothing of more uncertainty. For since the lieutenant of Claudius seems to have the first progress into these parts, since Bodicea was overthrown by the forces of Nero, and Agricola put a full end to these conquests, it is not probable the country was fully garrisoned or planted before, and therefore, however, These urns might be of later date, not likely of higher antiquity.

And the succeeding emperors desisted not from their conquests in these and other parts, as testified by history, and medal inscriptions yet extant.

The province of Britain, in so divided a distance from Rome, beholding the faces of many imperial persons, and in large account no fewer than Caesar, Claudius, Britannicus, Vespasian, Titus, Adrian, Severus, Commodus, Gaeta, and Caracalla.

A great obscurity herein, because no medal or emperor's coin enclosed, which might denote the dates of their interments, observable in many urns, and found in those of spittle-fields by London, Stowe's Survey of London, which contained the coins of Claudius, Vespasian, Commodus, Antoninus, attended with lachrymatries, lamps, bottles of liquor, and other appurtenances of affectionate superstition, which in these rural interments were wanting.

Some uncertainty there is from the period or term of burning, or the cessation of that practice, Macrobius affirmeth it was disused in his days, but most agree, though without authentic record, that it ceased with the Antonini. Most safely, to be understood, after the reign of those emperors which assumed the name of Antoninus extending unto Heliogabalus. Not strictly after Marcus, for about fifty years later we find the magnificent burning and consecration of Severus. And if we so fix this period of cessation, these zones will challenge above thirteen hundred years.

But whether this practice was only then left by empress and great persons, or generally about Rome, and not in other provinces, we hold no authentic account. For after Tertullian, in the days of Minucius, it was obviously objected upon Christians that they condemned the practice of burning. Execcantur rogos et damnant ignium sepulturam. Menucius Felix. Octavius.

And we find a passage in Sidonius, footnote, Sidonius Apollonarius, the letters three three, which asserteth that practice in France unto a lower account, and perhaps not fully disused, till Christianity fully established. Which gave the final extinction unto these sepulchral bone-fires.

Whether they were the bones of men, or women, or children, no authentic decision from ancient custom in distinct places of burial, although not improbably conjectured, that the double sepulture or burying-place of Abraham had in it such intention, But from exility of bones, thinness of skulls, smallness of teeth, ribs, and thigh-bones, not improbable that many thereof were persons of minor age, or women. Confirmable also from things contained in them. In most were found substances resembling combs, plates like boxes, fastened with iron pins, And handsomely overwrought like the necks or bridges of musical instruments. Long brass plates overwrought like the handles of neat implements. Brazen nippers to pull away hair, and in one a kind of opal, yet maintaining a bluish color.

Now, that they accustomed to burn or bury with them things wherein they excelled, delighted, or were dear unto them, Neither is farewells unto all pleasure, or vain apprehension, though they might use them in the other world, is testified by all antiquity. Observable from the gem or beryl ring upon the finger of Cynthia, the mistress of Propertius, when after her funeral pyre her ghost appeared unto him, and notably illustrated from the contents of that Roman urn preserved by Cardinal Farnese, footnote, the Gnere Annotations Book for Livy, wherein, besides, a great number of gems with heads of gods and goddesses, were found an ape or vagot, a grasshopper, an elephant of amber, a crystal ball, three glasses, two spoons, and six nuts of crystal.

And beyond the content of urns, In the monument of Childeric I and fourth King from Faramond, footnote, Schiffle in Anastasius Childerici, casually discovered three years past at Tourne, restoring unto the world much gold, richly adorning his sword, two hundred rubies, many hundred imperial coins, three hundred golden bees, the bones and horseshoe of his horse interred with him. According to the barbarous magnificence of those days in their sepulchral obsequies, although if we steer by the conjecture of many and septuagint expression, some trace thereof may be found even with the ancient Hebrews, not only from the sepulchral treasure of David, but the circumcision knives which Joshua also buried.

Some men, considering the contents of these urns, lasting pieces and toys included in them, and the custom of burning with many other nations, might somewhat doubt whether all urns found among us were properly Roman relics, or some not belonging unto our British, Saxon, or Danish forefathers.

In the form of burial among the ancient Britons, The large discourses of Caesar, Tacitus, and Strabo are silent. For the discovery whereof, with other particulars, we must deplore the loss of that letter which Cicero expected, or received, from his brother Quintus, as a resolution of British customs, or the account which might have been made by Scrobonius Largus, the position accompanying the Emperor Claudius, who might have also discovered that frugal bit, Of the old Britons, which, in the bigness of a bean, would satisfy their thirst and hunger. But that the Druids and ruling priests used to burn and bury is expressed by Pomponius. That for Linus, the brother of Brennus and king of Britons, was burnt, is acknowledged by Polydorus.

As also by a man de Cierrexensis in Historia, and Pineda in his Universa Historia, Spanish.

That they held that practice in Gallia, Caesar expressly deliberate. Whether the Britons probably descended from them of like religion, language, and manners, did not sometimes make use of burning, Or whether at least such as were after civilised unto the Roman life and manners conformed not unto this practice, we have no historical assertion or denial, but since from the account of Tacitus the Romans early wrought so much civility upon the British stock that they brought them to build temples, to wear the gown, and study the Roman laws and language, that they conformed also unto their religious rites and customs in burials. Seems no improbable conjecture.

That burning the dead was used in Sarmatia is affirmed by Gaguinus. That the Suions and Gothlanders used to burn their princes and great persons is delivered by Saxo and Olos. That this was the old German practice is also asserted by Tacitus.

And though We are bare in historical particulars of such obsequies in this island, or that the Saxons, Jutes, and Angles burnt their dead. Yet came they from parts where it was of ancient practice, the Germans using it from whom they were descended, and even in Jutland and Slesvich, in Anglia-Cimbrica, urns with bones were found not many years before us.

But the Danish and northern nations have raised an era or point of compute from their custom of burning their dead.

Some deriving it from Unguinus, some from Frotho the Great, who ordained by law that princes and chief commanders should be committed under the fire, though the common sort had the common grave interment. So, Starcaterus, that old hero, was burnt, and Ringo, royally burnt the body of Harold, the king slain by him.

What time this custom generally expired in that nation, we discern no assured period, whether it ceased before Christianity, or upon their conversion by Ansgurius the Gaul, in the time of Ludovicus Pius, the son of Charles the Great. According to good computes, or whether it might not be used by some persons, while for a hundred and eighty years paganism and Christianity were promiscuously embraced among them. There is no assured conclusion.

About which times the Danes were busy in England, and particularly infested this country, where many castles and strongholds were built by them or against them, And great number of names and families still derived from them.

But since this custom was probably disused before their invasion or conquest, and the Romans confessedly practiced the same since their possession of this island, the most assured account will fall upon the Romans, or Britons, romanized.

However, certain it is that Ernst conceived of no Roman original, are often digged up both in Norway and Denmark. Handsomely described and graphically represented by the learned physician, Vormius, Olae Vormiae, Monumenta et Antiquitates Danicae, and in some parts of Denmark are no ordinary number. As stands are delivered by authors exactly describing those countries. Adolphus Cyprius in Anales Les Vicensis. Unis ario abundava, quels, etc.

And they contained not only bones, but many other substances in them, as knives, pieces of iron, brass, and wood, and one of Norway, a brass gilded drus-harp.

Nor were they confused or careless in disposing of the noblest sort, While they placed large stones in circle about the urns or bodies which they interred, somewhat answerable unto the monument of Roderick stones in England, or a sepulchral monument, probably erected by Rollo, who after conquered Normandy, where it is not improbable, somewhat might be discovered. In Oxfordshire, Camden, meanwhile, to what The national person belonged that large urn found at Ashbury in Cheshire, Twinus de rebus albionicis, containing mighty bones and a buckler. What those large urns found at Little Massingham, or why the Anglese urns are placed with their mouths downwards, remains yet undiscovered.

Section 17.

18 18 - Hydriotaphia - Chapter 3 36:06

Plastered and whited sepulchres were anciently effected in cadaverous and corruptive burials. And the rigid Jews were wont to garnish the sepulchres of the righteous. Ulysses in Hecuba cared not how meanly he lived, so he might find the noble tomb after death. Great princes affected great monuments, and the fair and large urns contained no vulgar ashes. Which makes that disparity in those which time discovereth among us. The present earns were not of one capacity, the largest containing above a gallon, some not much above half that measure, nor all of one figure, wherein there is no strict conformity in the same or different countries, observable from those represented by Casselius, Bossio, and others, though all found in Italy.

While many have handles, ears, and long necks, but most imitate a circular figure in a spherical and round composure, whether from any mystery, best duration, or capacity, were but a conjecture. But the common forms with necks was a proper figure, making our last bed like our first, nor much unlike the urns of our nativity, While we lay in the nether part of the earth, an inward vault of our microcosm.

Many urns are red, these but of a black color, somewhat smooth and dully sounding, which begat some doubt whether they were burnt or only baked in an oven or sun. According to the ancient way, with bricks, tiles, pots, and testatious works, and, as the word tester is properly, to be taken when occurring without addition, and chiefly intended by Pliny, when he commended bricks and tiles of two years old, and to make them in the spring. Not only these concealed pieces, but the open magnificence of antiquity ran much in the artifice of clay. Hereof the house of Mausolus was built. Thus sold Jupitus stood in the capitol, and the statue of Hercules made in the reign of Tarquinius Briscus was extant in Pliny's days.

And such as declined burning or funeral urns affected coffins of clay, according to the mode of Pythagoras and way preferred by Varro. But the spirit of great ones was above these circumscriptions affecting copper, silver, gold, and porphyry urns, wherein Severus lay after a serious view and sentence on that which would contain him. Some of these urns were thought to have been silvered over from sparklings in several pots with small tinsel parcels, uncertain whether from the earth or the first mixture in them.

Among these urns we could obtain no good account of their coverings. Only one seemed arched over with some kind of brickwork. Of those found at Buxton, some were covered with flints, some in other parts with tiles. Those at Yarmouth, castor, were closed with Roman bricks. And some have proper earthen covers adapted and fitted to them. But in the Homerical urn of Patroclus, whatever was the solid tegument, we find the immediate covering to be a purple piece of silk. And such as had no covers might have the earth closely pressed into them. After which, disposure were probably some of these, wherein we found the bones and ashes half mortared under the sand and sides of the urn, and some long roots of quich or dogs grass wreathed about the bones.

No lamps included liquors, lachrymetries, or tear-bottles. attended these rural urns, either as sacred unto the Mayanese, or passionate expressions of their surviving friends, while with rich flames and hired tears they solemnized their obsequies, and in the most lamented monuments made one part of their inscriptions, footnote, cum lacrimis Some find sepulchral vessels containing liquors which time hath incursated into jellies. For beside these lachrymantries, notable lamps with vessels of oil and aromatical liquors attended noble ossuaries, and some yet retaining a venosity and spirit in them, footnote Lasius, which, if any have tasted, they have far exceeded the palates of antiquity. Ligures not to be computed by years of annual magistrates, but by great conjunctions and the fatal periods of kingdoms.

The draughts of consulary date were but crude unto these, and Opimian wine but in the must. Unto them, Vinum Opinianenum Anorum Centum, Petronius.

In sundry graves and sepulchres we meet with rings, coins, and chalices. Ancient frugality was so severe that they allowed no gold to attend the corpse, but only that which served to fasten neti. Footnote. 12. Cap. 50.11 De Iure Sacro. Newe aurum adito Astque arrodentes quiti erunt, in cum ilo sepaliere et utere, se frode esto.

Whether the opaline stone in this urn were burnt upon the finger of the dead, or cast into the fire by some affectionate friend, it would consist with either custom. But other incinerable substances were found so fresh That they could feel no singe from the fire. These upon view were judged to be wood, but sinking in water, and tried by the fire, we found them to be bone or ivory. In their hardness and yellow color they most resembled box, which in old expressions found the epithet of eternal.

and perhaps in such conservatories might have passed uncorrupted.

That bay-leaves were found green in the tomb of St. Humbert after an hundred and fifty years is looked upon as miraculous. Remarkable it was unto old spectators, that the cypress of the temple of Diana lasted so many hundred years. The wood of the ark and olive rod of Aaron were older at the captivity, but the cypress of the ark of Noah was the greatest of vegetable antiquity, if Josephus were not deceived by some fragments of it in his days.

To admit the moor-logs and fir-trees found underground in some parts of England, The undated ruins of winds, floods, or earthquakes, and which in Flanders still show from what quarter they fell, as generally lying in the north-east position.

But though we found not these pieces to be wood, according to first apprehension, yet we missed not altogether of some woody substance, For the bones were not so clearly picked, but some coals were found amongst them. A way to make wood perpetual, and a fit associate for metal, whereon was laid the foundation of the great Ephesian temple, in which were made the lasting tests of old boundaries and landmarks. Whilst we look on these, We admire not observations of colds found fresh after four hundred years.

In a long deserted habitation at Elmen, even egg-shells have been found fresh, not tending to corruption.

In the monument of King Childerick, The iron relics were found all rusty and crumbling into pieces. But our little iron pins which fasten'd the ivory works held well together, and lost not their magnetical quality, though wanting a tenacious moisture for the firmer union of parts, although to be hardly drawn into fusion. Yet that metal soon submitteth unto rust and dissolution. In the brazen pieces we admired not the duration, but the freedom from rust and ill-savor upon the hardest attrition. But now, exposed unto the piercing atoms of air, in the space of a few months, they begin to spot and betray their green entrails.

We conceive not these urns to have descended thus naked as they appear. Or to have entered their graves without the old habit of flowers. The urn philippimen was so laden with flowers and ribbons that it afforded no sight of itself.

The rigid lycurgus, a loud olive and myrtle. The Athenians might fairly, except against the practice of Democritus to be buried up in honey, As fearing to embezzle a great commodity of their country, and the best of that kind in Europe. But Paleta seemed too frugally politic, who allowed no larger monument than would contain four heroic verses, and designed the most barren ground for sepultia.

Though we cannot commend the goodness of that sepulchral ground which was set at no higher rate than the mean salary of Judas, Though the earth had confounded the ashes of these osheris, yet the bones were so smartly burnt that some thin plates of brass were found half-melted among them, whereby we apprehended that these were not of the meanest carcasses perfunctorily fired, as sometimes in military, and commonly in pestilence-burnings, or after the manner of abject courts huddled forth, Carelessly burned without the Isqueline court at Rome, which was an affront continued upon Tiberius, while Labert half burned his body, and in the amphitheatre, according to the custom in notable malefactors , whereas Nero, Seemed not so much to fear his death as that his head should be cut off, and his body not burnt entire.

Some, finding many fragments of skulls in these urns, suspected a mixture of bones. In none we searched was there cause of such conjecture, though sometimes they declined not that practice. The Atos of Domitian, footnotes for Tonius in Wittodomissiani, were mingled with those of Julia, of Achilles with those of Patroclus. All urns contained not single ashes. Without confused burnings, they affectionately compounded their bones, passionately endeavouring to continue their living unions. And when distance of death denied such conjunctions, unsatisfied affections conceived some satisfaction to be neighbours in the grave, to lie urn by urn, and touch but in their names. And many were so curious to continue their living relations, that they contrived large and family urns wherein the ashes of their nearest friends and kindred might successively be received, at least some parcels thereof, while their collateral memorials lay in minor vessels about them.

See the most learned and worthy Mr. M. Cazugon upon Antoninus.

Antiquity held to light thoughts from objects of mortality, while some drew provocatives of mirth from anatomies. footnote. Sic gerimus cunti, etc. ergo dum vivimus vivamus. Showed tricks with skeletons, when fiddlers made not so pleasant mirth as fences, and men could sit with quiet stomachs while hanging was played before them.

A barbarous pastime at feasts, when men stood upon a rolling globe with their necks in a rope and a knife in their hands, ready to cut it, When the stone was rolled away, wherein if they failed, they lost their lives to the laughter of their spectators. Athenaeus.

Old considerations made few mementoes by skulls and bones upon their monuments. In the Egyptian obelisks and hieroglyphical figures, it is not easy to meet with bones. The sepulchral lamps speak nothing less than sepulchre. And in their literal draughts, prove often obscene and antic pieces. Where we find dm putne dies manibus, it is obvious to meet with sacrificing patterers and vessels of libation upon old sepulchral monuments.

In the Jewish, hypergium and subterranean cell at Rome was little observable beside the variety of lamps and Frequent draughts of the holy candlestick. In authentic draughts of Antony and Jerome, we meet with thigh-bones and death's heads, but the cemeterial cells of ancient Christians and martyrs were filled with draughts of scripture-stories, not declining the flourishes of cypress, palms, and olive, and the mystical figures of peacocks, doves, and cocks, but Iterately affecting the portraits of Enoch Lazarus Jonas, and the vision of Ezekiel, as hopeful draughts and hinting imagery of the resurrection, which is the life of the grave, and sweetens our habitations in the lands of Moles and Pismias.

Gentile inscriptions precisely delivered the extent of men's lives. Seldom the manner of their deaths, which history itself so often leaves obscure in the records of memorable persons. There is scarce any philosopher but dies twice or thrice in Laotius, nor almost any life without two or three deaths in Plutarch. Which makes the tragical ends of noble persons more favourably ressentés by compassionate readers, who find some relief in the election. of such differences.

The certainty of death is attended with uncertainties in time-manner places. The variety of monuments hath often obscured true graves, and cenotaphs confounded sepulchres, where beside their real tombs many have found honorary and empty sepulchres. The variety of homer's monuments made him of various countries. Euripides had his tomb in Africa , but his sepulture in Macedonia. And Severus found his real sepulchre in Rome, but his empty grave in Gallia . He that lay in a golden urn eminently above the earth , It's not like to find the quiet of these bones. Many of these urns are broke by a vulgar discoverer in hope of enclosed treasure. The ashes of Marcellus were lost above ground upon the like account, put in a Plutarch in Wittemarchele.

Where profit hath prompted, no age hath wanted such miners, for which the most barbarous expolators found the most The commission of the gothish king Theodoric, for finding out sepulchral treasure. Cassiodorus. Goal, once out of the earth, is no more due unto it. What was unreasonably committed to the ground is reasonably resumed from it. Let monuments and rich fabrics, not riches, adorn men's ashes, The commerce of the living is not to be transferr'd unto the dead. It is no injustice to take, that which none complains to lose, and no man is wrong'd where no man is possessor.

What virtue yet sleeps in this terra damnata and aged cinders were petty magic to experiment. These Crumbling relics and long-fired particles superonate such expectations. Bones, hairs, nails, and teeth of the dead were the treasure of old sorcerers. In vain we revive such practices. Present superstition too visibly perpetuates the folly of our forefathers, wherein unto old observation this island was so complete that it might have instructed Persia. footnote.

Britannia hodii eam attonite calibratantus caramoniiis, ut eam persis debisi videre posit. Plinyi. LXIX.

Plato's historian of the other world lies twelve days incorrupted, while his soul was viewing the large stations of the dead. How to keep the corpse seven days from corruption by anointing and washing, without excenteration, were an unhazitable piece of art in our choicest practice.

How they made distinct separation of bones and ashes from fiery admixture, hath found no historical solution, though they seemed to make a distinct collection, and overlooked not Pyrrhus his toe. Some provision they might make by fictal vessels, coverings, tiles, or flat stones upon and about the body, careful separation of extraneous matter, composing and raking up the burnt bones with forks, observable in that notable lump of Galluanus. Masianus, who had the site of the vast austrinum, or vessel wherein they burnt the dead, found in the esquiline field at Rome, might have afforded clearer solution.

Erat et pas ustrinum appellatum quod in eo cadavere comberereino, capella de campo esculino.

But their insatisfaction herein begat that remarkable invention in the funeral pyres of some princes, by incombustible sheets made with the texture of asbestos. in cremable flax or salamanders wool, which preserved their bones and ashes incommixed. To be seen in the cate de recondites vetorum how the bulk of a man should sink into so few pounds of bones and ashes may seem strange unto any who considers not its constitution, and how slender a mass Would remain upon an open and urging fire of the carnal composition. Even bones themselves reduced into ashes to abate a notable proportion, and, consisting much of a volatile salt, when that is fired out, make a light kind of cinders. Although their bulk be disproportional to their weight when the heavy principle of salt is fired out, and the earth almost only remaineth, Observable in Sallow, which makes more ashes than oak, and discovers the common fraud of selling ashes by measure, and not by ponderation.

Some bones make best skeletons, footnote old bones, according to Lyseris, those of young persons not tall nor fat, according to Columbus. Some bodies, quick and speediest ashes. Who would expect a quick flame from hydropical Heraclitus? The poisoned soldier, when his belly break, put out two pyres in Plutarch. But in the plague of Athens, one private pyre served two or three intruders. And the Saracens, burnt in large heaps by the king of Castile, showed how little fuel suffiseth. Though the funeral pyre of Patropolis took up an hundred foot, a piece of an old boat, burnt Pompey. And if the burthen of Isaac was sufficient for an holocaust, a man may Carry his own fire.

From animals are drawn good burning lights, and good medicines against burning. Goodnet sperm ran of ovo. Though the seminal humour seems of a contrary nature to fire, yet the body completed proves a combustible lump wherein fire finds flame even from bones, and some fuel from almost all parts. Though the metropolis of humidity, put no to the brain, Hippocrates, seems least disposed unto it, which might render the skulls of these urns less burned than other bones. But all flies or sinks before fire almost in all bodies. When the common ligament is dissolved, the attenuable parts ascend. The rest subside in coal, calx, or ashes.

To burn the bones of the king of Edom for lime, Amos, chapter 2, verse 1, seems no irrational verity, but to drink of the ashes of dead relations a passionate prodigality, as our demesier of her husband, Mausolus.

He that hath the ashes of his friend hath an everlasting treasure. Where fire taketh leave, Corruption slowly enters. In bones well burnt, fire makes a wall against itself, experimented in cobbles and tests of metals which consist of such ingredients. What the sun compoundeth, fire analyzeth, not transmuteth. That devouring agent leaves almost always a morsel for the earth, where of all things are but a colony. And which, if time permits, the mother element will have in their primitive mass again.

Hither looks for urns and old sepulchral relics must not seek them in the ruins of temples, where no religion anciently placed them. These were found in a field, according to ancient custom in noble or private burial, The old practice of the Canaanites, the family of Abraham, and the burying-place of Joshua in the borders of his possessions, and also agreeable unto Roman practice to bury by highways, whereby their monuments were under eye, memorials of themselves, and mementos of mortality unto living passengers, whom the epitaphs of great ones were fain to beg to stay and look upon them. A language though sometimes used, not so proper in church inscriptions.

The sensible rhetoric of the dead to exemplarity of good life, first admitted the bones of pious men and martyrs within church walls, which in succeeding ages crept into promiscuous practice. While Constantine was Peculiarly favored to be admitted under the church porch, and the first, thus buried in England, was in the days of Cuthred.

Christians dispute how their body should lie in the grave. In urnal interment they clearly escaped this controversy. Though we decline the religious consideration, yet in cemeterial and narrower varying places, to avoid confusion and cross-position, a certain posture were to be admitted, which even pagan civility observed. The Persians lay north and south. The Megarians and Phoenicians placed their heads to the east, the Athenians something towards the west, which Christians still retain, and Beda will have it to be the posture of our Saviour. That he was crucified with his face towards the West, we will not contend with tradition and probable account. But we applaud not the hand of the painter in exalting his cross so high above those on either side.

Since hereof we find no authentic account in history, and even the crosses found by Helena pretend no such distinction from longitude or dimension.

To be gnawed out of our graves, to have our skulls made drinking-bowls and our bones turned into pipes to delight and sport our enemies, our tragical abominations escaped. in burning burials. Urnal interments and burnt relics lie not in fear of worms, or to be an heritage for serpents. In carnal sepature, corruptions seem peculiar unto parts, and some speak of snakes out of the spinal marrow.

But while we suppose common worms in graves, "'Tis not easy to find any there, few in churchyards above a foot deep, fewer or none in churches, though in fresh decayed bodies. Teeth, bones, and hair give the most lasting defiance to corruption. In an hydropical body ten years buried in the churchyard, we met with a fat concretion, where the nitre of the earth And the salt and luxurious liquor of the body had coagulated large lumps of fat into the consistence of the hardest castile soap, where a part remaineth with us.

After a battle with the Persians, the Roman corpse decayed in a few days, while the Persian bodies remained dry and uncorrupted. Bodies in the same ground do not uniformly dissolve, Nor bones equally milder, whereof in the opprobrious disease we expect no long duration.

The body of the Marquess of Dorset seemed sound and handsomely sear-clothed, that after seventy-eight years was found uncorrupted. Of Thomas, Marquess of Dorset, whose body being buried, fifteen-thirty, was sixteen hundred and eight upon the cutting open of the sear-cloth, found perfect. And nothing corrupted, the flesh not hardened, but in color proportion and softness, like an ordinary corpse newly to be interred. Burton's description of Leicestershire. Common tombs preserve not beyond powder. A firmer consistence and compage of parts might be expected from arafaction, deep burial, or charcoal. The greatest antiquities of mortal bodies may remain in petrified bones, whereof we take that in the pillar of Lot's wife, or metamorphosis of Auteleus, in the petrified relics of the general inundation, put in it in his map of Russia.

Some may be older than pyramids.

When Alexander opened the tomb of Cyrus, The remaining bones discovered his proportion, whereof urnal fragments, a form but a bad conjecture, and have this disadvantage of grave interments, that they leave us ignorant of most personal discoveries. For since bones afford not only rectitude and stability, but figure unto the body, it is no impossible physiognomy to conjecture at fleshly appendices, And after what shape the muscles and carnus parts might hang in their full consistencies.

A full spread of carriola shows a well-shaped horse behind. Handsome-formed skulls give some analogy of flesh resemblance. A critical view of bones makes a good distinction of sexes. Even colour is not beyond conjecture. Since it is hard to be deceived in the distinction of negro skulls. Dante's characters are to be found in skulls as well as faces. The poet Dante, in his view of purgatory, found gluttons so meagre and extenuated that he conceived them to have been in the siege of Jerusalem, and that it was easy to have discovered homo or omo in their faces. M. Being made by the two lines of their cheeks arching over the eyebrows to the nose, and their sunk eyes making an o, which makes up omo.

Other parts make up their corn proportions and inferences upon whole, All parts, and since the dimensions of the head measure the whole body, and the figure thereof gives conjecture of the principal faculties, physiognomy outlives ourselves, and ends not in our graves.

Severe contemplators observing these lasting relics may think them good monuments of persons past, little advantage to future beings. And considering that power which subdueth all things unto itself, that can resume the scattered atoms, or identify out of anything, conceive it superfluous to expect a resurrection out of relics. But the soul subsisting, how the matter clothed with due accidents may solve the individuality. Yet the saints, we observe, arose from graves and monuments about the holy city, Some think the ancient patriarchs so earnestly desired to lay their bones in Canaan as hoping to make a part of that resurrection, and though thirty miles from Mount Calvary, at least to lie in that region which would produce the first fruits of the dead.

And if, according to a learned conjecture, the bodies of men shall rise where their greatest relics remain, Many are not like to err in the topography of their resurrection, though their bones or bodies be after, translated by angels into the field of Ezechiel's vision, or, as some will order it, into the valley of judgment, of Jehoshaphat.

19 19 - Hydriotaphia - Chapter 4 22:44

Christians have handsomely glossed the deformity of death by careful consideration of the body and civil rights which take off brutal terminations. And though they conceived all reparable by a resurrection, cast not off all care of interment, and since the ashes of sacrifices burnt upon the altar of God were carefully carried out by the priests and deposed in a clean field, since they acknowledged their bodies to be the lodging-place of Christ and temples of the Holy Ghost, they devolved Not all upon the sufficiency of sole existence, and therefore with long services and full solemnities concluded their last exequies. Wherein to all distinctions the Greek devotion seems most pathetically ceremonious, Rituale graicum opera ge, Goa in officio Christian invention hath chiefly driven it rites which speak of hopes of another life and hints of a resurrection.

And if the ancient gentiles held not the immortality of their better part and some subsistence after death, in several rites, customs, actions, and expressions they contradicted their own opinions. wherein Democritus went high even to the thought of a resurrection as scoffingly recorded by Pliny.

Similis reviviscendi permissa democrito vanitas, cui non revixit ipse. Quae malum iste dementia est, iterari vitam morte. Pliny Book Seven, around fifty-five.

What can be more expressed than the expression of phosilides?

Or who would expect from Lucretius a sentence of ecclesiastes ? Before Plato could speak, the soul had wings in Homer, which fell not, but flew out of the body into the mansions of the dead, who also observed that handsome distinction of Demas and Soma, for the body conjoined to the soul and body separated from it. Lucian spoke much truth in jest when he said, That part of Hercules which proceeded from Alchemene perished, that from Jupiter remained immortal. Thus Socrates was content that his friends should bury his body, so they would not think they buried Socrates, and regarding only his immortal part, was indifferent to be burnt or buried. Plato in Phaedo. From such considerations Diogenes might contemn sepulture, and, being satisfied that the soul could not perish, grow careless of corporal interment.

The Stoics, who thought the souls of wise men had their habitation about the moon, might make slight account of subterraneous deposition, Whereas the Pythagoreans and transcorporating philosophers who were to be often buried held great care of their interment, and the Platonics rejected not a due care of the grave, that they put their ashes to unreasonable expectations in their tedious term of return and long-set revolution.

Men have lost their reason in nothing so much as their religion, wherein stones and clouts make martyrs. And since the religion of one seems madness unto another, to afford an account or rationale of old rites requires no rigid, reader, that they kindled the pyre adversely, or turning their face from it, was an handsome symbol of unwilling ministration. That they washed their bones with wine and milk, that the mother wrapped them in linen and dried them in her bosom, the first fostering part and place of their nourishment, that they opened their eyes towards heaven before they kindled the fire as the place of their hopes or original were no improper ceremonies. Their last valediction thrice uttered by the attendants was also very solemn.

Valle, valle, valle, nos te ordne quonatoro permitet sequemo. And somewhat answered by Christians, who thought it too little if they threw not the earth thrice upon the interred body, that In strewing their tombs the Romans effected the rose, the Greeks, amaranthus, and myrtle, that the funeral pyre consisted of sweet fuel, cypress, spur, larynx, ewe, and trees perpetually verdant lay silent expressions of their surviving hopes, wherein Christians which deck their coffins with bays have found a more elegant emblem. For that tree's seeming Dead will restore itself from the root, and its dry and exogenous leaves resume their verdure again, which, if we mistake not, we have also observed in furs.

Whether the planting of yew in churchyards hold not its original from ancient funeral rites, or as an emblem of resurrection from its perpetual verdure, may also admit conjecture.

They made use of music to excite or quiet the affections of their friends according to different harmonies. But the secret and symbolical hint was the harmonical nature of the soul, which, delivered from the body, went again to enjoy the primitive harmony of heaven from whence it first descended. Which, according to its progress, traced by antiquity, came down by Cancer and descended by Capricornus.

They burnt not children before their teeth appeared, as apprehending their bodies too tender a morsel for fire, and that their gristly bones would scarcely separable relics after the pyrrole combustion.

That they kindled not fire in their houses for some days after was a strict memorial of the late afflicting fire. And mourning without hope, they had a happy fraud against excessive lamentation, by a common opinion that deep sorrows disturbed their ghosts. To menes me laide meos.

That they buried their dead on their backs or in a supine position seems agreeable unto profound sleep and common posture of dying, contrary to the most natural way of birth, nor unlike our pendulous posture in the doubtful state of the womb. Therogenes was singular, who preferred a prone situation in the grave, and some Christians like neither footnote russians, etc., Who decline the figure of rest, and make choice of an erect posture.

That they carried them out of the world with their feet forward, not inconsinate under reason, as contrary to the native posture of man, and his production first into it. And also agreeable unto their opinions, while they bid adieu unto the world not to look again upon it. Whereas Mahometans, who think to return to a delightful life again, are carried forth with their heads forward, and looking towards their houses.

They closed their eyes as parts which first die, or first discover the sad effects of death. But their iterated clamations to excitate their dying or dead friends, or evoke them unto life again, was a vanity of affection, as not presumably ignorant of the critical tests of death by apposition of feathers, glasses, and reflection of figures which dead-eyes represent not, which, however not strictly verifiable in fresh and warm cadavers, could hardly elude the test in corpse of four or five days.

That they sucked in the last breath of their expiring friends was surely a practice of no medical institution, but a loose opinion that the soul passed out that way. And a fondness of affection from some Pythagorical foundation, Francesco Perucci, Pompei Funebri, that the spirit of one body passed into another, which they wished might be their own.

That they poured oil upon the pyre was a tolerable practice, while the intention rested in facilitating the ascension. But to place good omens in the quick and speedy burning, to sacrifice under the winds for a dispatch in this office, was a low form of superstition.

The Archimai Moorgesta attending the funeral train, and imitating the speeches, gestures, and manners of the deceased, was too light for such solemnities, contradicting their funeral orations and doleful rites of the grave.

That they buried a piece of money with them as a fee of the Elysian ferryman was a practice full of folly, but the ancient custom of Placing coins in considerable urns, and the present practice of burying medals in the noble foundations of Europe, are laudable ways of historical discoveries in actions, persons, chronologies, and posterity will applaud them.

We examine not the old laws of sepulture exempting certain persons from burial or burning, But hereby we apprehend that these were not the bones of persons planet-struck or burnt with fire from heaven, no relics of traitors to their country, self-killers or sacrilegious malefactors, persons in old apprehension unworthy of the earth, condemned under the tartarus of hell and bottomless pit of Pluto, from whence there was no redemption.

Nor were only many customs questionable in order to their obsequies, but also sundry practices, fictions, and conceptions discordant or obscure of their state and future beings. Whether unto eight or ten bodies of men, to add one of a woman as being more inflammable and unctuously constituted for the better pyral combustion, Were any rational practice, or whether the complaint of Periander's wife to be tolerable that, wanting her funeral burning, she suffered intolerable cold in Hell, according to the constitution of the infernal house of Pluto, wherein cold makes a great part of their tortures. It cannot pass without some question.

Why, the female ghosts appear unto Ulysses before the heroes and masculine spirits. Why, the saci or soul of Tiresias is of the masculine gender, who, being blind on earth, sees more than all the rest in Hell. Why, the funeral suppers consisted of eggs, beans, smallidge, and lettuce, since the dead are made to eat asphodels about the Elysian meadows. Why, since there is no sacrifice acceptable, nor any propitiation for the covenant of the grave, men set up the deity of mortar, and fruitlessly adore divinities without is, it cannot escape some doubt.

The dead seem all alive in the human Hades of Homer, yet cannot well speak, prophesy, or know the living, Except they drink blood wherein is the life of man. And therefore the souls of Penelope's paramours conducted by mercury chirp'd like bats, and those which followed Hercules made a noise but like a flock of birds. The departed spirits know things past and to come, yet are ignorant of things present. Agamemnon foretells what should happen unto Ulysses, Yet ignorantly enquires what is to become of his own son.

The ghosts are afraid of swords in Homer. Yet Sybilla tells Aeneas in Virgil, the thin habit of spirits was beyond the force of weapons.

The spirits put off their malice with their bodies, and Caesar and Pompey accord in Latin hell, Yet Ajax and Homer endures not a conference with Ulysses, and Deiphobes appears all mangled in Virgil's ghosts. Yet we meet with perfect shadows among the wounded ghosts of Homer.

Since Chiron in Lucian applauds his condition among the dead, whether it be handsomely said of Achilles, that living contemner of death, Did he had rather be a ploughman's servant than emperor of the dead? How Hercules his soul is in hell, and yet in heaven, and Julius his soul in a star, yet seen by Aeneas in hell. Except the ghosts were but images and shadows of the soul, received in higher mansions according to the ancient division of body, soul, and image, or simulacrum of them both. The particulars of future beings must needs be dark unto ancient theories, which Christian philosophy yet determines but in a cloud of opinions. A dialogue between two infants in the womb concerning the state of this world might handsomely illustrate our ignorance of the next, whereof, methinks, we yet discourse in Plato's den, and are but embryon philosophers.

Pythagoras escapes in the fabulous hell of Dante. Del inferno, Canto IV. Among that swarm of philosophers wherein whilst we meet with Plato and Socrates, Cato is to be found in no lower place than Purgatory. Among all the set, Epicurus is most considerable, whom men make honest without an Elysium. who contemned life without encouragement of immortality, and making nothing after death, yet made nothing of the king of terrors. Were the happiness of the next world as closely apprehended as the felicities of this, it were a martyrdom to live, and, unto such as consider none hereafter, it must be more than death to die, Which makes us amazed at those audacities that durst be nothing, and return into their chaos again.

Certainly such spirits as could contemn death when they expected no better being after, would have scorned to live, had they known any. And therefore we applaud not the judgments of Machiavell that Christianity makes men cowards, or that With the confidence of but half-dying, the despised virtues of patience and humility have abased the spirits of men, which pagan principles exalted, but rather regulated the wildness of audacities in the attempts, grounds, and eternal sequels of death, wherein men of the boldest spirits are often prodigiously temerarious. Nor can we extenuate the valour of ancient martyrs, who contemned death in the uncomfortable scene of their lives, and in their decrepit martyrdoms did probably lose not many months of their days, or parted with life when it was scarce worth the living.

For beside that long time past holds no consideration unto a slender time to come, they had no small disadvantage from the constitution of old age. Which naturally makes men fearful and complexionally superannuated from the bold and courageous thoughts of youth and fervent years, but the contempt of death from corporal animosity promoteth not our felicity. They may sit in the orchestra and noblest seats of heaven, who have held up shaking hands in the fire, and humanly contended for glory.

Meanwhile Epicurus lies deep in Dante's Hell, wherein we meet with tombs-enclosing souls which denied their immortalities. But whether the virtuous heathen, who lived better than he spake, or erring in the principles of himself, yet lived above philosophers of more specious maxims, lie so deep as he is placed, at least So low as not to rise against Christians who, believing or knowing that truth, have lastingly denied it in their practice and conversation, were a query too sad to insist on. But all or most apprehensions rested in opinions of some future being which, ignorantly or coldly believed, begat those perverted conceptions, ceremonies, sayings, which Christians pity or laugh at. Happy are they which live not in that disadvantage of time when men could say little for futurity but from reason, whereby the noblest minds fell often upon doubtful deaths and melancholy dissolutions.

With those hopes Socrates warmed his doubtful spirits against that cold potion And Cato, before he durst give the fatal stroke, spent part of the night in reading The Immortality of Plato, thereby confirming his wavering hand unto the animosity of that attempt.

It is the heaviest stone that melancholy can throw at a man, to tell him he is at the end of his nature, O, that there is no farther state to come, unto which this seems progressional, and otherwise made in vain. Without this accomplishment, the natural expectation and desire of such a state were but a fallacy in nature. Unsatisfied considerators would quarrel at the justice of their constitutions, and rest content that Adam had fallen lower. whereby, by knowing no other original and deeper ignorance of themselves, they might have enjoyed the happiness of inferior creatures who in tranquillity possessed their constitutions, as having not the apprehension to deplore their own natures, and being framed below the circumference of these hopes or cognition of better being, the wisdom of God hath necessitated their contentment.

But the superior ingredient and obscured part of ourselves, where to all present felicities afford no resting contentment, will be able at last to tell us we are more than our present selves, and evacuate such hopes in the fruition of their own accomplishments.

20 20 - Hydriotaphia - Chapter 5 25:38

V. Now since these dead bones have already outlasted the living ones of Methuselah, and in a yard underground, and thin walls of clay, Outworn all the strong and specious buildings above it, and quietly rested under the drums and tramplings of three conquests. What prince can promise such deuturnity unto his relics, or might not gladly say, Sic ego compone versus in ossa wellim?

Time Which antiquates antiquities, and hath an art to make dust of all things, hath yet spared these minor monuments. In vain we hope to be known by open and visible conservatories, when to be unknown was the means of their continuation, and obscurity their protection.

If they died by violent hands, and were thrust into their urns, These bones become considerable, and some old philosophers would honor them whose souls they conceived most pure, which were thus snatched from their bodies, and retain a stronger propension unto them, whereas they weariedly left a languishing corpse, and with faint desires of reunion. oracola caldaica, cum scholiis pseli et fetonis. Vui corpus vrediquentium animae purissimae.

If they fell by long and aged decay, yet, wrapped up in the bundle of time, they fall into indistinction and make one blot with infants.

If we begin to die when we live, and long life be but a prolongation of death, our life is a sad composition. We live with death, and die not in a moment. How many pulses made up the life of Methuselah will work for Archimedes? Common counters sum up the life of Moses's man. In the Psalm of Moses, Our days become considerable like petty sums by minute accumulations, where numerous fractions make up but small round numbers, and our days of a span long make not one little finger. According to the ancient arithmetic of the hand, wherein the little finger of the right hand contracted, signified an hundred. Pierius in Hieroglyph.

If the nearness of our last necessity brought a nearer conformity unto it, there were a happiness in hoary hairs, and no calamity in half-senses. But the long habit of living indisposeth us for dying, when avarice makes us the sport of death, when even David grew politically cruel, and Solomon could hardly be said to be the wisest of men.

But many are too early old and before the date of age. Adversity stretcheth our days. Misery makes Alcimini's nights, and time hath no wings unto it. But the most tedious being is that which can unwish itself, content to be nothing or never to have been, Which was beyond the malcontent of Job, who cursed not the day of his life, but his nativity, content to have so far been as to have a title to future being, though he had lived here but in a hidden state of life, and as it were an abortion.

What song the sirens sang, or what Namor Kellys assumed when he hid himself among women, Though puzzling questions are not beyond all conjecture, the puzzling questions of Tiberius unto grammarians, Marcellus Donatus in Suetonius.

What time the persons of these ossuries entered, the famous nations of the dead?

Clyde et ne l'ercon, Homer, and slept with princes and counsellors, might admit a wide solution. But who were the proprietories of these bones, or what bodies these ashes made up? We're a question above antiquarism, not to be resolved by man, nor easily perhaps by spirits, except, we consult, the provincial guardians or tutelary observators. Hadn't they made as good provision for their names as they have done for their relics? They have not so grossly erred in the art of perpetuation, but to subsist in bones and be but pyramidally extant is a fallacy in duration. Vain ashes which, in the oblivion of names, persons, times, and sexes, have found unto themselves a fruitless continuation, and only arise unto late posterity as Emblems of mortal vanities.

Antidotes against pride, vainglory, and madding vices. Pagan vainglories, which thought the world might last forever, had encouragement for ambition, and finding no atropos unto the immortality of their names, were never damped with the necessity of oblivion. Even Old ambitions had the advantage of ours in the attempts of their vainglories, who, acting early and before the probable meridian of time, have by this time found great accomplishment of their designs, whereby the ancient heroes have already outlasted their monuments and mechanical preservations. But in this latter scene of time we cannot expect such mummies into our memories, When ambition may fear the prophecy of Elias, and Charles V, can never hope to live within two methusalas of Hector.

Hector's fame lasting above two lives of methusala before that famous prince was extant.

And therefore, restless inquietude for the deuternity of our memories unto present considerations, seems a vanity almost out of date, and superannuated piece of folly. We cannot hope to live so long in our names as some have done in their persons. One face of Janus holds no proportion to the other. Tis too late to be ambitious. The great mutations of the world are acted, or time may be too short for outer signs. To extend our memories by monuments whose death we daily pray for, and whose duration we cannot hope without injury to our expectations in the advent of the last day, were a contradiction to our beliefs.

We, whose generations are ordained in this setting part of time, are providentially taken off from such imaginations, and being necessitated to eye the remaining particle of futurity, are naturally constituted unto thoughts of the next world, and cannot excusably decline the consideration of that duration which maketh pyramids, pillars of snow, And all that's past a moment.

Circles and right lines limit and close all bodies, and the mortal right-lined circle, footnote Theta, the character of death, must conclude and shut up all. There is no antidote against the opium of time, which temporarily considereth all things. Our fathers find their graves in our short memories, and sadly tell us how we may be buried in our survivors. Grave-stones tell truths scarce forty years, old ones being taken up and other bodies laid under them. Generations pass while some trees stand, and old families last not three oaks. To be read by bare inscriptions, like many in Grutter, footnote, Grutterie inscriptiones antiquae. To hope for eternity by enigmatical epithets, or first letters of our names.

To be studied by antiquaries, who we were, and have new names given us, like many of the mummies. Our cold consolations under the students of perpetuity Even by everlasting languages.

To be content that times to come should know only there was such a man, not caring whether they knew more of him, was a frigid ambition in cardan. Couperem notum esse quod sim non opto utsciato qualis sim, cardan in vita propria. Disparaging his horoscopic inclination and judgment of himself, who cares to subsist like Hippocrates' patients, or Achilles' horses in Homer, under naked nominations, without deserts and noble acts, which are the balsam of our memories, the entelecia and soul of our subsistences. To be nameless in worthy deeds exceeds an infamous history. The Canaanitish woman lives more happily without a name than Herodias with one. And who had not rather have been the good thief than Pilate?

But the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity. Who can but pity the founder of the pyramids? Erostratus lives that burnt the temple of Diana. He is almost lost that built it.

Time hath spared the epitaph of Adrian's horse, confounded that of himself.

In vain we compute our felicities by the advantage of our good names. Since bad have equaled Eurasians, and Thesites is like to live as long as Agamemnon. Who knows whether the best of men be known, or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot than any that stand remembered in the known account of time? Without the favor of the everlasting register, the first man had been as unknown as the last, and Methuselah's long life had been his only chronicle.

Oblivion is not to be hired. The greater part must be content to be as though they had not been, to be found in the register of God, not in the record of man. Twenty-seven names make up the first story, and the recorded names ever since contain not one living century. The number of the dead long exceedeth all that shall live. The night of time far surpasseth the day, and who knows when was the equinox.

Every hour adds unto that current arithmetic which scarce stands one moment. And since death must be the leucina of life, and even pagans could doubt whether thus to live were to die, Since our longest sun sets at right declensions and makes but winter arches, and therefore it cannot be long before we lie down in darkness and have our light in ashes. Custom of the Jews, who place a lighted wax candle in a pot of ashes by the corpse. Since the brother of death daily haunts us with dying mementoes, And time that grows old itself bids us hope no long duration. Deuternity is a dream and folly of expectation.

Darkness and light divide the course of time, and oblivion shares with memory a great part even of our living beings. We slightly remember our felicities. And the smartest strokes of affliction leave but short smart upon us. Sense endureth no extremities, and sorrows destroy us or themselves. To weep into stones are fables. Afflictions induce callosities. Miseries are slippery or fall like snow upon us, which, notwithstanding, is no unhappy stupidity. To be ignorant of evils to come, and forgetful of evils past, is a merciful provision in nature whereby we digest the mixture of our few and evil days, and our delivered senses not relapsing into cutting remembrances. Our sorrows are not kept raw by the edge of repetitions.

A great part of antiquity contented their hopes of subsistency with a transmigration of their souls. A good way to continue their memories while having the advantage of plural successions, they could not but act something remarkable in such variety of beings, and enjoying the fame of their past selves, making accumulation of glory until their last durations.

Others, rather than be lost in the uncomfortable night of nothing, were content to recede into the common being, and make one particle of the public soul of all things, which was no more than to return into their unknown and divine original again.

Egyptian ingenuity was more unsatisfied, contriving their bodies in sweet consistencies, To attend the return of their souls. But all was vanity, feeding the wind and folly.

Omnia vanitas et pastia venti. Nom nemo voxcis, urolem aqua et simacus, vide drusus, ecclesiastes. The Egyptian mummies which Cambyses all time had spared, avarice, Now consumeth. Mummies become merchandise, Misraim cures wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for balsams.

In vain do individuals hope for immortality or any patent from oblivion in preservations below the moon. Men have been deceived, even in their flatteries above the sun. And studied conceits to perpetuate their names in Heaven. The various cosmography of that part hath already varied the names of contrived constellations. Nimrod is lost in Orion, and Osiris in the Dog Star. While we look for incorruption in the Heavens, we find they are but like the Earth, durable in their main bodies, Alterable in their parts, whereof beside comets and new stars, perspectives begin to tell tales, and the spots that wander about the sun with phaeton's favor would make clear conviction.

There is nothing strictly immortal but immortality. Whatever hath no beginning may be confident of no end. Which is the peculiar of that necessary essence that cannot destroy itself, and the highest strain of omnipotency to be so powerfully constituted as not to suffer even from the power of itself.

All others have a dependent being and within the reach of destruction. But the sufficiency of Christian immortality frustrates all earthly glory, And the quality of either state after death makes a folly of posthumous memory. God, who can only destroy our souls, and hath assured our resurrection, either of our bodies or names hath directly promised no duration. Wherein there is so much of chance that the boldest expectants have found unhappy frustration, And to hold long subsistence seems but escape in oblivion.

But man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes and pompous in the grave, solemnizing nativities and deaths with equal lustre, nor omitting ceremonies of bravery in the infamy of his nature.

Life is a pure flame. And we live by an invisible sun within us. A small fire sufficeth for life. Great flames seem to little after death, while men vainly affected precious pyres and burn-like Sidonapolis. But the wisdom of funeral laws found the folly of prodigal blazes, and reduced undoing fires under the rule of sober obsequies. wherein few could be so mean as not to provide wood, pitch, a moorner, and an urn.

Five languages secured not the epitaph of Gordianus. The man of God lives longer without a tomb than any by one, invisibly interred by angels, and adjudged to obscurity, though not without some marks directing human discovery.

Enoch and Elias, without either tomb or burial, in an anomalous state of being, are the great examples of perpetuity in their long and living memory. In strict account, being still on this side death, and having a late part yet to act upon this stage of earth, if, in the decretory term of the world, we shall not all die, but be changed according to received translation, The last day will make but few graves. At least quick resurrections will anticipate lasting sepulchres. Some graves will be opened before they be quite closed, and Lazarus be no wonder. When many that feared to die shall groan that they can die but once. The dismal state is the second and living death, Where life puts despair on the damned, where men shall wish the coverings of mountains, not of monuments, and annihilation shall be courted.

While some have studied monuments, others have studiously declined them, and some have been so vainly boisterous that they durst not acknowledge their graves. Alaricus seems most subtle, who had a river turned to hide his bones at the bottom.

Even Scylla, that thought himself safe in his urn, could not prevent revenging tongues and stones thrown at his monument. Happy are they whom privacy makes innocent. Who deal so with men in this world that they are not afraid to meet them in the next, who, when they die, make no commotion among the dead, and are not touched with that poetical taunt of Isaiah.

Pyramids, arches, obelisks, were but the irregularities of vain-glory, and wild enormities of ancient magnanimity. But the most magnanimous resolution rests in the Christian religion, which trampleth upon pride, and sets on the neck of ambition, humbly pursuing that infallible perpetuity, unto which all others must diminish their diameters, and be poorly seen in angles of contingency, the least of the angles.

Pious spirits, who passed their days in raptures of futurity, made little more of this world than the world that was before it, while they lay obscure in the chaos of preordination and night of their forebeings. And if any have been so happy as truly to understand Christian annihilation, ecstasis, exolution, liquefaction, transformation, The kiss of the spouse, the gestation of God, and ingression into the divine shadow. They have already had an handsome anticipation of heaven. The glory of the world is surely over, and the earth in ashes unto them.

To subsist in lasting monuments, to live in their productions, to exist in their names, and predicament of chimeras, was large satisfaction unto old expectations, and made one part of their Elysiums.

But all this is nothing in the metaphysics of true belief. To live is indeed to be again ourselves, which bring not only an hope but an evidence in noble believers. Tis all one to lie in St. Innocent's churchyard, in Paris, where bodies soon consume, as in the sands of Egypt, ready to be anything, in the ecstasy of being ever, and as content with six foot, as in the moles of Adrianus, a stately mausoleum or sepulchral pile built by Adrianus in Rome, where now stand the castle of St. Angelo.

Lucan, tapis me cadavera solvered an rogus, how referred? It makes no difference whether corruption dissolved the carcass or the funeral pyre.

End of section 20 End of Hydra Tapia, Urn, Burial. End of selections from the Works of Sir Thomas Brown.

queue_music Chapters 20