for locusts and grasshoppers; but being amongst them, make them my common viands; and I find them 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, and 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 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 anything, but that we might come to composition.

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 condition of friars; for though misplaced in circumstances, there is something in it of devotion.  I could never hear the Ave Maria 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 direct their devotions to her, I offer mine to God, and rectify the errors of their prayers, by rightly ordering mine own.  At a solemn procession I have wept abundantly, while my consorts, blind with opposition and prejudice, have fallen into an excess of scorn and laughter.  There are, questionless, both in Greek, Roman, and African churches, solemnities and ceremonies, whereof the wiser zeals do 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 asquint on the face of

truth, and those unstable judgments that cannot consist in the narrow point and centre of virtue without a reel or stagger to the circumference.

As for those wingy mysteries in divinity, and airy subtleties in religion, which have unhinged the brains of better heads, they never stretched 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 love to lose myself in a mystery, to pursue my reason to an O altitudo!  It is 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 learned of Tertullian, Certum est quia impossible 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

nor 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.  It is 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.

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, do err in my altitude, for I am above Atlas’s 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 heaven 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 arc 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.

ON GOD

In my solitary and retired imagination, I remember I am not alone, and therefore forget not to contemplate Him and His attributes who is 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.  It is but five days older 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; it is a privilege of His own nature.  ‘I am that I am,’ was His own definition unto Moses; and it was a short one, to confound mortality, that durst question God, or ask Him what He was; indeed He only is; all others have been 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 prescious determination of our estates to come, but a definitive blast of His will already