SECT. V. That man is, as it were, a little world: with a digression touching our mortality. MAN, thus compounded and formed by God, was an abstract or model, or brief story of the universal: in whom God concluded the creation and work of the world, and whom he made the last and most excellent of his creatures, being internally endued with a divine understanding, by which he might contemplate and serve his Creator, after whose image he was formed, and endued with the powers and faculties of reason and other abilities, that thereby also he might govern and rule the world, and all other God's creatures therein. And whereas God created three sorts of living natures, to wit, angelical, rational, and brutal; giving to angels an intellectual, and to beasts a sensual nature, he vouchsafed unto man both the intellectual of angels, the sensitive of beasts, and the proper rational belonging unto man, and therefore, saith Gregory Nazianzene, PHomo est utriusque naturæ vinculum; "Man is the bond "and chain which tieth together both natures:" and because in the little frame of man's body there is a representation of the universal, and (by allusion) a kind of participation of all the parts thereof, therefore was man called microcosmos, or the little world. Deus igitur hominem factum, velut alterum quendam mundum, in brevi magnum, atque exiguo totum, in terris statuit; "God therefore placed in "the earth the man whom he had made, as it were another "world, the great and large world in the small and little "world;" for out of earth and dust was formed the flesh of man, and therefore heavy and lumpish; the bones of his body we may compare to the hard rocks and stones, and therefore strong and durable; of which Ovid: TM Inde genus durum sumus, experiensque laborum, Ar. Phys. 1. 8. c. 2. 1. 17. f. 9 Aug. 1. qu. 83. 4. 67. retr. 1. 1. C. 2. r Ovid. Met. 1. 1. From thence our kind hard-hearted is, Enduring pain and care, A stony nature are. His blood, which disperseth itself by the branches of veins through all the body, may be resembled to those waters which are carried by brooks and rivers over all the earth; his breath to the air; his natural heat to the enclosed warmth which the earth hath in itself, which, stirred up by the heat of the sun, assisteth nature in the speedier procreation of those varieties which the earth bringeth forth; our radical moisture, oil, or balsamum, (whereon the natural heat feedeth and is maintained,) is resembled to the fat and fertility of the earth; the hairs of man's body, which adorns, or overshadows it, to the grass, which covereth the upper face and skin of the earth; our generative power, to nature, which produceth all things; our determinations, to the light, wandering, and unstable clouds, carried every where with uncertain winds; our eyes, to the light of the sun and moon; and the beauty of our youth, to the flowers of the spring, which, either in a very short time, or with the sun's heat, dry up and wither away, or the fierce puffs of wind blow them from the stalks; the thoughts of our mind, to the motion of angels; and our pure understanding, (formerly called mens, and that which always looketh upwards,) to those intellectual natures which are always present with God; and, lastly, our immortal souls (while they are righteous) are by God himself beautified with the title of his own image and similitude. And although, in respect of God, there is no man just, or good, or righteous, (for, in angelis deprehensa est stultitia, "Behold, he "found folly in his angels," saith Job;) yet, with such a kind of difference as there is between the substance and the shadow, there may be found a goodness in man: which God being pleased to accept, hath therefore called man the image and similitude of his own righteousness. In this also ⚫ Job iv. 18. is the little world of man compared, and made more like the universal, (man being the measure of all things; Homo est mensura omnium rerum, saith Aristotle and Pythagoras,) that the four complexions resemble the four elements, and the seven ages of man the seven planets; whereof our infancy is compared to the moon, in which we seem only to live and grow, as plants; the second age to Mercury, wherein we are taught and instructed; our third age to Venus, the days of love, desire, and vanity; the fourth to the sun, the strong, flourishing, and beautiful age of man's life; the fifth to Mars, in which we seek honour and victory, and in which our thoughts travel to ambitious ends; the sixth age is ascribed to Jupiter, in which we begin to take account of our times, judge of ourselves, and grow to the perfection of our understanding; the last and seventh to Saturn, wherein our days are sad, and overcast, and in which we find by dear and lamentable experience, and by the loss which can never be repaired, that of all our vain passions and affections past, the sorrow only abideth: our attendants are sicknesses, and variable infirmities; and by how much the more we are accompanied with plenty, by so much the more greedily is our end desired, whom when time hath made unsociable to others, we become a burden to ourselves: being of no other use, than to hold the riches we have from our successors. In this time it is, when (as aforesaid) we, for the most part, and never before, prepare for our eternal habitation, which we pass on unto with many sighs, groans, and sad thoughts, and in the end, by the workmanship of death, finish the sorrowful business of a wretched life; towards which we always travel both sleeping and waking; neither have those beloved companions of honour and riches any power at all to hold us any one day by the glorious promise of entertainments; but by what crooked path soever we walk, the same leadeth on directly to the house of death, whose doors lie open at all hours, and to all persons. For this tide of man's life, after it once t Arist. 10. Metaph. c. 1. f. turneth and declineth, ever runneth with a perpetual ebb and falling stream, but never floweth again: our leaf once fallen, springeth no more; neither doth the sun or the summer adorn us again, with the garments of new leaves and flowers. Redditur arboribus florens revirentibus ætas; To which I give this sense. The plants and trees made poor and old The spring-time bounteous Covers again from shame and cold: But never man repair'd again And of which Catullus, Epigram 53. The sun may set and rise: Sleep after our short light For if there were any baiting place, or rest, in the course or race of man's life, then, according to the doctrine of the Academics, the same might also perpetually be maintained; but as there is a continuance of motion in natural living things, and as the sap and juice, wherein the life of plants is preserved, doth evermore ascend or descend; so is it with the life of man, which is always either increasing towards ripeness and perfection, or declining and decreasing towards rottenness and dissolution. SECT. VI. Of the free power which man had in his first creation to dispose of himself. THESE be the miseries which our first parents brought on all mankind, unto whom God in his creation gave a free and unconstrained will, and on whom he bestowed the liberal choice of all things, with one only prohibition, to try his gratitude and obedience. God set before him a mortal and immortal life, a nature celestial and terrene; and, indeed, God gave man to himself, to be his own guide, his own workman, and his own painter, that he might frame or describe unto himself what he pleased, and make election of his own form. u God made man in the beginning, saith Siracides, and left him in the hands of his own counsel. Such was the liberality of God, and man's felicity: whereas beasts, and all other creatures reasonless, brought with them into the world, saith Lucilius, and that even when they first fell from the bodies of their dams, the nature which they could not change; and the supernal spirits or angels were from the beginning, or soon after, of that condition, in which they remain in perpetual eternity. But (as aforesaid) God gave unto man all kind of seeds and grafts of life, to wit, the vegetative life of plants, the sensual of beasts, the rational of man, and the intellectual of angels; whereof whichsoever he took pleasure to plant and cultive, the same should futurely grow in him, and bring forth fruit, agreeable to his own choice and plantation. This freedom of the first man Adam, and our first father, was enigmatically described by Asclepius Atheniensis, saith Mirandula, in the person and fable of Proteus, who was said, as often as he pleased, to change his shape. To the same end were all those celebrated metamorphoses among the Pythagoreans and ancient poets, wherein it was feigned that men were transformed into divers shapes of beasts, thereby to shew the change of men's conditions, from rea Eccles. xv. 14. |