offer to others, that the sorrows of this life are but of two sorts: whereof the one hath respect to God; the other, to the world. In the first, we complain to God against ourselves, for our offences against him; and confess, Et tu justus es in omnibus quæ venerunt super nos; "And thou, "O Lord, art just in all that hath befallen us." In the second, we complain to ourselves against God, as if he had done us wrong, either in not giving us worldly goods and honours, answering our appetites; or for taking them again from us, having had them: forgetting that humble and just acknowledgment of Job, The Lord hath given, and the Lord hath taken. To the first of which St. Paul hath promised blessedness; to the second, death. And out of doubt he is either a fool or ungrateful to God, or both, that doth not acknowledge, how mean soever his estate be, that the same is yet far greater than that which God oweth him: or doth not acknowledge, how sharp soever his afflictions be, that the same are yet far less than those which are due unto him. And if an heathen wise man call the adversities of the world but tributa vivendi, "the tributes of living;" a wise Christian man ought to know them and bear them but as the tributes of offending; he ought to bear them manlike, and resolvedly; and not as those whining soldiers do, qui gementes sequuntur imperatorem.

For seeing God, who is the author of all our tragedies, hath written out for us and appointed us all the parts we are to play; and hath not, in their distribution, been partial to the most mighty princes of the world; that gave unto Darius the part of the greatest emperor and the part of the most miserable beggar, a beggar begging water of an enemy, to quench the great drought of death; that appointed Bajazet to play the grand signior of the Turks in the morning, and in the same day the footstool of Tamerlane, (both which

parts Valerian had also played, being taken by Sapores ;) that made Bellisarius play the most victorious captain, and lastly, the part of a blind beggar; of which examples many thousands may be produced: why should other men, who are but as the least worms, complain of wrongs? Certainly there is no other account to be made of this ridiculous world, than to resolve, that the change of fortune on the great theatre is but as the change of garments on the less: for when, on the one and the other, every man wears but his own skin, the players are all alike. Now if any man, out of weakness, prize the passages of this world otherwise, (for, saith Petrarch, Magni ingenii est revocare mentem a sensibus,) it is by reason of that unhappy fantasy of ours, which forgeth in the brains of man all the miseries (the corporal excepted) whereunto he is subject: therein it is, that misfortune and adversity work all that they work. For seeing death, in the end of the play, takes from all whatsoever fortune or force takes from any one; it were a foolish madness, in the shipwreck of worldly things, where all sinks but the sorrow, to save it. That were, as Seneca saith, fortunæ succumbere, quod tristius est omni fato; "to fall under fortune, of all other the most miserable "destiny."

But it is now time to sound a retreat; and to desire to be excused of this long pursuit: and withal, that the good intent which hath moved me to draw the picture of time past (which we call history) in so large a table, may also be accepted in place of a better reason.

The examples of divine Providence every where found (the first divine histories being nothing else but a continuation of such examples) have persuaded me to fetch my beginning from the beginning of all things; to wit, creation. For though these two glorious actions of the Almighty be

so near, and, as it were, linked together, that the one necessarily implieth the other: creation inferring providence, (for what father forsaketh the child that he hath begotten?) and providence presupposing creation; yet many of those that have seemed to excel in worldly wisdom have gone about to disjoin this coherence; the Epicure denying both creation and providence, but granting that the world had a beginning; the Aristotelian granting providence, but denying both the creation and the beginning.

Now although this doctrine of faith, touching the creation in time, (for by faith we understand that the world was made by the word of God,) be too weighty a work for Aristotle's rotten ground to bear up, upon which he hath (notwithstanding) founded the defences and fortresses of all his verbal doctrine; yet that the necessity of infinite power, and the world's beginning, and the impossibility of the contrary, even in the judgment of natural reason, wherein he believed, had not better informed him, it is greatly to be marvelled at. And it is no less strange, that those men, which are desirous of knowledge, (seeing Aristotle hath failed in this main point, and taught little other than terms in the rest,) have so retrenched their minds from the following and overtaking of truth, and so absolutely subjected themselves to the law of those philosophical principles; as all contrary kind of teaching, in the search of causes, they have condemned either for fantastical or curious. But doth it follow, that the positions of heathen philosophers are undoubted grounds and principles indeed, because so called? or that ipsi dixerunt, doth make them to be such? Certainly no. But this is true, that where natural reason hath built any thing so strong against itself, as the same reason can hardly assail it, much less batter it down; the same, in every question of nature, and finite power, may be approved

66

for a fundamental law of human knowledge. For saith f Charron, in his book of Wisdom, Toute proposition humaine a autant d'authorité que l'autre, si la raison n'on fait la difference; "Every human proposition hath equal authority, if reason make not the difference,” the rest being but the fables of principles. But hereof how shall the upright and unpartial judgment of man give a sentence, where opposition and examination are not admitted to give in evidence? And to this purpose it was well said of 8 Lactantius, Sapientiam sibi adimunt, qui sine ullo judicio inventa majorum probant, et ab aliis pecudum more ducuntur: "They "neglect their own wisdom, who, without any judgment, approve the invention of those that forewent them; and “suffer themselves, after the manner of beasts, to be led by "them." By the advantage of which sloth and dulness, ignorance is now become so powerful a tyrant, as it hath set true philosophy, physic, and divinity, in a pillory; and written over the first, Contra negantem principia; over the second, Virtus specifica; and over the third, Ecclesia Romana.

But for myself, I shall never be persuaded that God hath shut up all light of learning within the lantern of Aristotle's X brains ; or that it was ever said unto him, as unto Esdras, Accendam in corde tuo lucernam intellectus: that God hath given invention but to the heathen, and that they only have invaded nature, and found the strength and bottom thereof; the same nature having consumed all her store, and left nothing of price to after-ages. That these and these be the causes of these and these effects, time hath taught us, and not reason; and so hath experience, without art. The cheese-wife knoweth it as well as the philosopher, that sour

×

f Charron de Sagesse.

* Lact. de Orig. Erroris, 1. 2. c. 8.

runnet doth coagulate her milk into a curd. But if we ask a reason of this cause, why the sourness doth it? whereby it doth it? and the manner how? I think that there is nothing to be found in vulgar philosophy to satisfy this and many other like vulgar questions. But man, to cover his ignorance in the least things, who cannot give a true reason for the grass under his feet, why it should be green rather than red, or of any other colour; that could never yet discover the way and reason of nature's working, in those which are far less noble creatures than himself, who is far more noble than the heavens themselves; Man, saith h Salomon, that can hardly discern the things that are upon the earth, and with great labour find out the things that are before us; that hath so short a time in the world, as he no sooner begins to learn, than to die; that hath in his memory but borrowed knowledge; in his understanding nothing truly; that is ignorant of the essence of his own soul, and which the wisest of the naturalists (if Aristotle be he) could never so much as define, but by the action and effect, telling us what it works, (which all men know as well as he,) but not what it is, which neither he nor any else doth know, but God that created it, (For though I were perfect, yet I know not my soul, saith Job:) man, I say, that is but an idiot in the next cause of his own life, and in the cause of all the actions of his life, will, notwithstanding, examine the art of God in creating the world; of God, who, saith Job, is so excellent as we know him not; and examine the beginning of the work, which had end before mankind had a beginning of being. He will disable God's power to make a world, without matter to make it of. He will rather give the moths of the air for a cause; cast the work on necessity or chance;

Salomon, c. I. v. 9.

i Job, c. 37. v. 23.