* * * * *

  A man’s trangression God does then remit,
  When man he makes a penitent for it.

* * * * *

  God, when he takes my goods and chattels hence,
  Gives me a portion, giving patience: 
  What is in God is God:  if so it be
  He patience gives, he gives himself to me.

* * * * *

  Humble we must be, if to heaven we go;
  High is the roof there, but the gate is low.

* * * * *

  God who’s in heaven, will hear from thence,
  If not to the sound, yet to the sense.

* * * * *

  The same who crowns the conqueror, will be
  A coadjutor in the agony.

* * * * *

  God is so potent, as his power can that.
  Draw out of bad a sovereign good to man.

* * * * *

  Paradise is, as from the learn’d I gather,
  A choir of blest souls circling in the Father.

* * * * *

  Heaven is not given for our good works here;
  Yet it is given to the labourer.

* * * * *

One more for the sake of Martha, smiled at by so many because they are incapable either of her blame or her sister’s praise.

  The repetition of the name, made known
  No other than Christ’s full affection.

And so farewell to the very lovable Robert Herrick.

Francis Quarles was born in 1592.  I have not much to say about him, popular as he was in his own day, for a large portion of his writing takes the shape of satire, which I consider only an active form of negation.  I doubt much if mere opposition to the false is of any benefit.  Convince a man by argument that the thing he has been taught is false, and you leave his house empty, swept, and garnished; but the expulsion of the falsehood is no protection against its re-entrance in another mask, with seven worse than itself in its company.  The right effort of the teacher is to give the positive—­to present, as he may, the vision of reality, for the perception of which, and not for the discovery of falsehood, is man created.  This will not only cast out the demon, but so people the house that he will not dare return.  If a man might disprove all the untruths in creation, he would hardly be a hair’s breadth nearer the end of his own making.  It is better to hold honestly one fragment of truth in the midst of immeasurable error, than to sit alone, if that were possible, in the midst of an absolute vision, clear as the hyaline, but only repellent of falsehood, not receptive of truth.  It is the positive by which a man shall live.  Truth is his life.  The refusal of the false is not the reception of the true.  A man may deny himself into a spiritual lethargy, without denying one truth, simply by spending his strength for that which is not bread, until he has none left wherewith to search for the truth, which alone can feed him.  Only when subjected to the positive does the negative find its true vocation.