There is no liberty for causes to operate in a loose and straggling way, nor any effect whatever 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 sortileges 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.

’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.

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.  Some men have written more than others have spoken.  Of those three great inventions in Germany, there are two which are not without their incommodities.  Tis not a melancholy wish 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.

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.  There are many, questionless, canonised 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 that wise heathen Socrates, that suffered on a fundamental point of religion—­the unity of God.  The leaven 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.

III.—­THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY

I thank God I have not those strait ligaments or narrow obligations to the world as to dote on life or tremble at the name of death.  Not that I am insensible of the horror thereof, or, by raking into the bowels of the deceased and continual sight of anatomies, I have forgot the apprehension of mortality; but that, marshalling all the horrors, I find not anything therein able to daunt the courage of a man, much less a well-resolved Christian.  Were there not another life that I hope for, all the vanities of this world should not entreat a moment’s breath from me.  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, that hath more in it than the eye of a common spectator doth discover.