term hath never detained me from sin, nor do I owe any good action to the name thereof.  I fear God, yet am not afraid of him; his mercies make me ashamed of my sins, before his judgments afraid thereof; these are the forced and secondary method of his wisdom, which he useth but as the last remedy, and upon provocation:  a course rather to deter the wicked than incite the virtuous to his worship.  I can hardly think there was ever any scared into heaven; they go the fairest way to heaven that would serve God without a hell; other mercenaries, that crouch unto him in fear of hell, though they term themselves the servants, are indeed but the slaves of the Almighty.

That which is the cause of my election I hold to be the cause of my salvation, which was the mercy and beneplacit of God, before I was, or the foundation of the world.  “Before Abraham was, I am,” is the saying of Christ; yet is it true in some sense, if I say it of myself; for I was not only before myself, but Adam—­that is, in the idea of God, and the decree of that synod held from all eternity:  and in this sense, I say, the world was before the creation, and at an end before it had a beginning; and thus was I dead before I was alive; though my grave be England, my dying place was Paradise; and Eve miscarried of me before she conceived of Cain.

* * * * *

Now for that other virtue of charity, without which faith is a mere notion and of no existence, I have ever endeavored to nourish the merciful disposition and humane inclination I borrowed from my parents, and regulate it to the written and prescribed laws of charity:  and if I hold the true anatomy of myself, I am delineated and naturally framed to such a piece of virtue; for I am of a constitution so general that it consorts and sympathizeth with all things:  I have no antipathy, or rather idiosyncrasy, in diet, humor, air, anything.  I wonder not at the French for their dishes of frogs, snails, and toadstools; nor at the Jews for locusts and grasshoppers; but being amongst them, make them my common viands, and I find they 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, or Dutch:  but where I find their actions in balance with my countrymen’s, I honor, love, and embrace them in the same degree.  I was born in the eighth climate, but seem for 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