which have no angles at all.  Some may be near unto goodness who are conceived far from it; and many things happen not likely to ensue from any promises of antecedencies.  Culpable beginnings have found commendable conclusions, and infamous courses pious retractations.  Detestable sinners have proved exemplary converts on earth, and may be glorious in the apartment of Mary Magdalen in heaven.  Men are not the same through all divisions of their ages:  time, experience, self-reflections, and God’s mercies, make in some well-tempered minds a kind of translation before death, and men to differ from themselves as well as from other persons.  Hereof the old world afforded many examples to the infamy of latter ages, wherein men too often live by the rule of their inclinations; so that, without any astral prediction, the first day gives the last:  men are commonly as they were; or rather, as bad dispositions run into worser habits, the evening doth not crown, but sourly conclude, the day.

If the Almighty will not spare us according to his merciful capitulation at Sodom; if his goodness please not to pass over a great deal of bad for a small pittance of good, or to look upon us in the lump, there is slender hope for mercy, or sound presumption of fulfilling half his will, either in persons or nations:  they who excel in some virtues being so often defective in others; few men driving at the extent and amplitude of goodness, but computing themselves by their best parts, and others by their worst, are content to rest in those virtues which others commonly want.  Which makes this speckled face of honesty in the world; and which was the imperfection of the old philosophers and great pretenders unto virtue; who, well declining the gaping vices of intemperance, incontinency, violence, and oppression, were yet blindly peccant in iniquities of closer faces; were envious, malicious, contemners, scoffers, censurers, and stuffed with vizard vices, no less depraving the ethereal particle and diviner portion of man.  For envy, malice, hatred, are the qualities of Satan, close and dark like himself; and where such brands smoke, the soul cannot be white.  Vice may be had at all prices; expensive and costly iniquities, which make the noise, cannot be every man’s sins; but the soul may be foully inquinated at a very low rate, and a man may be cheaply vicious to the perdition of himself.

Having been long tossed in the ocean of the world, he will by that time feel the in-draught of another, unto which this seems but preparatory and without it of no high value.  He will experimentally find the emptiness of all things, and the nothing of what is past; and wisely grounding upon true Christian expectations, finding so much past, will wholly fix upon what is to come.  He will long for perpetuity, and live as though he made haste to be happy.  The last may prove the prime part of his life, and those his best days which he lived nearest heaven.