Meanwhile, Epicurus lies deep in Dante’s hell, wherein we meet with tombs inclosing souls which denied their immortalities.  But whether the virtuous heathen, who lived better than he spake, or, erring in the principles of himself, yet lived above philosophers of more specious maxims, lie so deep as he is placed; at least so low as not to rise against Christians who, believing or knowing that truth, have lastingly denied it in their practice and conversation—­were a query too sad to insist on.

But all or most apprehensions rested in opinions of some future being, which, ignorantly or coldly believed, begat those perverted conceptions, ceremonies, sayings, which Christians pity or laugh at.  Happy are they which live not in that disadvantage of time, when men could say little for futurity but from reason; whereby the noblest minds fell often upon doubtful deaths and melancholy dissolutions.  With those hopes Socrates warmed his doubtful spirits against that cold potion; and Cato, before he durst give the fatal stroke, spent part of the night in reading the immortality of Plato, thereby confirming his wavering hand unto the animosity of that attempt.

It is the heaviest stone that melancholy can throw at a man, to tell him he is at the end of his nature; or that there is no farther state to come, unto which this seems progressional, and otherwise made in vain.  Without this accomplishment, the natural expectation and desire of such a state were but a fallacy in nature.  Unsatisfied considerators would quarrel at the justice of their constitutions, and rest content that Adam had fallen lower; whereby, by knowing no other original, and deeper ignorance of themselves, they might have enjoyed the happiness of inferior creatures, who in tranquillity possess their constitutions, as having not the apprehension to deplore their own natures; and being framed below the circumference of these hopes, or cognition of better being, the wisdom of God hath necessitated their contentment.  But the superior ingredient and obscured part of ourselves, whereto all present felicities afford no resting contentment, will be able at last to tell us we are more than our present selves, and evacuate such hopes in the fruition of their own accomplishments....

But the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity.  Who can but pity the founder of the pyramids?  Erostratus lives that burnt the Temple of Diana; he is almost lost that built it.  Time hath spared the epitaph of Adrian’s horse, confounded that of himself.  In vain we compute our felicities by the advantage of our good names, since bad have equal durations; and Thersites is like to live as long as Agamemnon.  Who knows whether the best of men be known, or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot than any that stand remembered in the known account of time?  Without the favor of the everlasting register, the first man had been as unknown as the last, and Methuselah’s long life had been his only chronicle.