ardour of courage equally trouble and relax the belly.  The nickname of Trembling with which they surnamed Sancho xii., king of Navarre, tells us that valour will cause a trembling in the limbs as well as fear.  Those who were arming that king, or some other person, who upon the like occasion was wont to be in the same disorder, tried to compose him by representing the danger less he was going to engage himself in:  “You understand me ill,” said he, “for could my flesh know the danger my courage will presently carry it into, it would sink down to the ground.”  The faintness that surprises us from frigidity or dislike in the exercises of Venus are also occasioned by a too violent desire and an immoderate heat.  Extreme coldness and extreme heat boil and roast.  Aristotle says, that sows of lead will melt and run with cold and the rigour of winter just as with a vehement heat.  Desire and satiety fill all the gradations above and below pleasure with pain.  Stupidity and wisdom meet in the same centre of sentiment and resolution, in the suffering of human accidents.  The wise control and triumph over ill, the others know it not:  these last are, as a man may say, on this side of accidents, the others are beyond them, who after having well weighed and considered their qualities, measured and judged them what they are, by virtue of a vigorous soul leap out of their reach; they disdain and trample them underfoot, having a solid and well-fortified soul, against which the darts of fortune, coming to strike, must of necessity rebound and blunt themselves, meeting with a body upon which they can fix no impression; the ordinary and middle condition of men are lodged betwixt these two extremities, consisting of such as perceive evils, feel them, and are not able to support them.  Infancy and decrepitude meet in the imbecility of the brain; avarice and profusion in the same thirst and desire of getting.

A man may say with some colour of truth that there is an Abecedarian ignorance that precedes knowledge, and a doctoral ignorance that comes after it:  an ignorance that knowledge creates and begets, at the same time that it despatches and destroys the first.  Of mean understandings, little inquisitive, and little instructed, are made good Christians, who by reverence and obedience simply believe and are constant in their belief.  In the average understandings and the middle sort of capacities, the error of opinion is begotten; they follow the appearance of the first impression, and have some colour of reason on their side to impute our walking on in the old beaten path to simplicity and stupidity, meaning us who have not informed ourselves by study.  The higher and nobler souls, more solid and clear-sighted, make up another sort of true believers, who by a long and religious investigation of truth, have obtained a clearer and more penetrating light into the Scriptures, and have discovered the mysterious and divine secret of our ecclesiastical polity; and yet we see some, who by