Page images
PDF
EPUB

and strengthening our understandings, and conclude that it is as impossible for the mind to be improved without those supplies, as for the body to subsist without its natural food: if, when we allow ourselves recreations and exercises, to cherish and refresh our spirits, and to waste and dispel humours, without which a well-tempered constitution cannot be preserved, we would allow some exercises to our minds, by a sober and frank conversation with learned, honest, and prudent men, whose informations, animadversions, and experience might remove and expel the vanities and levities which infect our understandings: if when an indisposition or distemper of body, an ill habit of health, calls upon us to take a rougher course with ourselves, to vomit up or purge away those choleric and phlegmatic and melancholic humours, which burn and cloy and suffocate the vital parts and passages; to let out that blood which is too rank, too corrupted for our veins, and to expel those fumes and vapours which hurt our stomachs and ascend to our brains: if we would, I say, as diligently examine the distemper of our minds, revolve the rage and fury of our choler, the dulness and laziness of our phlegm, the sullenness and pride of our melancholy; if we

would correct this affection, and draw out that passion; expel those fumes and vapours of ambition which disturb and corrupt our reason and judgment, by sober and serious meditation of the excellency and benefit of patience, alacrity, and contentedness; that this affection and this passion is not consistent with sobriety and justice, and that the satisfying them with the utmost licence brings neither ease nor quiet to the mind, which is not capable of any happiness but in, at least not without, its own innocence; that ambition always carries an insatiableness with it, which is a torment to the mind, and no less a disease than that is to the stomach: in a word, if we would consider, there is scarce a disease, an indisposition, a distemper, by which the body is disturbed, to which, or some influence like it, the mind is not liable likewise; and that the remedies for the latter are much more natural, more in our power, than for the former; if we would use but half the diligence and industry to apply them which we do to the other we should find ourselves another kind of people, our understandings more vigorous, and our lives more innocent, useful, and beneficial, to God, to ourselves, and to our country; and we should think we had learn

ed nothing, till we had learned "so to number our days that we might apply our hearts unto wisdom;" that wisdom, of which the fear of the Lord is the beginning, and of which the eternal blessing of God is the end and the reward.

III.

REFLECTIONS ON THE HAPPINESS WHICH WE MAY ENJOY, IN AND FROM OURSELVES.

Montpellier, 1669.

It was a very just reproach that Seneca charged the world with so many hundred years ago, and yet was not more the disease of that than of this age, that we wonder and complain of the pride and superciliousness of those who are in place and authority above us; that we cannot get an admittance to them; that they are never at leisure that we may speak to them; when (says he) we are never vacant never at leisure to speak to ourselves; "Audet quispiam de alterius superbiâ queri, qui sibi ipse nunquam vacat?” and after all complaints and murmurs, the greatest and the proudest of them will be sometimes at leisure, may be sometimes spoken with; "aliquando respexit, tu non inspicere te unquam, non audire dignatus es;" we

can never get an audience of ourselves, never vouchsafe to confer together. We are diligent and curious enough to know other men; and it may be charitable enough to assist them, to inform their weakness by our instruction, and to reform their errors by our experience: and all this without giving one moment to look into our own, never make an inspection into ourselves, nor ask one of those questions of ourselves which we are ready to administer to others, and thereby imagine that we have a perfect knowledge of them. We live with other men, and to other men; neither with nor to ourselves. We may sometimes be at home, left to ourselves, when others are weary of us, and we are weary of being with them; but we do not dwell at home, have no commerce, no conversation with ourselves, nay, we keep spies about us that we may not have; and if we feel a suggestion, hear an importunate call from within, we divert it by company or quiet it with sleep; and when we wake, no man runs faster from an enemy than we do from ourselves, get to our friends that we may not be with ourselves. This is not only an epidemical disease that spreads every where, but effected and purchased at as great a price as most other of

our diseases, with the expense of all our precious time; one moment of which we are not willing to bestow upon ourselves, though it would make the remainder of it more useful to us, and to others upon whom we prodigally consume it, without doing good to them or ourselves: whereas, if we would be conversant with ourselves, and as ingenuous and impartial in that conversation as we pretend to be with other men, we should find that we have very much of that at home by us, which we take wonderful unnecessary pains to get abroad; and that we have much of that in our own disposal, which we endeavour to obtain from others; and possess ourselves of that happiness from ourselves, whether it concerns our ambition or any other of our most exorbitant passions or af fections, which more provoke and less satisfy by resorting to other men, who are either not willing to gratify us, or not able to comply with our desires; and the trouble and agony, which for the most part accompanies those disappointments, proceeds merely from our not beginning with ourselves before we repair to others.

It is not the purpose and end of this discourse, to raise such seraphical notions of the vanity and pleasures of this world, as

« PreviousContinue »