exceed its whole duration. However, to palliate the shortness of our lives, and somewhat to compensate our brief term in this world, it is good to know as much as we can of it; and also, so far as possibly in us lieth, to hold such a theory of times past, as though we had seen the same. He who hath thus considered the world, as also how therein things long past have been answered by things present; how matters in have been acted over in another; and Eccl. i. 9, how there is nothing new under the sun; may conceive himself in some manner to have lived from the beginning, and to be as old as the world; and if he should still live on, it would be but the same thing. 10. iv. 13. one age XXX. Lastly; if length of days be thy porHor. Ep. i. tion, make it not thy expectation. Reckon not upon long life: think every day the last, and live always beyond thy account. He that so often surviveth his expectation lives many lives, and will scarce complain of the shortness of his days. Time past Time past is gone like a shadow; make time to come present. Approximate thy latter times by present apprehensions of them: be like a neighbour unto the grave, and think there is but little to come. And since there is something of us that will still live on, join both lives together, and live in one but for the other. He who thus ordereth the purposes of driotaphia, this life, will never be far from the next; and is in some manner already in it, by a happy conformity and close apprehension of it. And if, as we have elsewhere declared, any have been In his Hyso happy as personally to understand Christian or Urnannihilation, ecstasy, exolution, transformation, the kiss of the spouse, and ingression into the divine shadow, according to mystical theology, they have already had a handsome anticipation of heaven, the world is in a man ner over, and the earth in ashes unto them. Burial. |