turns to fury; if from a small cause, it is peevishness; and so is always either terrible or ridiculous. It makes a man's body monstrous, deformed, and contemptible, the voice horrid, the eyes cruel, the face pale or fiery, the gait fierce, the speech clamorous and loud. It is neither manly nor ingenuous. It proceeds from softness of spirit and pusillanimity; which makes that women are more angry than men, sick persons more than healthful, old men more than young, unprosperous and calamitous people than the blessed and fortunate.* It is a passion fitter for flies and insects than for persons professing nobleness and bounty. It is troublesome not only to those that suffer it, but to them that behold it; there being no greater incivility of entertainment than for the cook's fault, or the negligence of the servants, to be cruel, or outrageous, or unpleasant in the presence of the guests. It makes marriage to be a necessary and unavoidable trouble; friendships, and societies, and familiarities to be intolerable. It multiplies the evils of drunkenness, and makes the levities of wine to run into madness. lt makes innocent jesting to be the beginning of tragedies. It turns friendship into hatred: it makes a man lose himself and his reason and his argument in disputation. It turns the desires of knowledge into an itch of wrangling. It adds insolency to power. It turns justice into cruelty, and judgment into oppression. It changes dis

* See Bacon's Essay on Anger.

cipline into tediousness and hatred of liberal institution. It makes a prosperous man to be envied, and the unfortunate to be unpitied. It is a confluence of all the irregular passions: there is in it envy and sorrow, fear and scorn, pride and prejudice, rashness and inconsideration, rejoicing in evil and a desire to inflict it, self-love, impatience, and curiosity. And lastly, though it be very troublesome to others, yet it is most troublesome to him that hath it.

Only observe that such an anger alone is criminal which is against charity to myself or my neighbour; but anger against sin is a holy zeal, and an effect of love to God and my brother, for whose interest I am passionate, like a concerned person: and, if I take care that my anger makes no reflection of scorn or cruelty upon the offender, or of pride and violence, or transportation to myself, anger becomes charity and duty.* And when one commended Charilaus, the king of Sparta, for a gentle, a good, and a meek prince, his colleague said well," How can he be good, who is not an enemy even to vicious persons ?"†

ON SICKNESS.

AT the first address and presence of sickness stand still and arrest thy spirit, that it may without amazement or affright consider that this

* Hooker's Anger is said to have been like a vial of clear water, which, when shook, beads at the top, but instantly, subsides, without any soil or sediment of uncharitableness. + Holy Living, chap. iv. sect. 8.

was that thou lookedst for, and wert always certain should happen, and that now thou art to enter into the actions of a new religion, the agony of a strange constitution: but at no hand suffer thy spirits to be dispersed with fear, or wildness of thought, but stay their looseness and dispersion by a serious consideration of the present and future employment. For so doth the Libyan lion,* spying the fierce huntsman, he first beats himself with the strokes of his tail, and curls up his spirits, making them strong with union and recollection ; till, being struck with a Mauritanian spear, he rushes forth into his defence and noblest contention; and either scapes into the secrets of his own dwelling, or else dies the bravest of the forest.

In sickness the soul begins to dress herself for immortality. And first, she unties the strings of vanity that made her upper garment cleave to the world and sit uneasy. First she puts off the light and fantastic summer-robe of lust and wanton appetite.

Next to this, the soul by the help of sickness knocks off the fetters of pride, and vainer complacencies. Then she draws the curtains, and stops the light from coming in, and takes the pictures down, those fantastic images of self-love, and gay remembrances of vain opinion, and popular noises. Then the spirit stoops into the sobrieties of humble thoughts, and feels corruption chiding the forwardness of fancy and allaying the vapours of conceit and factious opinions.

* See Theocritus, Idyll. 25, line 230.

Next to these, as the soul is still undressing, she shakes off the roughness of her great and little angers and animosities, and receives the oil of mercies and smooth forgiveness, fair interpretations and gentle answers, designs of reconcilement and christian atonement, in their places.

The temptations of this state, such I mean which are proper to it, are little and inconsiderable; the man is apt to chide a servant too bitterly, and to be discontented with his nurse, or not satisfied with his physician, and he rests uneasily, and (poor man!) nothing can please him and indeed these little undecencies must be cured and stopped, lest they run into an inconvenience. But sickness is in this particular a little image of the state of blessed souls, or of Adam's early morning in paradise, free from the troubles of lust, and violences of anger, and the intricacies of ambition, or the restlessness of covetousness. For though a man may carry all these along with him into his sickness, yet there he will not find them; and in despite of all his own malice, his soul shall find some rest from labouring in the galleys and baser captivity of sin.*

THE PROGRESS OF SIN.

I HAVE seen the little purls of a spring sweat through the bottom of a bank, and intenerate the stubborn pavement, till it hath made it fit for the

*

Holy Dying, ch. iv. sect. 1. and ch. iii. sect. 6.

impression of a child's foot; and it was despised, like the descending pearls of a misty morning, till it had opened its way and made a stream large enough to carry away the ruins of the undermined strand, and to invade the neighbouring gardens : but then the despised drops were grown into an artificial river, and an intolerable mischief. So are the first entrances of sin, stopped with the antidotes of a hearty prayer, and checked into sobriety by the eye of a reverend man, or the counsels of a single sermon: but when such beginnings are neglected, and our religion hath not in it so much philosophy as to think any thing evil as long as we can endure it, they grow up to ulcers, and pestilential evils: they destroy the soul by their abode, who at their first entry might have been killed with the pressure of a little finger.

He that hath past many stages of a good life, to prevent his being tempted to a single sin, must be very careful that he never entertain his spirit with the remembrances of his past sin, nor amuse it with the fantastic apprehensions of the present. When the Israelites fancied the sapidness and relish of the flesh-pots, "they longed to taste and to return.

So when a Libyan tiger drawn from his wilder foragings is shut up and taught to eat civil meat, and suffer the authority of a man, he sits down tamely in his prison, and pays to his keeper fear and reverence for his meat; but if he chance to come again, and taste a draught of warm blood, he presently leaps into his natural cruelty,

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