she is dead;" for that will be the end of all merry meetings; and I choose this to be the last advice to both.

Remember the days of darkness, for they are many; the joys of the bridal chambers are quickly past, and the remaining portion of the state is a dull progress, without variety of joys, but not without the change of sorrows; but that portion that shall enter into the grave must be eternal. It is fit that I should infuse a bunch of myrrh into the festival goblet, and after the Egyptian manner serve up a dead man's bones at a feast; I will only show it, and take it away again; it will make the wine bitter, but wholesome. But those married pairs that live, as remembering that they must part again, and give an account how they treat themselves and each other, shall at that day of their death be admitted to glorious espousals; and then they shall live again, be married to their Lord, and partake of his glories, with Abraham and Joseph, St. Peter and St. Paul, and all the married saints.

All those things that now please us shall pass from us, or we from them; but those things that concern the other life, are permanent as the numbers of eternity and although at the resurrection there shall be no relation of husband and wife, and no marriage shall be cele

brated but the marriage of the Lamb; yet then shall be remembered how men and women passed through this state, which is a type of that; and from this sacramental union all holy pairs shall pass to the spiritual and eternal, where love shall be their portion, and joys shall crown their heads, and they shall lie in the bosom of Jesus, and in the heart of God to eternal ages.

THE ATHEIST.

Who in the world is a verier fool, a more ignorant, wretched person, than he that is an atheist? A man may better believe there is no such man as himself, and that he is not in being, than that there is no God; for himself can cease to be, and once was not, and shall be changed from what he is, and in very many periods of his life knows not that he is; and so it is every night with him when he sleeps. But none of these can happen to God; and if he knows it not, he is a fool. Can any thing in this world be more foolish, than to think that all this rare fabric of heaven and earth can come by chance, when all the skill of art is not able to

This is the atheist: heart there is no The thing framed the tongue never

make an oyster? To see rare effects and no cause; an excellent government and no prince; a motion without an immoveable; a circle without a centre; a time without eternity; a second without a first; a thing that begins not from itself, and therefore not to perceive there is something from whence it does begin, which must be without beginning; these things are so against philosophy and natural reason, that he must needs be a beast in his understanding that does not assent to them. "the fool hath said in his God;" that is his character. says that nothing framed it; made itself to speak, and yet talks against him that did; saying, that which is made, is, and that which made it, is not. But this folly is as infinite as hell, as much without light or bound as the chaos or primitive nothing. But in this the devil never prevailed very far; his schools were always thin at these lectures. Some few people have been witty against God, that taught them to speak before they knew how to spell a syllable; but either they are monsters in their manners, or mad in their understandings, or ever find themselves confuted by a thunder or a plague, by danger or death.

THE TONGUE.

By the use of the tongue, God hath distinguished us from beasts; and by the well or ill using it we are distinguished from one another; and therefore though silence be innocent as death, harmless as a rose's breath to a distant passenger, yet it is rather the state of death than life; and therefore when the Egyptians sacrificed to Harpocrates, their god of silence, in the midst of their rites they cried out, "The tongue is an-angel," good or bad, that is, as it happens. Silence was to them a god, but the tongue is greater; it is the band of human intercourse, and makes men apt to unite in societies and republics; and I remember what one of the ancients said, that we are better in the company of a known dog, than of a man whose speech is not known. A stranger to a stranger in his language, is not as a man to a man; for by voices and homilies, by questions and answers, by narratives and invectives, by counsel and reproof, by praises and hymns, by prayers and glorifications, we serve God's glory, and the necessities of men; and by the tongue our tables are made to differ from mangers, our cities from deserts, our churches from herds of beasts and flocks of sheep.

But the tongue is a fountain both of bitter waters and of pleasant; it sends forth blessing and cursing; it praises God, and rails at men; it is sometimes set on fire, and then it puts whole cities in combustion; it is unruly, and no more to be restrained than the breath of a tempest; it is volatile and fugitive: reason should go before it; and, when it does not, repentance comes after it; it was intended for an organ of the divine praises, but the devil often plays upon it, and then it sounds like the screechowl, or the groans of death; sorrow and shame, folly and repentance, are the notes and formidable accents of that discord.

He that loves to talk much, must scrape materials together to furnish out the scenes and long orations; and some talk themselves into anger, and some furnish out their dialogues with the lives of others; either they detract, or censure, or they flatter themselves, and tell their own stories with friendly circumstances; and pride creeps up the sides of the discourse, and the man entertains his friend with his own panegyric; or the discourse looks one way and rows another, and more minds the design than its own truth; and most commonly will be so ordered that it shall please the company.