abatements of his pleasure, as may serve to represent him presently miserable, besides his final infelicities. For I have seen a young and healthful person warm and ruddy under a poor and thin garment, when at the same time an old rich person hath been cold and paralytic under a load of sables, and the skins of foxes. It is the body that makes the clothes warm, not the clothes the body; and the spirit of a man makes felicity and content, not any spoils of a rich fortune wrapt about a sickly and an uneasy soul. Apollodorus was a traitor and a tyrant, and the world wondered to see a bad man have so good a fortune; but knew not that he nourished scorpions in his breast, and that his liver and his heart were eaten up with spectres and images of death. His thoughts were full of interruptions, his dreams of illusions; his fancy was abused with real troubles and fantastic images, imagining that he saw the Scythians flaying him alive, his daughters like pillars of fire dancing round about a caldron in which himself was boiling, and that his heart accused itself to be the cause of all these evils.

Does not he drink more sweetly that takes his beverage in an earthen vessel, than he that looks and searches into his golden chalices

for fear of poison, and looks pale at every sudden noise, and sleeps in armour, and trusts nobody, and does not trust God for his safety, but does greater wickedness only to escape awhile unpunished for his former crimes? "Auro bibitur venenum." No man goes about to poison a poor man's pitcher, nor lays plots to forage his little garden made for the hospital of two bee-hives, and the feasting of a few Pythagorean herb-eaters. They that admire the happiness of a prosperous, prevailing tyrant, know not the felicities that dwell in innocent hearts, and poor cottages, and small fortunes.

Can a man bind a thought with chains, or carry imaginations in the palm of his hand? Can the beauty of the peacock's train, or the ostrich plume, be delicious to the palate and the throat? Does the hand intermeddle with the joys of the heart? or darkness, that hides the naked, make him warm? Does the body live, as does the spirit? or can the body of Christ be like to common food? Indeed the sun shines upon the good and bad; and the vines give wine to the drunkard, as well as to the sober man; pirates have fair winds, and a calm sea, at the same time when the just and peaceful merchantman hath them. But although the things of

this world are common to good and bad, yet sacraments and spiritual joys, the food of the soul, and the blessing of Christ, are the peculiar right of saints.

MARTYRDOM.

They that suffer any thing for Christ, and are ready to die for him, let them do nothing against him. For certainly they think too highly of martyrdom, who believe it able to excuse all the evils of a wicked life. A man may give his body to be burned, and yet have no charity; and he that dies without charity dies without God: "for God is love." And when those who fought in the days of the Maccabees for the defence of true religion, and were killed in those holy wars, yet being dead, were found having about their necks pendants consecrated to idols of the Jamnenses; it much allayed the hope which, by their dying in so good a cause, was entertained concerning their beatifical resurrection. He that overcomes his fear of death, does well; but if he hath not also overcome his lust, or his anger, his baptism of blood will not wash him clean. Many

things make a man willing to die in a good cause; public reputation, hope of reward, gallantry of spirit, a confident resolution, and a masculine courage; or a man may be vexed into a stubborn and unrelenting suffering. But nothing can make a man live well, but the grace and the love of God. But those persons are infinitely condemned by their last act, who profess their religion to be worth dying for, and yet are so unworthy as not to live according to its institution. It were a rare felicity, if every good cause could be managed by good men only; but we have found that evil men have spoiled a good cause, but never that a good cause made those evil men good and holy. If the governor of Samaria had crucified Simon Magus for receiving Christian baptism, he had no more died a martyr, than he lived a saint. For dying is not enough, and dying in a good cause is not enough; but then only we receive the crown of martyrdom, when our death is the seal of our life, and our life is a continual testimony of our duty, and both give testimony to the excellencies of the religion, and glorify the grace of God. If a man be gold, the fire purges him; but it burns him if he be like stubble, cheap, light, and useless. For martyrdom is the consummation of love. But then it must be supposed that this grace

must have had its beginning, and its several stages and periods, and must have passed through labor to zeal, through all the regions of duty to the perfections of sufferings. And therefore it is a sad thing to observe, how some empty souls will please themselves with being of such a religion, or such a cause; and though they dishonor their religion, or weigh down the cause with the prejudice of sin, believe all is swallowed up by one honorable name, or the appellative of one virtue. If God had forbid nothing but heresy and treason, then to have been a loyal man, or of a good belief, had been enough: but he that forbade rebellion forbids all swearing and covetousness, rapine and oppression, lying and cruelty. And it is a sad thing to see a man not only to spend his time, and his wealth, and his money, and his friends upon his lust, but to spend his sufferings too, to let the canker-worm of a deadly sin devour his martyrdom. He therefore that suffers in a good cause, let him be sure to walk worthy of that honor to which God hath called him; let him first deny his sins, and then deny himself, and then he may take up his cross and follow Christ; ever remembering, that no man pleases God in his death who hath walked perversely in his life.