AN ADDRESS To the Hopeful Young GENTRY OF ENGLAND. IN Some Strictures on the most dangerous Vices incident to their Age and Quality.  
Mors fera, Parce precor, vitam anticipare vel ipsam;  
 moriatur Homo, sit precor ipse priús.  
Couleius noster De Salviâ.  
Cur moriatur-Cui Salvia crescit?  
By a perfect Honourer of their Worth.  
London, Printed by E. C. for G. Walbancke, and are to be sold at his Shop near Grays-Inn-Gate in Holborn, 1669.   

Imprimatur,  
Rob. Grove R.P.D. Episc. Lond. a sac. Domest. Mart. 26. 1669.   

TO THE Nobly Accomplished, AND Honourably Descended John Burgoyne Esquire.  
SIR,  
IN the midst of the giddy and rapid turn of the Affairs of this World, the Malignity and Predominancy of Vice, clouding and obstructing Reason, violently agitating the purest of its spirits and succours into the same commotions and confusions: He that can stand steady and  is a greater Miracle, than could have been the subject of Archimedes his bold Boast; That he would unfix this whole Globe of Earth, might be have but a footing off from it. For beside his vanity to promise the uncentring of that vast Body and unwieldy, when he could not give his own small active Carcase one remove from it; He would have been as far to seek for a convenient distance and station where to effect the operation: So that through the incertainty and impossibility of his postulatum, the grand design must necessarily fall to the ground, as obscurely as himself was erelong cast down, to measure his own lines and narrow dimensions in the Dust. But granting it a demonstration, I must pay far greater Admiration and Esteem to those brave Souls, who when the whole course of Nature is under impetuous motions and tumults remain unconcerned and fixed, and, by the conduct of singular Virture, retain their Sobriety and Prudence, when all about them is mad, and under the fatal hurries of the great Disturbers of mankind, or the furious Tempests of their own uncontrolled passions: This 'tis to bear up a manly head above the Ruins, though the whole Fabric of the World be sinking, and rolling into one Confusion.  
That the slender supports of these few Lines are opposed against these threatened mischiefs of bolder Vice, with ambition to act the part of any Atlas (for our declining Age seems to want more than One) would be a presumption I need not acquit myself from, by assuring you I dwell not so much abroad, and from the notice of the dangers menacing my own Cottage: And indeed I here expect the whole world to be my Compurgators, and fearing no such Calamity that every one will excuse me that Labour, and as readily engage against any other such Undertaker. The truth is [Sir] these short reflexes on Vice do exceedingly enhanse to me the Beauty and Dowry of Virtue; the more I contemplate the vacuities and deformities of that, I admire to find not so much as the least shadow of either in this; And I am willing to proclaim aloud, That Virtue alone is that noble and undaunted generosity; which not any single Engineer, but were every vicious person an Archimedes, with all their Stratagems and force they could not in the least shake or undermine. And where should I expect, however wish, to find this Gallantry of Spirit, if not among our Nobless? I look on them to be the Spirituous blood of the Body Politic; not their Purpurate descent alone, but the unquestionable verity that the Blood is the vitals of the Creature warrants my assertion; and it would be an ungrateful Argument to evince it, from the infallible approaches Death, once interred here, makes upon all the fortresses of the Garrison, in every tide the blood beats up, to and from the Heart. The fortyfying therefore of this Archaeus, may it be as cordial and acceptable, as if I now brought some nobler Liquor to be transfused into the veins, and drained off the sheepish and vituline qualities so long fed upon and imbibed, that, though we scorn the clothing, betray the sound of Wool in our language.  
But Sir I must stop here to meet your wonder, when understanding perfectly my temperament, you see this close conception exposed and enduring the sight of the Sun, and every one's readiness in Physiognomy: and that He you know me to be, when the World can be no more advantaged by his mean capacity, than he is like to be by its unexpected kindness; will yet put himself under the power of suffering from it: why he is not content to sit still in private digesting his resentments of the follies abroad, with the freedom they allow him to be quiet? and if some will ever be found doing amiss, what should make him do worse, to say he likes it not? He will first tell you every day produces something as strange as this, and what may equally be the object of your wonder; unless you are wholly exempt from it, and He from saying more of it. But if He much more wonder at this himself and (if the regard He cannot dissemble for himself would permit) do hugely condemn himself and it: Will you or any other like him, or it, the better? If neither, Sir believe it, he will keep a little more good opinion in store for himself, which shall make him esteem no better of himself and the world, than if there were no relation intervening; He means so much to favour himself, that that shall do him as little hurt as he can do it good. And if you look for your friend, Sir, he is not yet turned Anchorite, he will sooner be a Pilgrim with good Company, and the excellent Guide he is lately acquainted with. Nor are his resentments in fear of Fermentation next Spring; Nay he hopes to be as serene in the Canicular days, as now, when the humours are close with the Earth locked up in the cold and innocent embraces of the Snow. And let this clear him from being thought too invective to the evils of our times; that as he is sensible of a monstrous conflux of instant vices, his thoughts are calm, and pen but mild, to those fears he has of the next age, in danger to be o'erspread with the Superfetations of that Impiety, which will be too obdurate to feel the edge of a satire.  
Sir all but yourself will now expect large Encomiums to recommend you to the view of the multitude; But I am sensible they stand but ready to devour you, and this I call you to patronise For yourself, Sir, I aver not so much Jealousy over your inclinations to these vices, as Hopes that your life will be a fair copy of all Virtues, presents you to this place, to supply the draught I should have added to them: and may your Auspicious beginnings continue me in acknowledgement of my defects and tenuity, deterring my pen from entering on the Commendations will be your due. And for your Family, it is so illustrious, that I shall be taxed by those that would find nothing good in it, for daring to affix this Name to so mean a Front: and they will leave you in haste to come and revenge themselves upon me, if I cannot escape their stomach. However be pleased my wishes, and well wished directions may be favourably interpreted by your Noble mind, and all of your truly noble quality.  
And Sir, for your friend, pray wish him well also, now fallen to be employed in such a public Character; for you cannot tell what change he may not dare venture next in his life, (if you will with him suppose it of his Life, which every day changeth; not of himself and his vowed constancy and integrity) for there must, and will be found some so foolish, as not to fear the Printers nor Readers Press they are to pass, any more than others do Matrimony: and there may be Fatality to be pleaded for that also; which to fear is the next way to the curse of continuing a Miserable Life, out of all hopes of a kind Reprieve of Death to cut the halter of our fears. And methinks I am now acting my own Departing; and have two words to say for myself before the last Farewell: wherein (Pardon the digression) I seem to represent many of those we have seen too much personating a public (not to say republic) death, as if their deaths too were to be none of their own: not unlike to me they appear to the poor Widow, who went out to gather two sticks to prepare a small cake, that they may at least die with a good morsel in their mouths. But not to forget to leave off, though I do it less formally: For first I will not supplicate your favour, no more than expect your thanks, for being prolix, but tell you my design is honest, and an effect of my Honour to your Name and Person. Next I know not how to entreat a good opinion or pardon of the Language, only assure you, I took what words I thought most full and near to my Conceptions; and I can sooner alter the natural Tone of my voice, to counterfeit any others, than choose to fall into the Rectifiers or Body-makers hands, and suffer my Mind to be pinched and shaped into the constraint of another's dress and Mode of expression. I shall but add, that all of it is but a Christmá Letter: And you know we are allowed our Masquerades, and longer festivous entertains of a Carnival; So as you will admit it over your threshold, when I tell you under the vizour in a whisper, That I am none other than Your very known Servant  
January, 11 th'. 166 8/9.   

AN ADDRESS To the Hopeful Young Gentry OF ENGLAND.  
SINCE you are now entering upon those years, which entitle you the growing hopes of England, and their fairest Care and Charge; from whom is expected the strength and honour of your Age, the security and glory of the Nation: It cannot be unworthy consideration to Advise, by what generous means the old renown of our Ancestors may be vindicated from the threatened Evils of those dangerous Vices, which, springing up with the young Nobless of our Country, enervate their native vigour, deplume their Nobility; and in a viperous combination attempt to strangle our Hercules in its very infancy.  
Your birth was in the midst of busy and tumultuous Times, wherein you may remember, and could not but observe some of the later grand catastrophes, in which part of your several families eminently acting, from the various engagings and sunccesses of those your relations you still received suitable Impressions on your green years; and in those early days took in a ●●rge Map of the World in a small Compass: You have seen enough in your sphere to make you early commence Men, and furnish you with notices beyond the researches of former Histories. It deserves to be reckoned among the effeminacies of mankind, that so many are found to complain of their peculiar infortunacy, to be cast into such a stirring and unquiet Age as we have lived in: Whereas an Heroic spirit and virtue esteems it a proper exercise & test of its worth, from so great revolutions acquiring withal a knowledge and experience of the admirable occurrences, we turn many years' Chronicles to be acquainted with: there having met so rare and quick a conflux of signal mercies and judgements together, that we may judge them designed by Providence, either to make the utmost experiment to resuscitate a lethargic people, and restore Spirits in the Compendium of Elyxirs: Or as the Stage is always fullest and crowded with dispatches at the winding up the Play, that the World itself near a period, is to fill up its short duration with an Epitome of all the wonderful events of past Ages, if not labouring to exceed them all in delivery of a new world of Prodigies,  it be made the greatest by its own conflagration.  
But among all the unhappy Ones we have lived to see, none is so stupendous as their unsuccessfulness; That when an hand from high has been exerted in all the amazing Methods of Providence, we have closed our Eyes with a Malignant obstinacy against the clearest evidencies and acknowledgements of a Deity; and been so miserably incredulous as to dare the Divine Vengeance to farther proofs of its Power and Wisdom in our utter confusion. Thus of old, Vesuvius could not satisfy some unreasonable Curiosoes but by their addition to its fuel, or the difficulty of a recess; whence they brought the scars and stigmas of their folly, who hoped to pry and wade through such clouds of smoke and gulfs of Fire. You are therefore to contrast with a stupidly opining Age, which, having forfeited the right use of its Reason, will desperately expose all to the hazard, rather than seem to be without it; and stumbling at the plain, most familiar, and lucid Resolves of Reason and Nature, will yet blindly assay to ransack all their most abstruse treasures, and discuss the Sacred Mysteries Infinitely transcending either.  
But the malice of this evil will assault you most dangerously, by corrupting all the sound Rules of Morality in your converse; and having conformed your manners to the licentiousness it practices, you must be forced to espouse those principles which will patronise your exorbitancies. And this is a very insinuative debauching of the mind, a Conquest without the formalities of an attaque, which serve to alarm us against the Enemy. There are therefore of the most pernicious habits which our young Gallants Indulge, which seem to me the infallible prognostics of their ruin, and the fate of the common Body; Against which I am to fortify you, as those that by their very familiarity and obviousness are become more inimical and dangerous, gathering strength by not being opposed, and by our long desuetude from the contrary renour of unquestioned Virtue; which if you admit to become the arbiters of your Life and Conceptions, will render the various aspects of every Age as pleasant and useful to your steady and clear optics, as they are confusive and unaccountable to all other spectators.  
He that expects after a Deluge the same vernancy disposition and order, the soil was before adorned with; may also hope the Inundations of war will assuage with the easy and silent progressions of Peace; and that the next Age will, without interruption, prosecute and perfect the designs only, of their quiet Grandfathers. How much of this is like truth, let us judge by what all former Time's record, if our own be yet too near the seed time, and the next be to inherit the Crop. But this has as much truth as need be owned; That if the Virtues of their progenitors be defaced by the succeeding audaciousness of the sword, their Vices however will never want fostering by the next Generations: Hence what were but the exposed stolen offspring of former years, are the Legitimacies of later; and we have no copy left so foul, which too ingeniously transcribing Vice does not every day out-blur. You may therefore, if you will, own the torrent of our enormities to the Time when nothing was unlawful; The Fountain is too deeply embosom'd in our Natures, to lay so far off. But it is not impossible to trace it from its earliest footsteps, and where it gins to spring into a stream; but that so sullied in the puddle it flows from, that you will conclude it to be rather one ditch and channel of mire. And it can be no other, that scarcely can be said to rise out of the lap of Sloth; On the Basis whereof might Vice be fixed, it would raise its Pillars, and even stop you here from farther inquiries after Honour and Glory, to sleep out the remaining baleful minutes of Life in  

IDLENESS,  
The Capital of those Indulgencies, that conspire the delivery up of our hopeful Youth, bound hand and foot into the vassalage and torures of imperious Vice: the punishment of him who was bound to an heated Stag, that could neither command himself nor the swift Beast; but tied and unactive, yet ran all the Stages of his Bearers excursions, and was held fast to all it's petulant vagaries: Such is the hurry of restless passions in the Idle Soul, through the many regions of Fancy, and boundless Appetite; till it be tired and fall down in some covert of obscene darkness. The Idle person is the only common Hackney, and, having not employ of his own to work off Time and his faculties, stands ready to let out himself Post, on the easy rates of the next stirring device and lubency. A Play, a Ball, a Mistress, a Glass of Wine engage his Soul as profoundly in contemplation of his dawning felicity, as the Turks Zeal is enspirited by their brutish paradise. But We compassionate these poor Infidels, whose knowledge is confined with the brandished Sword; and perhaps were ours forbidden on as penal curiosity, it would become more desirable. While though, we every day make bold plantations (how successfully I will not adjust) upon every Creek and Point of Philosophy, and outbid all Antiquity on the fair terms We proffer knowledge: to see the refined and most improvable part of our own land uncultivated, the Youth and strength of our Nation lay fallow, and only shoot forth into those spongy Mushrooms and Wild-daisies, their softbrain makes grow into its entertainments; is enough to persuade us that true knowledge is as inaccessible as the Tree of Life, and that Our Age is most unfortunate to be debarred the proper scrutinies and direct approaches toward it. For certainly knowledge and Wisdom itself is still the same pure and subtle concentration of light; It cannot as to its real worth and lustre be depretiated, and would always deserve the utmost insudation, the best of our Oil and Labour in its acquest. It must be therefore the dismal disaster of our time, that denies us all possibility of discovery, where this lucid Pyramid is erected, and how we may come under it's vital influences. Were we not thus lost with the Eden we have lost, without doubt we should not be contented with our low and puerile attempts after it; But awake from our sluggish velleities, vigorously to string and strain our minds, to work some other furniture for them, beside Couches and Pallets; we would break open some way to let in the bright rays of Knowledge and Virtue, and not imagine we had lamps given us only to hang up against the wall, to drowze, or be pensively befotted under them: while nothing but the Chimaeras, follies and shadows of a dream, haunt the thin Ghosts in their living Sepulchers, till these are commuted for a thicker, but not more heavy or useless Arch of Stone.  
But to free us from the enchantments of this kind of dead-sleep, and excite us to a noble inquisition after Virtue and Science; let the whole World be convinced, that they are as accessible as immutable, nor do on any parts of the Universe vary their Compass, nor can be Retrograde on the Dial of any time. Our age is as freely irradiated with their beams, as with that benignity of the Sun, which ripened our Ancestors Cucumbers, and now stripes and paints our Melons; 'tis our want alone of rising will not suffer us to see day. While beside Man (the lesser scheme of the Creation) the fairest portion of Mankind (I mean those of your degree) and the Soul of Man (its noble Heavenborn inhabitant) nothing is found idle in nature. She is every where, and continually, pregnant with new labours, and productions: see how in the Vegetative World not a spire of Grass creeps out of the Earth, but is elevating its head still nearer to Heaven: In the Sensitive the choicest Animals receive our commands, and execute our drudgeries: That Coloss of life, the Elephant has its understanding, strength, and service apportioned to its bulk; and among Infects, the very Fly and Ant make a supplement to their close dimensions, in their wonderful agility and industry; by which they fill up an equal space with vastest bodies. In the fabric and constitution of Man, she is still busied in accumulation of similary, or exporting useless and discordant particles. Life itself seems to be but the result, and harmony of an even-flowing motion; and that Automaton which keeps pace with every step of time, striking all its own minutest and remotest wheels with a regular saliency, tells us loudly by the pulse against the pillow, that we were not born to slumber away our hasty time and life; which hold more of a Race than walk in their motion and tendency to their last pause and rest. Nor does Nature with so much exactness elaborate and exalt the spirits in the body, instantly to put off and lose their name and nature, by being blended and perishing in an insipid Caput mortuum; or as if they were so curiously contrived and designed, only to officiate in that skull, once Head of the Roman Empire; which rivalled Jove, but stooped below his very Eagle when turned into the device of a Most August Fly-Trap.  
Can you have leisure to admire enough at that impertinency, which would summon the utmost skill and consort of Music to play his Dormouse asleep? or would to Oriental Bezoar and Ambar dissolve Gold and Pearl, to maintain a Mole? To no higher achievements serve the fair Titles, Revenues, and Complexions of a great part of Mankind; beside these, nothing is intelligible about them, nor can more be said of them: so near to nothing do they shrink, whose souls languish under the irreparable decays of tabific inactivity; or are broken with pitiful low and sordid lubencies of idle entertainments; wholly superseding those brave actions, sublime and profitable speculations, which would infuse the life of men into them, and render them, off Men, immortal. Thus their Heroic Progenitors traced Virtue and Honour, through all its intricate and dangerous mazes; and this was the ascent they made to that high serenenes, where every Pearl of their Coronets was stellified: And this only highway to Happiness is still as open, and more delightful than you imagine the common descent to Avernus. And indeed it can be no other than the very dregs of Idleness that can sink the spirit (or may I not rather say, the Sediment of a soul?) below all handsome action, in such an age as we live, which pretends to such extraordinary Knowledge and Politeness; however must be most famous for those Grand Actions to be enroled in it, wherein Posterity will imagine none could be born but to some laborious part.  
Had we the generosity which did always breath with English spirits, it would be so far from being extinguished in ignoble silence, and limited to the narrow stage of our own Island, that it would break forth and display its valour through all parts of the habitable Earth. Have we no Messieurs de Villa, Fevillade, or St. Montbrun kindled with the sparks of honour, that will fly to the succours of that Chistian Garrison (before whose walls more blood has been shed, than would serve for Cement to a far greater City) rather than expire at home, as unknown as their Tombs will be to the Candiots! Certainly That place is now the fairest Field of Honour, which has so long been the Christians strongest shield (under their great Captain and Prince) against Infidels, and it will be worthy learning with how vast expense of Treasure, and prodigality of Lives, they study to defend their dearer Country. And in the long story of that single Siege you will read all the old admired Roman Courage, Conduct, and Felicity; which will be so signalised to after times, that our latest Nephews will take a Voyage only to visit its venerable ruins; wherein are now enclosed those gallant Souls, that have shaken off the softness, and stupifying pleasures of Ease, with the grim terrors of Death, to sacrifice all in so glorious a Quarrel, and for the common security. Can we lie immersed in wanton Idleness, when Christianity is concerned for her battered Bulwarks, that suffer again the Siege of Rhodes more nearly; and that in such sanguinary Scenes and Tragedies, as the very naming them will fright the young Gallants out of the Pit?  
Where being brought by my discourse, I do not much admire to see the Theatres crowded with our Idle Spectators; the hours here spent are a tolerable exemption from lewder diversions, and with some obtain the credit of a School discipline, periodic Lectures, and Academic exercitations; which teach as much gravity and experience, as they think can amount to necessary aphorisms, to regulate their own lives by, and be diagnostic of all others. I may not envy the Dramatic Ingeniosoes the Empire they here sway over Wit, nor the Models they give of the world, and the delectable variety, in which they serve up the humours that are abroad: May the Stage never want a florid Laureate to Chastise predominant Vices, and troublesome Follies; but so prudently and industriously, that they may no longer be feared to teach them. But I could wish our Nobless would here always admit the but necessary ceremony of a Taster; that they may have its salubriousness approved, before it take possession of their Stomach, and it prove too late for an Antidote. But supposing the Stage less dangerous and nauseous than some Pulpits; and that every day brought forth a work as consummate as Father Ben's: Yet I would advise them against their common frequenting Plays, if I took it not as an eviction, that they knew no more congruous advancement of their Noble faculties; and were burdened with too long and empty parentheses of Time. For, I conceive, whoever transmits' his affections to be wrought on by every fiction the Poet engages them in, shall in a little time cease to be Master over them, and they will be at the command of every passionate Romantique: Or they will be so broken or extirpated, wholly by such continued and violent efforts, that they will altogether be unserviceable, if he lose not all the due sentiments of Nature: Either of which extreme is so palpable an imbecility of mind, as need not be pointed at, for it too easily betrays itself in daily converse? Greater inconveniences you may hear continually nursed up at the Stage, and fear worse; unless it be judiciously purged and refined.  
But indeed what place, time, and occasion is not poisoned in a dead Sea of Idleness, though they be never so free and innocent in their own disposition? Virtue and Generosity itself coming but near it, though but in a volatile thought or Action, is suddenly suffocated with the noisome exhalations of this almost Stygian lake. I have heard in a very serene Oratory affirmed; that two parts of three, that are now sentenced under unquenchable flames, had those first kindled here on earth, in the fire of their burning and impure lust. However, it is scarce dubitable, that all those miserable Souls, now filling up the regions of darkness, did first fit and adopt themselves to that state, by contracting a supine torpor and negligence of Spirit: For without controversy, idleness lets in upon the Soul all the inundation of Vice, and is that unhappy plot oregrown with every weed and noxious burden of the Earth; so that as some Gardens are a collection of the choicest and most usesul Plants, this becomes a seminary of all the horrid excrescencies can grow out of a Dunghill.  
We indeed see some of active lives and full of business fall into exorbitancies of as dismal effects, as can be the offspring of the dullest brain and hours: But you may not surmise this the genuine birth of any honourable or necessary employ. Those public spirits were to be commiserated more than they who offered their lives as their Country's Victims of old, if there were any fatal connexion of Vice with their Offices; which are consecrated as the very Rewards and Asylums of Virtue, and are so many Thrones on which she may display and dispense her Sovereign dignity and influences. No, I must believe any vices nourished under their protection to be the scrofulae, and luxuriant impetigos of fowl humours. They will prove the disease of the person not the office; and entrench so much upon the borders of Idleness, that you will entertain the greater indignation against that evil, which can prevail upon the strongest and noblest constitutions. For I grant that person to be fallen beside his business, and to have quitted his own Station; that is at leisure to contrive and pursue his private stratagems of ambition, avarice and malice. This is a degeneracy and corruption growing upon the Soul, by a vacation from his proper intendments of Time and Labour: while instead of his attendance on the steerage of the common Vessel, the man is so idle as to row forth his own Cockboat for shells and pebbles. But whatever smaller and justifiable gratifications are here to be gleaned up, their Country would add their blessing to the heap, might it encourage every one nobly endowed to adapt himself and fortunes for the honour and service of the Public. But let this Idleness never bear the impudence to steal upon an honourable presence, it being as indecorous, as to see a rude clown covered near the Chair of State. And what distance that was to observe at Court, the very proud and barbarous Turkish Sultan's in their profession and skill of some mechanic art still teach us; and we may better learn from our late Glorious Sovereign's Royal mouth, that He thought He could earn a Livelihood were he so low reduced by any Trade he knew of, but making of Hang: his Clemency will allow you the allusion to any fair fence of the word: and his constant instructions to the Nobless craving his permission to travail, had this always inserted, to keep the best Company, and never be idle. May it therefore by so canonised an example be banished all Societies, as that which wherever it comes is sure to shut the man out of doors; For 'tis the man of business gives denomination and life to the world: And many an Age will be buried in oblivion, as silently as if it had lost an entire succession of mankind, and all that was worthy recording.  
Idleness may it once be expelled; I dare promise we shall obviate two calamities, which become our mortal afflictions, and almost immortal complaints; Our unreasonable dissatisfactions, and decay of Trade. Idle people and such as have none of their own create business for all about them; and their proper concerns being trivial or discarded, those of others to their unexercised apprehensions appear strange and difficult: Hence Curiosity (the idle man's Mephostophllus) posts through the air to catch intelligence, and advisoes upon the several emergencies, being sure to meet some lose dispatches, out of what quarter soever the wind does but breath. These still conjure up new perplexities, fresh and fantastic conjectures, which first creep forth in whispers and night discoveries, then more boldly come abroad, and stand the censures of their full Burnt-to-water Conventions, or higher Club-Assemblies; if in private affairs, they are insolent and disgustful; if on public, their interpolate Jealousies, and wildly wise Apothegms every where bring in growing discontents and murmur: not without a miracle indeed can it be expected, any thing should please and satisfy them abroad, who never knew the Art to make content within, and at home. But if this ubiquitary meddling seem to absolve these kind of persons from Idleness, and they will hence be thought as active in the Intelligencies of the spheres, and the only they that keep all in motion; Those that know what harmony is required to a motion regular, and how sure a stop the least dust and check will cause in a fine contrived piece of work, will wish them quiet, and uninterrupted rest, may but the business of the sober and industrious part of mankind be removed out of their troublesome Orb. And as to our increase in Riches, when every hand and brain promote and encourage a prosperous diligence; None are found so idle as to question it, though so d sobliging and unworthy of their native Country, as to stigmatize and empoverish it with their sloth. For sensible will be the decays of that body, from which you subtract nourishment and exercise; the latter whereof mends all the defaults of the former, stirs up a kindly warmth, facilitates digestion, discusses excrementitious humours, purifies and exhilirates the depressed spirits. But no more need be added on this tenacious subject, than that if your years and quality could get above the dross and dregs of idleness, so as to lay out yourselves vigilantly in the service your Generation calls you unto, and may expect of you, if Idleness be exploded; We shall have less news and more money stirring.  
Having beheld the Soul under this close and obscure incubation; Let us view the brood hatched by ignorance and Folly: and the earliest we meet up, is   

PRIDE,  
Breaking through the thick shell; which, hasting to be the first displaying its gay Plumes abroad, forgets how much of its nakedness is exposed, and that it owes all its pomp to a borrowed Gawdiness, Man enters the world bare and unarmed, all other creatures growing into their furs, shells, barks, down-quilts and scaly Coats of Mail; each of which has as much of defence as ornament: Yet none of these but willingly bequeath their spoils, to rob man of his poor Pride, who cannot so much as shroud himself from the injuries of the air but in some of their liveries. Yet who but computes the Drapery which curious invention has spun us out of all the parts of the inferior creation; some from its very bowels as fine drawn as the web of Arachne, the loom-work of the Brain, and the very net of love itself; and considers withal how many operose preparations, various interweavings and mistures of differing elements meet in the meanest shreds of our Wardrobe; must necessarily infer that the whole studies of man were to beguile the Creatures of their design; as if he scorned to be indebted to them, for what they can never distinguish again, to have been their old cast ; Or as if he intended in his very attire (not contented with the covering of any single Animal) to stitch together another Epitome of the Creation for his outside also; and, in the far distant growth of his gorgeous apparel, would array himself daily with a new map of Geography.  
But all this pageantry covers not the miserable inside, but like the ragged embroidery of a Beggar's patches, confesses the wretched poverty within; the poor mind neither knowing itself, nor any thing beside itself, from either of which it would learn humility. But Pride is the spawn of Idleness, and the foam of Ignorance: Where ever you meet her, give her rather your hat than your tongue; for it is unreasonable you should reverence her in any other dialect than that she wears, and you will otherwise run the hazard of being understood. Is it not a splenetic divertisement to behold two Gallants as formally rigged forth, as London, Amsterdam, or Venice can equip them, attaquing each other with a full bearing up to the salute, sometime veiling down every inch of their sails, streaming out all their lose colours, and pendents, and suddenly closing with whole Broadsides of embraces? while not a word attends the Ceremony, (which is like the great Czars' dump representative of a sage Council) and they come off perhaps with a furled cuff, a silken rope slacked, or a curl unpitched (I mean ungummed, or ungreased) This you may call the School of Antiques, a very variation of Postures, a Trial of Agility, and such a mute comparison of empty Noddles, as we make of Bottles by oft and quick shaking them.  
And this is the stately outside and high-raized Front of Pride: which content yourself to have thus superficially seen, if you will not rest here but enter further, look for no reception or refreshment within, there are no commodious rooms contrived to that intent; for this is a pile wholly loftyfied into Garrets, and they either empty or the Frippery of all Trash and Lumber: but here most of the world choose to dwell, as where they can best overlook themselves, as well as their vicinage.  
I may give Pride the Title (or she will take it) of Heir apparent in the masculine, to the greatest portion of their Time and Care. With the other sex let her be advanced for their Mirror, that which flatters them even out of themselves into a kind of fond Apotheosis: You must no longer read there flesh and blood no, the eyes, the lips and breath, are the very portals of the radiant Apollo, the heavenly blushes of Aurora, and the fragrant incense that must appease some such Deity. Thus Youth and Beauty in either Sex, kindled by a constant reflection of its own beams, and having no other fair object to attract it powerfully and virtuously, glows with a burning self-complacency, till a rapid Zeal of Pride snatch the conceits of themselves beyond the terms of mortality, and they deem they sensibly change regions, and step into a deifying naturalisation, so that you may no more expect a converse with them that savours of humanity: all the rest of mankind are to be treated by them as their vassals and creatures, and their very words must be thought to sound more then man. And that they may command this devotion and maintain a just adoration, they appear not without the pomp and splendour which are worshipped in the Images of Saints and upon shrines and altars, that do not oblige vulgar veneration, unless embellished with sumptuous ornaments, and glittering oblations: In such a mantle of Gold they will imitate Jove, and conceive they have no imperfections, which these ductile leaves do not gloriously hid and heal.  
Thus Pride sacrificeth to herself, not only with the grosser material treasures and riches employed in her service, but with the refined odours that rise from her own presumed delights with herself, and the high conveived pleasure in her own felicities. But can the rough bush of a quickset hair fence off all frigidity from the Brain, and shelter the tender Pia mater from scratches? Does a bespangled Vest cast a greater heat and blaze on the hearth of the Breast? To what then, serve the exquisite study and profusions lavished out on our dressing? some Valet de Chambre, Player or Common woman, shall surpass your bravery when you have born the patience of the nicest accoutrement. Believe it, the Art you bestow and Value you set upon your dress and habit, lay more open the ugliness, poverty and sickness of your Soul, and show that first needed fucus and Emplasters to palliate your inward sores and defects.  
But our Otioso's here plead the indispensable morality, and that they are hound to the strictest observances of the Fashion; than which words none can breathe more infection, nothing appear in a better mode and more sure to captivate and destroy us: As what allows us neither constancy in our present fluctuancie's, nor any fair calculation of hopes for futurity, if it must be omnipotent then also: It can introduce the most fanatique Metamorphoses of ourselves, and patronise all the Caprichio's of the famous Shrew-Tamer. To instance but in one assimilative attraction in its very Capillaries, no less remarkable than that which is perfective of nature: Observe how fashion has prevailed against nature to Perruque all complexions with the fairest hair; where many must be wholly drowned, as the Portuguez, Amorettaes' at Goa their Negro women, whom they dress up all in white, to make up their admired Beauty of a Fly in milk. But as this shades and destroys the distinctions and native features of each face, it may unluckily be brought to confound all distinctions of birth too, by supposing those many indiscriminated (not to say unknown) Heads to have had but one common Parent; At least that this connatural similitude links them all under the same Hereditary Crasiness of the Brain.  
How predominantly successful is this Supreme Legislative Fashion? Laws, Examples, Rewards, Punishments cannot enforce an Uniformity in any other Medium; while she alone translates and altars the world at pleasure, making it solicitous to obey her, deriving her Formulaires and scanty Praescripts to it, with the same Authority the Medes and Parthians sealed up their Laws, and that alone in that these are most alterable.  
But I am not at leisure to give longer attendance on Pride, who I doubt will disdain to have its measures also taken by a country hand: Without a Compliment I assure her, I admire her inconceivable pleasure and self opinion on which she lives; as much as I should have done Regiomontanus his Fly, if he could have shut up life as well as motion in so narrow room. For to see a Gallant flutter and buzz, with no other wings than his Tailor has imped on, to strut like a dancing Mr. to speak by determined and unaccountable motions and springs, and nothing to be significant without a multi-screwing body; can I look upon him to be other than a fine articulate Engine, a Counterfeit of Man, and the larger ingredients of some Puzzionello? And thus taken in pieces you see the stuffing and crutches, Pride swells and stalks on. But what esteem wise and sober men ballast themselves with, you can take from the true knowledge and study of yourselves only, to make your own sufficient instruction and support: Where you will soon learn the ennobling of the mind to be the most perfect accomplishing of the man; which, by its fairer accessions of virtue and wisdom, debaseth the inferior gratifications and mistaken opinions of its own Dignity; to keep itself up with an equal moderation, and magnanimity too great to stoop to any Vice; especially the depravations of Pride, in the effeminacies I have branded of those persons, whose highest attainments are the dear purchase, most accurate ostentation, and transcendent Vanity of their Attire.  
That Hero, who is a Denizon of the Universe, no no where devests himself of his invariable habit of Virtue; which, as the richest, warmest, easiest, and immaculate, can never be worn out of Fashion.  
That Pride, which grows out of pregnant faculties and ample improvements of Time and Parts, is so far from falling under our censure here, that we may rather applaud and promote it; that it may retain its indignation and just contempt of these insignificant Poppets and Mormoes; whose souls, bodies, and  seem to be but one Composition; and as if they were all taken up at the same shop and artificially bombasted and compacted to sustain a burden of wealth, and fairly turn itself to all the Arrests of brutish sensuality. Of this nobler and more substantial basis of Pride let this though be here said, and considered with all the weight of seriousness: That their brave spirits will bear an higher flight, and there is yet above them a pleasure as satisfactory and durable, as this of their highborn Pride is certainly most jejune, and no less low and transient.  
But the Epicure must be served in the next place to Pride: and   

INTEMPERANCE,  
Is usually willing to yield unto her precedence, but on good provision to be made for its Appetite immediately to succeed. For it well relisheth the Genius of the Marcese in their reception of Messire, and this Honorific Titles return, in discovering to them the rate preparation of the leaf of a Swine. So low a rate has been set upon the Man, since the fairest part of his Character is, that he eats and drinks well, and knows good food, nothing better. As if the soul of the Glutton were bestowed upon him only to be a Cateress to his carcase, and see the larder of the stomach be not unfurnished: Nay, it often has no higher office than of a Cook, and feasts itself with the skill to provoke, as well as allay Hunger and Thirst. What Adepti are those admired to be, who can discourse learnedly on a studied dish, can anatomize it dextrously, show you what contrary qualities meet in its temperament, give you all the criticisms, and analize the various Gustoes' of meats and liquors? To have the presence of such a Vertuoso is the best countenance you can give your Treat, and your Friend; you may be sure in his company you supped in Apollo: Such a man's  and Face (for there you may taste his assay) are as cautiously observed by the whole Table, as if they were under his prescriptions for diet; and as necessary as the previous infusion of the Unicorns horn to the patiented Herd. His frown is as fatal to the Cook as the Judges on the Bench, and scorcheth all he sends up worse than at the rack. This man needs not Philoxenus his wish, for whatsoever is born down the swallow of any at the board, I may say, he has the pleasure of its gust; for it becomes Manna to all the Guests by yielding the taste he put upon it, and he may easily be understood to have the volupe of his  extended in all theirs.  
Seems not this to be the instinct of a gallant and acute soul? is not this a Gusto raised and fitted alone for Ambrosia and Nepenthe? Yes certainly. And you may believe such choice Viands will yield a concoction of Spirits, that cannot but colonize the brain with most defaecate and noble Conceptions. For they farce themselves with the most exquisite delicacies, as if neither their bodies were cast in the mould of Earth, nor their regalioes but the various-formed figures of the dust they raise, nor the spirits from them other than the brood which other Animals generate out of the grass we trample on. But in truth do they not by their excess and high feeding oppress the brain, and suffocate its operations with fuliginous steams from the kitchen, obstructing the fine channels and pipes, which should transmit the finer and nimble spirits to all their stages, and for all their admirable dispatches and functions; while the redundancy of dull pituitous moisture unstrings, and intercepts their vigorous tension, and sensation?  
No, they are phlegmatic souls who think a load of dainties every this soil with any other product than what we cast out, and spread upon the common. The mind is that dry and clear light, maintained in its Vigils by an even, constant, and moderate confluence of pure and innocent Spirits: You drown it by pouring in too much (though never so rich) Liquor; if you impregnate its oil with too fat and drossy a Sulphur, it sends forth as noisome stenches as Vulcan's Cave, and is o'ercast with an encircling shadow: if you fret it with acid and saline particles, how disturbed is its flame and offensive with continual crackling explosions of those busy bodies? While the poor soul starves for want of its mean and kindly repast: The pampered body too, surcharged with crudities, or an overgrown stock of flesh, becomes its own unwieldy impediment (needing some Engine, like the Chariot the Indians annex to their sheep, to bear up thei● monstrous train of Tail) & not seldom is it an Hospital of diseases, and its own House of correction too.  
Into an unshapen bulk have we seen many extended, whose parts are as useless to them as if growing in another Country; like the unvisited rooms of some great Houses (so little the care and concern of the family) that Vermin have come to nestle and burrow in the wide tenements of their Flesh. And truly they must of necessity devise some proportionable accretion and enlargement of their Soul, if they would have all their apartiments and needless superstructures well tenanted and kept in constant repair. But the direct contrary is their ruin; for they appear with so little of the presence of a Spirit animating them, that what they have of life is like that to be seen on the bodies of Witches in their ecstasies; where the soul is withdrawn into the most close and silent recess, (the state of the voluptuous Egyptian Calyphs of old) while they dawb up the pores and outward chinks, to make the retiring room more dark and warm, and guard the passes against foreign invasions. The soul is in so little case in these additional out-jettings, and loser edifices; that immuring a larger compass of ground, it is but more labyrinthally and securely imprisoned. So some number of the world are buried under the curse of their much building, and not a few master's famished to keep their beasts lusty: by the inverted divine admonition to fortify the inward man upon the ruins of the outward.  
But our Apitii scorn to have their enjoyments straightened, though more safely ensconced; they must every day rove abroad to fetch in sacrifices to their Oesophagus, and loudly solennize the festivals of Comus, crowned with fresh chaplets of Ivy and Myrtles: offering up the most delicious morsels the world has in store, in their Latitudinarian Targets of Minerva; as if she were here to be again born out of the variety of far-fetched brains, and Tongues: with no less libations of the Falernian grape, in their lofty surveying Tricongio Goblets. By the full draughts they quaff off in the noblest blood of the Vine you would guests they designed to imitate Jove and Mercury, and having filled a bottle of an whole Ox hid (once the Continent of a City) with this celestial Liquor, would with equal advantage and authority, constellate it into an Aethereal Urinal. Or if Orion may not owe his rise from so low springs, you would conceive they had new cast themselves into humane alembics, from whom nothing less than Spirits of Wines should be extracted; and from the same copious and rich luxury of meats they pray upon, that some Chemist had dearly purchased their more terrene excrements, out of them to exalt his Occidental cidental zibeth. So laboriously does Gluttony plough up land and seas; and prohibit the free and open refuges of the ensnared Air; to serve up that plenty to our surfeited Tables, which is in its second course must be exonerated at the Esquiline port. This and the urinary evacuate those Oceans of voluptuousness, and mountains of wealth, out of which you cannot on the nearest research derive and gain one lest grain of Profit, or the smallest drop of remaining pleasure. There in corruption they all perish; where man himself must at last alight from his Journey, to cast up the total of his expenses, in the short conclusion of Vanity and Vexation.  
We need no more admire the cup of Circe, and the fictitious mutatious Poets have licenced: they relate men turned into ordinarily known Beasts: but we every day see a new species of brutes, as cruel as monstrous, engendered in our luxuries; which were I to digest into one collection, you would see a stranger Pyramid and larger than great Abbess erected in his Capital City of Persia; you might also fancy every dish, and glass of wine, productive of a different kind of Animals. But what rubrics the nefariousness of our Times, is to be drawn from drunkenness, which draws more swords and blood of our Nation in one year, than any one battle spends in the same compass of time; The sanguine quarrels of our Compotations, like the famous set of Teeth, whence so many armed Champions grew, divide the Bravoes, and their interests, into new and sober contests, and spring up into a warlike harvest of factions and Duels. For we continually see these intemperancies creating more Enemies, than good nature (to which none more pretend) can make Friends, and the strongest fidelity shipwrackt and split in a small glass of wine drank or refused.  
But beside this dangerous Service, wherein a man ventures his life as cheaply and commonly, as a poor Soldier that for  the day stands in the breach, and tempts every shot; there is a secret poison envenoms this Good-fellowship, a sting that makes a breach in a man's bosom, beyond his skill ever to compose, and reconcile with a perfect cure. Wine for the most part eludes the Guards every man ought to have upon his own breast, and breaks open the locks of all his Conclave and Cabinet Secrets: He is then like a Vessel full of Leaks, and the Liquor washeth all before it: if he have any infirmity of mind or latent Vice, this empties and disgorgeth all: he shall need no other Indictment than his own treacherous evidence, and impotent folly; which the most sober of his protests and retractations shall never expunge. Should another be private to the confident trust and affection some One reposes in his dearest Friend, to whom he embosoms his whole-self; should he break in upon the free Caresses and Amours of the Conjugal Bed, about which the Night has drawn a second and modest Curtain; should he hear his open Confessions to Heaven of all his baseness, and and unworthy abuse of infinite condescensions: As soon as this person who thought himself in the dark shall find himself exposed and betrayed, I cannot imagine but his indignation will be all thought too little to torment himself alone, without regard of any other Traitor. And I am confident, were Windows thus made into our hearts and actions, Man would so far hate converse, as rather to seek the most solitary and dismal Wilderness; Nay, knowing his own misery by the view he would not have had of it, but from others prying examinations, He would even fly his own shadow, and study how he might run from and avoid himself, as the only derided and insulted on by all the rest of the world.  
The more noted disguises Ebriety put's upon men; with the detriment, mind, Body, and Estate suffer by the irrevocable lapses of them all: The most sottish of those, who most study to amuse their own heavy hours, thoughts, and company with the condiment and fallacy of Wine, yet cannot measure it out, but with the many observations from their own acquaintance they miss at the Club, and remembrance of their former jovialties together. I therefore industriously dismiss them, having but insinuated the height of Passion it inflames, and sometimes feeds with blood, and the life of Amity itself; with that exulcerate feebleness of reason, which by an impotent tenesmus betrays the infirmities of those, we almost Idolised, to scorn and hatred.  
Those who indulge Gluttonous voracity far no better, by exchanging sanity of mind and Body for the corruption of both; the former in many, scarce owning the preservative quality of being a living pickle to the latter. Not Cleopatra's dissolved Union, the Spicery of Arabia, with the genuine Balsam and skill of the Egyptian Embalmers, can long keep those bowels from putrefaction, which we so solicitously pamper: These being the very first conceive it, on the dissociation of soul and body. Methinks those very Fingers with which we carry our dainties to our Palate, that with our Rings bear the Sepulchral heads of some of our former familiarity, should indigitate to us a Lecture of our own mortality, and tell us, we all the while feed our animated Sarcophaguses. I shall not determine whether Fire or Earth be the most faithful Heirs, Assigns, and repositories of our Relics; for perhaps every Tomb may enclose in it a self-subsistent lamp, as the Heart alive enjoys its vital flame, and the Spirits render the whole body luminous, as well as pervious, till Death breaks open, and let's out the light. But I am sure our Glutton gormandizes, as if he would make his Friends their last Treat of his own Corpse; and, that in which has lived to devour so many Thanks giving meals, serve them up a bill of Far equal to the Princelike Archbishop of Yorks Inauguration Feast; and with the same courtesy install himself in the kind graves and Monuments of his last Officious Friends surviving Stomaches.  
From the good cheer and wine, that has disposed our Gallant to the embrace of any near hover and base Form, we most usually trace him to the lap of his Venus: the little busy Cupids of   

LUST  
Dancing about in the lose Air, instantly gliding into possession of his mind; where all the weak characters of Virtue and sobriety are washed out, to make a Table fair enough to render any Vice more legible that shall be first impressed in it. The Citadel of the Heart thus unmanned, is easily surprised and garrisoned with a miserable woman; Who never thinks the Victory absolute and secure till she have demolished all the Fortifications of his reason and modesty, triumphed over his captived tame passions, and raised in it a Mosque to the blind God of Love. Here you see another Cytherea born out of the despumations of our Seas of Wine, with this only difference, she is not naked, but appears more formidably armed to conquer man than Jove and Neptune, with their Thunder and Trident. Upon this Ocean you may certainly fear the incursions of this famous Rover, whom I may call a woman of war (with no greater solaecism than that, which gives the feminine gender in ordinary discourse of a man of War) dressed only with slight tackling, and wary concealments drawn over her shot, to amuse you; or make a more speedy chase after you when flying from her: Here lading is not worth reprisal whatever damage she had done you: Her vessel suffers not by storms or repeated wrecks; nor can you any way direct a shot to sink it; she only suffers by Fire, and carrying so prodigious store of Ammunition is to be blown up not boarded.  
Let me essay to give you some such Character of Venus, (if any be to be taken of her, pozing us with her Protean disguizes, not perfections) and directions in your obnoxiousness, by which you may avoid the dangerous incantations of these Sirens. That which first betrays us is the supposed Beauty we drink greedily in at our startled eyes, if not joined with the heats of some too kind and close salutes: and how desperate madness is it, when the heart is the Mine of so combustible Lust, to suffer the lose globuli of powder catch fire at the eyes and lips, which with the twinkling of an eye spring the incendiary Train to the magazine of its Wildfire? But indeed we are here fairly cheated in our pursuits and reveries to single beauty; We admire that for Orient, sweet, and perfectly symmetrized, which is but the tincture and odor she borrows every morning from the Closet, and the Tailors ingenious farcings: For when she is dressed, so little a part she is then of herself, as is the small Chapel of the Lauretan Lady, under the great and rich cover they have clothed it withal: and indeed a Woman undressed to herself dressed, is like a Cottage to a Palace; Dressing is a Woman's Art of Architecture, and the extraordinary niceness and expenses thereof the Curse and disease of too much Riches.  
But supposing a face as lovely as ever you adored in a dream, or can fancy without the help of one; This complexion is but vanishing and skin deep. Sickness, Grief, or Age make as heavy devastations on it, as the barbarous Tartars can do, in their inroads to a flourishing Country: Raise up but the scarf skin which covers this fine mould, and you never beheld a more rueful object: Or conceive it as the admired frontispiece of an excellent Fabric, and but consider what is done within, how these fair embellishments are but neat contrived emunctories to the Brain; and you must think of something loathsome also. 'Tis your own fancy feasts itself with the perfections it has created to worship; So prompt and cunning it is to cook up a known and ordinary entertainment, into new and delicious blandishments. But if you are not to be out of conceit with the face, consider what manner of deformed Inhabitant inspirits this Beauty; and that a monstrous soul in an illustrious case, needs your compassion on the inconveniency which is greater than that Galba paid rend for▪ Nay it requires your utmost vigilancy too: for this Creature feeds on poisons, and kills with her looks and breath. For to suppose all must be fair within, because of this specious superficies, and that a sweet countenance necessarily dulcifies and clarifies the soul; is to place the Lantern of Judas, and adore it among sacred Relics; because it lighted the Traitor to the prodition of our Blessed Saviour. If that sex, as virtuous as beautiful, be Angelical, 'tis more diabolical by its Apostasy.  
It is an unparallelled slavery to bow your affections to the imperiousness of such a lewd soul, who requires the quite contrary experiment of servitude, to that the bestial Duke of Ossuna frighted his naked Barber into: for she expects as easy command of your passion as her skill has perfected hers into by the art of obeying wholly her libidinous appetite. What misery must it be to be enthralled to a sort of inferior Animals than mankind, of whom I may almost virifie the Turkish Religion; that such as these have lost their soul? Tacitus himself aphorizeth no less in his short and poignant conclusion with Messalina. Can you see the inside of this strange Woman, you would find it altogether a practice of outsides; an exchange of differing habits, looks, and phrases shaped to every circumstance of dissimulation. Sometime she is as inaccessible as Valentia, to which no other than a narrow bridge permits approach and all seems to be horrid Alps about it, rocks frozen harder and colder with frost and snow; and none but an Hannibal would hope to break through them. Anon, like the Town Plura on a sudden fall of a rock subverted, and nothing to be seen of it but a direful Lake.  
Such an one indeed is a common sewer of Lust, and Drugs. For the latter like the Hospital near the Churchyard of magnificent St. Peter at Rome cannot lay far off: and 'tis well if she have not the quick digestion also of that Earth, once part of Holy ground. I am sure you know not what dangers and evils you repose on. Inconstancy, Impetuosity, Fallaciousness are the composition of their Love, Lust the informant. Scarce ever do any reassume chastity, who have once deposed it. For immodesty strait enthrones a Plebeian usurping community, that attaint the noblest spirits which use to blush at Baseness, and by its hatred of all sense of Honour puts all that is honest and generous out of countenance. Then you will too late groan under the Tyranny and fatigues which mind and body are involved in, when you find yourself both as far from the satisfaction and happiness you sigh after, as in that hour you first became her Votary; and no nearer liberty than the Galleyslave, who expects Death alone to unchain him from the Oar. For like the labours of Hercules some new exploit will still be conjured up to destroy or ensure your courage and obsequiousness, and like him you will endure a dying life, in those flames Love, and Jealousy can never make too hot for their Purgatory.  
Yet at the no easy rates of a Gallican Limbus, our Age will buy the pleasure of its Lust. Neither the disappointment of their hopes, vassalage of their passions, nor Penances (At the price whereof they would renounce Heaven itself) can make these maniac's temperate. And indeed they seem to be under an high distemper of mind and body; the solicitude, insaciety, vicissitude of violent affections, and distractions, are symptoms of that: the pale face, vibrated eyes, inequal pulse, and their waking Coma show this to be under an acute fever, which all their long sighs cannot hasten in breath enough to cool.  
But if you obtain the utmost fruitions of your Amours, if you fear no Rival, if your joint affections be embosom'd in one common breast, and you know not how to express or entertain a more full indulgency of Love; All the history hereof does openly confess this your happiness, to be empty, shallow, and miserable: For the most pathetic Language of your melting affections can speak or signify no more than bare commiserations, or bold wishes over your Beloved; wherein you rather pity and bewail one another in the short capacity of Love, than take or give any perfect proof or content in it: While your greatest efforts of passion do but instruct the mind in its tremulous fluctuancies, that it is at the wrong point of the Magnet; and only condole over its affections to be so frustrated of their rest, and permanent satisfaction. For the acquest then of no more; Consider you stake the All of yourself, whatever that can amount to, for the hectic fever of a consuming, incertain, fugacious, fantastic brutish pleasure, which concludes, without extorted acknowledgement, that you are deluded, and infinitely short of that good, the Soul would quietly rest in, without forming so much as one thought to uncenter itself.  
None that finds Opinion the Empress of the world, but observes Passions to be the ladders by which it ascended: Passions which supplant Reason, to whom they were given in subjection and service, and gain the entire government of our wills. So does lust assign itself to its ensnaring object, That it uses to prefer it abundantly, before the particular content, which every individual enjoys of his Creator's goodness, to reckon himself abstractedly happy in: (had not every one such an innate principle, emulation and envy would continually torture the Soul, and we should wish to be any thing but what we are) now an unlawful Love cancels this beatifying apprehension, and connatural emulgency of delight, which is sucked from out of itself alone; and imposes another Standard of your joy. What you love you live; Your passion, suppressing all other concerns, erects a Court of Requests, out of which nothing is to be transacted, and the whole business and design of living shall be to love: And that love, adoring its beloved so transportedly, never ceaseth to consign itself over by its own exinanition; to become and be transformed into what it loves. I could hence philosophise nicely on the cause of the distinct formation of either Sex, contrary to the received Tradition, that the predominant virtue determines the conception into its own similitude: which would solve divers subtleties, but it is excentric. From this discourse you have this sad consequence, that the object possessing and impassionating you, will certainly infuse into you all those vicious defects her degenerate mind has contracted, and you yield up your own integrity to be deformed by her monstrous depravations.  
Thus much more you see you venture of yourself for so remarkable an infatuation; and if you will add unto it the diuturnity, and (I had almost said) impossibility of vindicating your self from this Bondage; You have sound out a State of direful misery, ineluctable and deplorable sadness. For Love though it be slowly and late ascendent, seldom sets, but with ourselves descending into shades and oblivion. 'Tis not the first living, but of the last dying emotions of the soul: You see it will strive under all the infirmities of old Age, to render it as ridiculous as insufficient. You cannot when you please divorce it your afflicted bosom: it wakes with you, and lays down beside you; and when you court some soft repose and silence, it breaks in upon you withal the noise tumult and lancination of distracted passions, holding your eyes open to its ravishments, though you behold nothing therein but your own sufferings. So have I seen a poor captive Bird, when attempting a free and open flight, rudely checked with the short twine, and after a small hover and fluttering resistance in the affected air, fall breathless grovelling on the earth. On the folly of poor stupid man, that, as much as it abhors the very shadow of restraint and fetters, which are of another's imposing, yet studies to build himself a Labyrinth, and thinks himself not secure of his liberty; till he have contrived how ingeniously to incarcerate his freeborn affections! Thus those who dreaded the Roman yoke, by the same methods of Fear subjected the Nation to their voracious Eagles, only having the election how to perish.  
Should I after some dark and rough draughts delineating your misery, design to heighten the few faint appearances of your imagined felicity and light titillations of sense; and fill it up with the many deep shadows, and strong grounded horrors which the passions draw upon amorous Gallants: You would think it the very picture of that Carcase which had been martyred in Venereal fires, and was conserved as a specific against Lechery. Or that you saw some dismal night-piece, on which one lose touch of the Pencil had thinned the air, but so as if it had but with a thought only followed the swift flight of an Angel through it. So transient is the ecstasy of your delight and pleasure, over the black visions of Lust.  
Can I say more to prejudicated and arm you when your Soul will be endangered by this assassination, knowing what circumventions will sometime be prevalent, which these Savages to our nature would wholly ensnare you in; and that all I can say will be little enough to instruct your innocence, and I fear much too weak to rescue it from a surprise, much more out of the fastnesses of a securely accustomed and Familiar Vice? These kind of Creatures therefore the Predatory spirits upon the life of man we have not a word in all the vocabulary of evils bade enough to signify their hideous Turpitude, unless I could pliancy it so completed, that they had nothing more to add to make it more Fatal to us. Put the malice of these sorceresses is so fruitful of mischiefs, that we are only happy that the Fount of Goodness is inexhaustible, when we see all degrees of misery disseminated out of their circulating Pandora's Box. You cannot comprehend the mystery of the sacramental Dedication they have made of themselves in their Vow of Prostitution: Wherein they devote themselves to corrupt and debauch Man from his Integrity and felicity: So difficult will it be to prognosticate what villainies will not be broached by them, to poison the world with a worse plague than that from Naples. Show me that sincerity Grandieur, Sapience that has escaped their pernicious attempts: Show me the greatest combination of nefariousness has but been meditated, and I will more than exemplify it in some notorious impudence, or profligate treachery of a woman. Our blessed Lord and Saviour among all tentations, permitted not this of the 〈◊〉 so much as to be levelled against him; so immaculate Virtue could no more admit a conflict with this impurity, than the Sun itself can be supposed assaulted with midnight. And we know it the Guardian, as well as honour of Innocence to be free from all suspicion and dare of a very tempting vice. But the first, best, strongest, greatest and wisest of mere men, speak their diminution in all these, by their unhappy connexion to these indeclinable particles of Levity. They are indeed themselves the nullity of all words: Nothing they speak is more substantial than their very looks, which every breath of yours, and (what is out of all compass more variable) their own desultory fancy altars often in a moment.  
I am angry with my invention to be so jaded in so fowl a Road, every progression is more squalid and miry to me, yet I want dirt enough to cast upon these seeming Viae Lacteae. Who 〈◊〉 rubbed on so exquisite a dealbation, that my very Ink looseth its blacks upon them. Neither think me provoked or in passion beyond the Antipathy every good Soul has to Hypocrisy. Believe me then, these are the grand Favourites of Hell, or the aptest disciples Lucifer ever schooled, that are so easily and naturally accommodated to that Art, that what we say of common Liars own belief, that to them warrants at last their often questioned, and therefore more cautelous Fictions, we may here apply, That so industriously are these disciplined, that not their dearest friends, but their vilest selves too fall by their own Cheats and Dissimulation. And would the Imposture rot with themselves. But to see these Hyenae ensnare truly generous Souls, that are guilty of betraying nothing but themselves, raiseth so high an Indignation in me, that methinks every point I direct my pen to should be the sharp Execution of a stile at their hearts; for, if they have any, they have more than the Creation formed in them.  
But they have not yet their death's wound, who outlive and outvie the transmutation of Cats themselves: Suppose you saw such a beautiful countenance at parting, o'ercast with an heavy cloud of seeming Sorrow, because it leaves you perplexedly grieved: When instantly upon your vanishing it clears up all its beams and displays, to melt the next face and heart into a warm thaw, and court him as the Traveller out of his Cloak and modesty, into the barefaced nudities of lust. Would you not wish with me such a common red Lattice were always as pervious to the eye, as signal in the paint; to abhor at once the Goatish stench, loathsome impurities, and treacherous embraces of a Brothel Affection?  
In the mean while how entire and meritorious soever your love be, it can have no fairer reception in her breast, than that Room which is the thoroughfare of a common Hostelry: and here your Heart will be lodged; not under so consecrate custody and regard, as those donaries and votive Tables, which some Sts. Chapels with ostentation reckon up: But rather strung up, as a long file of fallen teeth, by which some vagrant Operator girds his Art about him; where if there be any of the Catalogue of greater esteem than other, 'tis not for any kindness he owes it, or any its native excellecy, but from some extraordinary monstrosity in it. I could hazard so much intimacy with such a Publican Soul, as might procure me but an inlet upon her thought, when she is casging, up the roll of her Copy-holders', and the duties they pay her: For I guess I should find her caressing herself with greater delight, to have made so many Proselytes, than pleasure of fully gratifying her inflamed Lust, She may well admire that versatile sagacity of her skill, that has deluded and excoriated so many Booties, over whose innocent credulity, she solennizeth and insulteth with the Sovereignty and Triumph of the haughty Scythian upon Caged Bajazet.  
Can a man be willing to serve only to fill up her Muster, to increase the names must approve and licence her skill; that she is one perfect in the mystery of her Faculty; and of as refined dissimulation as the Trade can bear? O Heavens! O tame Figures of Men! rather than want choler and indignation at this indignity, may you be all over icteritious. Can I wish worse than these Miscreants are forging upon themselves, it should be Cassandra's destiny, to find none persuaded by them: So far I pity, so much just wrath have I against these Megaera's, whose Hypocrisy may Entitle itself another Fury of Hell (their bottomless Patrimony) and have Primacy of the other there. The very Beasts can show us out of their brutal appetite and converse, nothing to be an Hieroglyphic of this Synopsis of Vice: The bosoms of these Wretches only, enclose this monstrous propagation of promiscuous evils, not to be conceived in all Africa. These are the Ignes fatuae, and Precipices too, of benighted and wand'ring Affections; the wanton touches upon pruriginous spirits, which instantly gripe with the stings and pangs of a Scorpion; the Velitation of a mad Sardian laughter, which terminates in mortal convulsions. Those haggish Succubae, which not only drain the blood of its purest vitals, but by Aconite to the parched heart.  
Can I say more to awaken an Enchanted soul, than that it is upon the margin of all horror? Open but your sight to one beam of sober and clear Reason, and you will be amazed to see how insensibly you have been hurried and transported by these infernal Emissaries, to such a distance from your own home and knowledge, and that in so short a time: And if any good word may be now of force to dissolve the charm you are under, what ever this folly has cost you; Believe me you cannot pay too dear for a Repentance that will snatch you out of their Gremial graves.  
In a word, these mistresses of the Magistery of dissimulation, are the greatest Enemies to the convers of the World. For whereas nature impressed one royal and plain stamp on the noble mine of our Affections, These first debase them with their dross then form what impress soever they list to transfer upon them: So while we pay them with currant and solid mass of unalloyed Love, they cheat and beggar us with exchange of their base obtruded Gounterfeits. And this is a mystery they anvil without any noise, it needs no load nor trial of Artisans tools: Their Hearts are the mineral, their Breasts the hot forges, their Brain Hammer and Vice, their impudent looks, lascivious words and wanton gestures the exposing stalls to their cozenage: their ware and shop how cheap and open soever, is yet too dark and dangerous to advance one step nearer perdition. Thus like dancing Masters they are born with the Engines of their Trade, and can set it up as easily as Tumblers vault; and without hardship of an Apprenticeship become free of any Corporation. This is enough to decipher them to your knowledge without the infallibility of the Porphyry Chair. Avoid them therefore as the most dreadful underminers of your liberty and happiness; somewhat stolen upon the quiet of man again to cast him out and bar Paradise against us: which shall be charge enough to impeach those seducing Spirits, and confirm you in your blessed Innocence.  
But I cannot have so great detestation to this herd of Satyrs, as veneration to that Love which is pure, and refulgent in the Conjugal or Amical Love-knot. I even adore that Affection, which springing from a sacred root sprouts forth it's still flourishing blossoms to enammel the fair plantations of Nature with a perpetual Spring: The present, the after ages while time and mankind cohabite shall rise up to honour you with their due benedictions, and with the whole bank of Humanity shall acknowledge it owes its Stock to your liberal improvements. Friendship I no less admire as one of the fragrantest flowers in the garden of the Creation, that Odour which delights the Soul with the sympathy born from the same spot of Earth into an uniting coalition of Affections: Which in differing sexes may sometime grow into elegancies not otherwise educible: and if the terrene nourishment thereof be not too rich and luxuriant, the complacencies of nature will by their fair attractions, more powerfully and engagingly corroborate and sweeten it. But a true principle of Amity in all persons and Relations, will not cease to sublime itself into an Angelical perfection, and innocence of Love; both in wishing nothing so much as one another's happiness, and pursuing it by all the amicable obligations and assistances of Virtue, with a celestial efflorescence of Joy, to have together ascended above the dull and tumultuous cares and hurries of unreasonable passions; and be so fare emergent from sense, as to distinguish and  a condition that is serene, congenial, the Banquet of the most intelligent and amiable Spirits, and a praelibation of what the happy Glorious above enjoy and feast upon.  
But lo, we are brought down again, to this gross Orb of Grief and loss, our Gallants Tragedy of   

GAMING  
Where we find his Royalties and Manors parceld and rend into a small pack of Cards, his money ebbing and flowing with the pace it keeps to the rifing and falling Dice: all his hopes cast into a narrow box; his deeds and conveyances in as little paper, as the Conqueror passed whole Countries over by. Not that our Gallants love Abridgements of our voluminous laws, much less a sure and speedy way to be rich: Nor do they curse the tedious formalities of Tribunals. Only they admit of a distinct Court from Westminster-Hall, from which no appeal is allowed: Every Ordinary has its Solon and Lycurgus; and as a particular Chancery expedites all the rules of its tried and well consulted Equity: and from these you shall sometime meet our Gamesters return, with the countenances of those that had just passed a Trial at Bar. The famous Painter Angelo might from their looks have finished his last Judgement: The loser's bearing the gulfs of despair in their very faces, being undone and ejected out of all their fair affluences, and so much as the hopes and possibility of having one cast more for a Fortune: not one minute more of the whole stock of time to turn up a favourable revolution; They themselves Relations, dependants, expectancies excluded, and for ever debarred approach near to their abdicated prosperity. On the other side he might have the high springtides of exhilient Joy enlarging their channels, oreflowing all its banks to import an Ocean of new raised spirits, to welcome and take acquaintance of the great success and delight the winner brings off: In whose look, not a Line Fear dares lay hold on, nor through this crowd of exultations can one sad thought justle up to an Audience: And our Painter may fear to begin a Face so full of life, as all his skill and oil, will be too little to tarifie and air, to brisk and rutilate.  
But those in whom our Gaming can draw so pleasant a Prospect are indeed herein more like the blessed Heirs of Heaven; in that they are the rarer instances of Beatitude, some few select reserves of the collection of mankind, like the crowned Victors of the many that contended for the Prize, and lost it. Only here our Gallants rashly commit the whole course to Fortune and chance. Those who exterminate Providence may here behold, what fair provision they assign to the prudence and industry of the World, and account it the unluckiest advantage man could stumble on, to be born with eyes, endowed with understanding to discern happiness, and a soul spirited to its enjoyment; but have no way distinguishable to seek after and acquire it, nor any means to retain it longer than the mutable contingencies of Affairs settle in one Posture: For when the four stirring Elements, like the suits at Cards, are shuffled into another hand, or such numbers fall into a benign or cross chance; there will be no bearing up against these blind events, and the Age must be left to play its own Game, and us; without any mediate disposures or motions of our own.  
This would be to infatuate all the designs of reason and diligence. For though we know we must hazard storms, unseen rocks and shelves of dangerous Seas; Yet who puts out, without his skilful Pilot and Compass? Nay who puts himself upon the perils of waves, but on the fairest expectance of profitable returns? Only our home Adventurers here, that contract their whole substance into so little bulk, that they may easily heave all overboard at one lift, and cast all away in one sudden wreck. Nor will they be advised to beware of those armed Land-Pirates, that lay ready to pray upon every ventured Estate, the arts they have to make out a Prize, their stratagems to hunt it, their violence and treachery invading it, and barbarousness to divide the spoil in the very sight of the naked Gull. So do we often see an old stout Carack, that has made many a successful honourable and rich voyage; that has long carried all the fortune, name, and venture of a brave Family embarked in it: neither split on the fatal hardness of the times, nor broken by fury of continual Tempests, or lost by its old indiscoverably growing leakages; no, nor yet nobly sunk after manly resistance by the prevailing enemy of its nation: But basely assailed by an unsuspected crew of Villains in the very harbour; unladen, pillaged, and cleft into so small planks, that you find not so much of it remain, as of our great Drakes vessel to be but a narrow Seat of that once famous name.  
What the admirable wisdom and conduct of your Ancestors gathered into one safe Hive, to be the stock and shelter of the whole Tribe; to Head & Countenance; to all the Lineage; One night surpriseth, destroys, the Oeconomy of the Family, extinguishes the fair Colonies it might have peopled the world with; and there remains nothing of it but the shade of a great Name; the empty curtail of its faint Echo. I know no law can be formed to prevent these frequent miscarriages, wherein Posterity suffers abortion, and many a pregnant Spirit is suffocated, in the straight enclosures of a confining vellicating Fortune: who had they opportunity of fairly launching forth, their sails had been filled with the same breath of their Age's Honour, and Applause, which was a propitious gale to their Grandfathers: whereas now your own farthest extended Line shall remember your name, but to lash it with their heaviest execrations. For the robbing of the whole by your exportation and alienation of what was theirs more than yours, has also like the Peter-penny ship stranded in Sandwich, together with it sank the Harbour; and made its convenient situation more regretfully deplorable in the sad disaster. For it is a misery to be born to the remembrance of those honours, which contemplation and sense of our present indigencies suffer us only to grieve over, and sink in that also below the calamity and loss itself.  
I could wish there were kept a Register in each shire of all, who, by this or any other profusion, end as the Snuffs of noble and wealthy descents, that their Country may exclaim at and abominate the stench; And that some proportion of every fair Revenue might by no Law niceties be alienable; but, upon such a declination of the Family, immediately pass into the Counties possession: not to erect Hospitals for the devastator, but be wholly converted to the education of the most hopeful Youth can be recommended (those of that Name primarily respected) for the making up the breach among them, and raising up as flourishing a name again to the Nation. Nor can your severity be too rigid upon the spendthrift, who has submitted himself and Fortune (as the Military discipline sometime does its offender's lives) to the lot upon the Drum-head, and his posterity under the Spear to infamous slavery and sufferings: Spirits so ignobly base, that, were their Father's dust entrusted on their inheritance, would even pawn their quiet ashes and old monuments, to build one poor bank at play.  
These are less worthy our commiseration, than the many Malefactors we with dry eyes follow to Execution. He that salcheth or robs on the highway is not in hope of such booties, nor capacity to destroy more than single lives: Here we see played away the lives and beings of those, they have no more just power to dispose of, than the Church has, to alienate its consecrate rights to profane abuses; or than we can force of satisfaction, for the cruelty, and rapines of Romans and Danes upon our Forefathers. I might add to the shame of our Gallants madness, what their hopes of gain can be upon their greatest success. Did you ever see any great Family made greater by accessions at Play? Certainly Industry and honest Labour raised all that we now see, bearing up above the malice and fate of old Time: An Estate thus built has no one rafter but is seasoned, every stone has the stability of a Quarry; 'tis cemented with long wrought sweat, and is a morsel on which Saturn himself will break his fangs: What we gain by fair diligence has a sweetness, which stolen waters shall sooner become wine than emulate, a sweetness which from the soundness of its constitution forbids corruption; and must needs conserve every particular, as being the condiment of Time itself: which would be so burdensome to us, that were there no industry necessary, to till, sow, and reap our fields, our bread and life would be alike embittered to us. All your gains at play can never be adopted to serious and noble uses, like the I holoze Gold, and all Sacrilegious spoils, they rather bring a Coal to consume your own high-raised hopes and Fortunes: Those that rob you, are anon under the pilfer of their own vicious Lusts; and the Infidels that depend on Events of as great success every day will find their own Family unprovided for.  
I will join to this Quixotry its inseparable Sancho through all the adventures of Gaming; that bears the weapons; and Portmanteau full of Lightning and Thunder: I mean the   

SWEARING  
That attends Gamesters; which is so much the more inexcusable, because all this while our Gallants must play with as little concern and regret as the Don had, whether he did beat or was beaten; the generosity of his spirit and glory of the Adventurers would not bear a second beating by his own passions. But certainly that great Isabel, who in her extremities of Childbirth covered her face, and not so much as by her looks would derogate from Majesty; could not so quietly look on the intrenchments upon her state and Sovereignty, but would passionately assert it, against her own Ferdinand. And I will not believe Oaths and Curses, because they accent our ordinary Language, and are used to veil many natural defects, sound no more when we part with an arm or limb of an Estate. If they are not all this while in passion, these might have been well spared; if they be, these like bellows blow it into greater heat and fury: and this can be but the very blowing away an overture to an excuse.  
However these are the Gamesters, Artillery, and Trumpets too: if they come off with a fair Atchieument, these proclaim the Prize; if worsted, they sound the foil too. They have not Oaths enough to magnify and invoke Fortune in her favourable aspect: Nor ever hope to be revenged of her frowns, by belching up their hasty and fowl execrations on the Minion. As temerariously and blindly they cast round about them these firebrands and fatal poniards, as she seems to them wantonly to dispense her destinies. But where the Fire catches, and the Wounds fall, the Nature of this fulminant Gold will loudly direct you: You think to blow and shoot it up against Heaven; but it kindles below, and breaks downward, recoiling fearfully, with the noise and burning of a Cannon upon your own bosom.  
Might I inquire what these bold Gigantic Combatants think of Fortune, or a surer hand guiding their Game: If there be none, why do the Brutes so rave, at what do they discharge their continual brayings, why so tormentously rend their weary throats? If there be a Fortune, She is blind and unconcerned. Why should they commit their hopes and enjoyments to the Winds? But if indeed you strive with Heaven; 'tis because you can subject its decrees to yours, or fear them not: If the first, you only are in fault if you be not as happy as you would be: Conquered, frighted Heaven must have stooped to your commands. Why complain you farther of it? If the latter steel your audaciousness, They are very impotent and despicable cannot reach, and punish your daring impieties. Be confident however, this is not the way to call down celestial auxiliaries (as infernal Spirits are willing to answer hard and terrible words) your defiances arm them against you, to power down greater fury, to complete and triumph in your extremest misery.  
But our Gallants plead not so much the ventilation of Passion, the explosion only of some fired discontented Spirits by their cursed Oaths (where. I cannot conceive the Devil for their Example) They use them as the Elegancies and figures of speech, as necessary as the Ornaments of their dress. They are their supplements unto all parts of discourse and Rhetoric: Oaths and imprecations file off all rudeness and barbarisms, act the full force of persuasion, and the very acuteness of a declamation and satire. They can be as ill laid down by our Nobless as their Muffs in winter, so frigid and shrivelled would their converse be without them. They have a way to comprise much of their great minds in this kind of Laconic brevity. Their Pages, Coachmen, and Watermen with but one round mouthed Ejaculation, and a hand toward their sword, strait know what they mean, and, as Spaniels are taught, readily execute their pleasure. The same again breathed with a melting accent, smooth face, and bending body, serves in the quintessences of compliments, and protests of most obliging friendship and service.  
O depraved times, and more degenerate Humanity! Is there no way left us to be ingenious, and facetious, but by obscenities or monstrous abuse of all that is sacred? Does Profaneness and contempt of Divinity encircle our Wits with that Laurel, which will both dare the Thunderer, and evade the blow! Then let us yield them immortality, and dread the strokes of their incensed Wit, as the vulgar do the tails of Comets, and the multiplication of Suns. But if we reflect on the genuine evaporations of these Ingenioso's, how like are they to Meteors, and Hurricanes of wit, rather than fixed stars, or the Heaven born placid and fructifying Dew: rather loud foaming forced and angry Torrents; than the smooth and Crystalline stream flowing easily from a pure Fountain of happy invention? That which can run with an even uninterrupted vein of fertile ingeny and knowledge, through all the wind of Art and Nature; Sometime emptying itself in the profound speculations of abstruse Philosophy, to try the most reaching fathom; Anon, playing with and turning up the loser sands, resting on the sides of the courted shores, crisping its light dividing waves into limpid curls, with whispered purling murmurs; as if weaving into bracelets, and with its studied music obliging its Muse's stay and delight. 'Tis the facility and fertility of Wit alone can impregnate the most barren Subject, make a Garden of a Common, contrive an oregrown Forest into a Grove, or innocent Labyrinth; cut a rocky Precipice into a delightful Grott, and Waterworks; and is at no knotty emergency so stopped and plunged, that it needs to call a Deity down upon the stage, to make its way open and disembogued.  
Since then the essentials of true wit are of a different Origination and progressions, from the Spurious attempts of those who laying their titles so boldly from Heaven, are but the monstrous race of Centauris, and far from Demigods; Let the Nobles confess their mistake, when they find this cloud break in noise and smoke, and include no other Juno: And may they the more easily quit this superfluity of Vice, as what sounds with no other effect than the vanity of children's Potguns and Crackers. 'Tis a wickedness yields so little present satisfaction, and may so easily be shut out of all discourse; that it is the huge amazement of sober men, that any will venture paying dear for so fond a Lubency. That converse, which would be not only innocent but delightful, is often thus orespiced, and made too poignant with sprinkling those hot and high Oaths and Curses: that our spirits are in danger of the air they breath, like needles and launcets piercing a tender and sedate Soul; at the same time making the wounds deeper with regrett, to be so unhappily bound and sowed up in a bag, with nettles and Wasps.  
This Vice may more decently now also be relinquished as being the Familiar of their very Lacquays, the Blazonry of the dregs of the Populace. In births, , diet, diversions, and the heightening your pleasures; in the melioration of your minds by education and converse, in your hopes, designs, and noble employments you far outstrip all their enjoyments, and attempts: But here they can Rival (I do not say) outvie you, in number, volubility, and as loud volleys of Oaths and execrations. Now it concerns your Honour to retire, leave them the sport and quarry, which is not worth your Time, and does but dishonest your truly noble Entertainments.  
You may here make a most profitable experiment upon the world (most docible by Examples that descend) You have conveyed this cursed sound through the whole Island in an instant; as in the whispering pipes, the Roman wall is said to have carried in so long a Traverse. Would you might be entreated to change these harsh and terrible sounds into soft and peaceable, that the affrighments and Furies, those have alarmed, may be appeased; and we may appear to be seriously busy; not tumultuously startled and hurried together as to an uproar and Riot: You may hence inform us, whether signal Virtue can be as exemplary as Vice has been by imitation destructive. So may you recover the reputation your births have given you above the commonalty, and your Faith remain inviolable: That your but necessary asseverations upon your Generosity and Honour, may be reverenced in yourselves, and sacred in the esteem of your Inferiors.  
We should now at last be grossly deluded, if we expect to find Religion in those Persons we struck at in the series of our discourse: For none of those Vices can be the Rule of that Profession we have espoused: No softer a word and power than   

ATHEISM  
Regulates these men's lives, and emboldens their impieties. With this Generalissimo of the Powers of darkness, this skirmish shall be concluded, as that (which some gloss) the race of man shall at last set and conclude in. And now indeed, when we see the notion of a Deity usurped, but as the occult qualities to be derided only and exploded: We cannot but find the shadows growing and stealing apace upon us. But certainly 'tis an affectation of obscurity envelopes us in night, and shuts out those rays, which cannot but in every point clear up to us the being of a Creator. 'Tis gross Ignorance, Inconsideration, malicious wickedness of the world, that dares not, will not admit a God into their thoughts, to become the Supreme Arbiter of their hearts and lives. Therefore they perplex their brains to dispute it off the stage. and with far greater anxieties labour to entangle the conception of a Deity, than they can so much as suppose in acknowledging their makers infinite perfections.  
For shall fond man, whom we every day see crumbling into Earth, that knows not his own beginning nor setting, his composition nor capacity, judge of those things which as infinitely transcend our comprehension, as Nature; and could be no longer adorable if not perfectly mysterious? shall shallow we, lost in diving but to the bottom of every sensible, hope to fathom the immense Abyss of all power, knowledge, goodness? Would you any longer worship, love, or fear God, if you had an apprehension of his being, which you could any any where terminate in finite limits? This would be to heathenize the Earth again, and reduce such a slight and formal veneration, as heretofore was bestowed on their race of Gods, that once grew among themselves; and on the Idols they shaped according to their own fancied Images. I need not say it is necessary, for it is impossible, we should here have any more plain notions of our Maker, than those in which He is pleased to reveal himself to us. All of the knowledge of himself is mysterious, adorable, admirable, but most consummate: All of our Duty plain, easy, and most necessary. I say enough for the reasonableness thereof, that if it had been no Trial of the will and affections to renounce the world and ourselves, God would never have propounded it in the middle between an Eternal Glory and Misery.  
But it is a vain Curiosity (which first made the breach upon Man in the mass) which will not be confined to its duty, under our present possessions, and hopes, greater than man can raise his vast soul to contrive. The state of which happiness, because entering upon no avenue of our senses; nay above all the reaches of our what not amplifying Heart, and almost powerfully creating Imagination; confounds our conceptions and belief of it. But do I believe God the maker of this fair fabric of this visible Creation; wherein every one fancies he could carve out portion large enough for his most importunate desires: and in the poor pittances, fragments and Atoms whereof we every day see many reposing their utmost felicity, and could be content to sing eternal Requiems to their Souls over them? Do I not herein also admire the wonderful delight, beauty, use, and harmony resulting from every part of it, and concentring within myself in fullest pleasure and content, from my contemplations and fruitions thereof? And shall I not now be confident, that the most wise Creator, that raised this glorious frame but as a Pavilion to be spread over Pilgrims, or a stately Theatre for some few days exhibiting the various Scenes and Actors upon the world, and then be taken down, has a Palace of infinitely more excelling workmanship and entertainment; that the happiness reserved must transcend what soever I can see lovely and desirable here in my passage, and therefore must be Heaven?  
Where the yellow clay, glass beads and pebbles we reckon ourselves and riches by (in our Sanguine dreams here) which we fear under our keeping, and bitterly bewail being lost; All these will be contemptible to the diaphanous yet solid Sun of the metals, pearls, and truly precious starry Gems; which are not to be the treasures but materials of the Celestial mansions. The satisfaction I now take in one good word or work virtuously accomplished, will then pass into a festival of Joy, by being asserted into a blissful activity of all goodness, to the utmost of my enlarged powers. The refined pleasure my Soul now takes in, with every fresh gleam, and discovery of New found knowledge, and embracing a truth consentaneous to the principles of my own reason; shall then be the quickening it still to move on the inexhaustible deeps of Science and wisdom, with free expansions, and heliotrope conversions to that eternal light; that will irradiate and inform the intellectuals with the Spirit of all understanding. The affection of love, which here at some time carries me out, to a delight and union with any attractive amiableness, and my ravishments in the harmonious repercussions of a Beloved, shall there transport me ●●●o one endless Ecstasy of Love; where I shall enjoy what can alone (without grating on any one affection) perpetually invite out and meet the Soul in its purest ardencies and zeal, with inextinguishable freeness, and fullness of divine goodness and bounty: so that this inconceivable energy the soul shall feel, will carry it wholly forth to the Vision of Beatitude, and pass it into the Glory it sees, adores, and loves with endless Delectation. Now than if I may have leave to call the will of the Blessed Souls, purity; their understanding, all eye; all their affections, Love: You will think the world you now live in a sink of Vice; a Cavern of dark ignorance; and a den of monstrous and savage malice and cruelty.  
Can I here also portray the horrors a dejected, guilty, astonished, broken, despairing, and self-torturing spirit, which way soever it turns, feels, and fears; I should from our own senses, which are often sabled with melancholy, from the rave of a Fever, the pangs and groans of acute pains, and deathbed agonies and struggle, say enough to confess, though not constitute the misery of an Hell. Both these states with all the notions our narrow conceptions form of them, having all the demonstrations our understanding, and the nature of the thing can admit, nothing being wanting to convince and support the most penetrating and cautelous Reason; let us no longer deny their being and certainty, because so incomprehensibly above us, and ours. For I am persuaded as to a distinct and clear apprehension of them, we are as incompetent, as the Embryo is in the close and dark womb to conceive of the vastness, order, and beauty of this larger nest of Nature; wherein the comparison you will also find to be more straightened. From your enjoyments here only consider whether you think the Author of them could not have heightened and perpetuated them, had it seemed good to infinite wisdom.  
We in all these behold a continual vicissitude various interchanges and successions of all things sublunary. And it may not be amiss to grant such a rotation of States and families; as may suppose that they have all had their equal portion of prosperity and adversity; so also that the very highest and lowest pitch and fall of either have, in some age or other, made some of the same stock most eminent in both conditions: that in every line some may be accountable for the trust of Princely power, and trial of meanest debasement. However in all the variations of our affairs here below, we may easily see and admire a Providence disposing them, and bearing up a most constant tenor of unerring regularity: That days and seasons have their unalterable returns, the minds and shapes of each man their proper sentiments and impresses, every nation its particular distinct genius, the levity and excellency of each so counterpoised (even to the turning with the two hundredth part of a grain) by some other defects and virtues of a neighbour Country, to the setting of due bounds to all: For the wilyness of that ballanceth the strength of this; the heat and agility of another is tempered by the Phlegm and industry of their Enemy: to their innate ambition, is opposed the inexpungnable zeal others have to their native soil. Thus we see the Empires of the world have their periods, declination and expiration; as well as a Rise, augmentation, and flourishing.  
That the conceptions and designs of every individual admit so many transmutations with their years; and that all of them sooner or later retire, and clear the stage to another Generation, to which must be committed the whole concerns of Mankind; and yet all this while among so different traverses, the world has fallen into no decay; no Encroachments have been made on Nature; nor such inundations on its Inhabitants as to drown any of their specific temperaments, or so o'erflow any one part of them, as not to be recovered in some revolutions; does loudly proclaim and justify the most wise decretals of Heaven, managing so many dissenting heads, and new hands to the carrying on the wonderful business of Providence. There is no novelty under the Sun, all will still proceed with the measures of a man, if we do not put off our own natures and principles. For 'tis Atheism alone can unhinge all, and invert the whole order of things; by destroying all opinion of the wisdom and integrity of former ages, the happy security of the present, and all concerns and hopes for the future.  
But had we a considerative view into the causes, actings, and terminations of those grand occurrences, which first startle, then leave us as much careless as unsatisfied; we should admire the deep agencies of Providence. Did every one but seriously regard the wonders that have signalised a great part of his own private concerns and contingencies; the notices arising thence would show how he had been acted and guided by another hand and intention, beside and beyond his own. Round about how many notable instances daily break forth to instruct us, that Blind Nature alone could not so happily Time and finish her wise mistakes? As Embryos we cannot conceive much of the Order and Power of the Intellectual World. But I am persuaded much more is done among us by the concurrence of good and Evil Spirits, in common converse and Accidents, than we imagine or observe. Had we an history of those unaccountable remedies (which are no small nor unwarranted part of Medicine) some from animals, other from Vegetables, taken inwardly, or used as Annulets; we should acknowledge a great deal to their benignity, or some permitted delusions in their discoveries. The Temple of Aesculapius famous for its cures prescribed in dreams, and registered into a Dispensatory on the walls thereof; beside many later remarkables of this nature, justifies this my conceit.  
Withal I suppose them very prone, if not by rule disposed, to concern themselves in all sorts of Offices, wherein they may employ their powerful activities; and have the pleasure unseen, to guide, assist, and patronise many of our undertake. Many sudden and uncouth friendships, antipathies, strange deliverances, advices in extraordinary distances, solutions of intricacies, presages, and powerful influences upon other Creatures I may favourably refer to their presence and ministry; not denying but there are some persons by nature and temper (without recourse to an Asterism) fitted to wonderful intimations, and performances beyond the Vulgar. Yet I cannot but admire to see some suddenly grown up into an opinion and repute with the World; wonderfully made the darlings of Fortune, from one lucky article of an occasion instantly outstripping all others, and their own thoughts; thrive and prosper to the amazement of all, where every one before was defeated and wasted; in every enterprise and but petty hazard successful and victorious: and all this without anxious solicitudes, laborious insudations, or more than Common stock of comprehension or contrivance. At the same time, a person wherein nothing is wanting to the Ornament, as well as strength and vigour of Reason and Prudence, no defect in industry and Art; sinking, unfortunate, every way oppressed, and quite broken in all his designments: When I presently reflect on the admonition given Mark Antony, in his competitions with Augustus; and that there is more truth and mystery in it, than we are ware of, and advized by. On a due collection, you will conclude, even where all seems to lay open to the sports and frolikes of Time and Chance, a most sure Hand from above, beyond our determinations and reaches, disposes all events how casual soever in appearance and (by many Instruments [perhaps] of some nearer degree of Intellectual Agents.)  
From the promiscuous successes and conditions, Virtue and Vice are here equally involved in with industry and Imprudence, you may as necessarily infer the consequence of a state of life after this; where one shall account for the impious abuses of long provoked and most attractive goodness; the other meet a remuneration, suitable to the exercise of a suffering, throughly tried, and perfected integrity. To which I may join the insatiable thirst, the soul of man pants under, toward a state of immortality: It beholds itself made to distinguish, and comprehend, the truth and worth of all about it (beyond the power it sees any other Creature born unto) But there remaining so great a part of it undiscovered upon the Continent, as well as wide Ocean of knowledge; All the principles hereof also being but precariously and dubiously admitted; How does the Soul lay down and bewail its sad condition, finding its clearest resolves and conclusions, subject to cavillation and torture, when raising up an appetite large enough to take in the coveted delicacies, appearing only as if but to tantalise it? But now that doctrine which meets us heated, tired, dejected in despair of ever reaching, what our greediness has transported us out after; how welcome, pleasant, satisfactory will it be to us; reviving and raising us up again on our feet, so as to forget all our past toil and weariness; Especially when to the possession of this Terrestrial knowledge, It bids us look up to Heaven above, and reckon upon the innumerable Lights and worlds of wisdom and understanding there, which we are created capable to look and pass into, and shall eternally reside under their illuminations?  
We shall suddenly then make up the arrears of the longest lives (and an hundred years are brought into as small a point as twenty, to the review of a dying person.) The Philosophy, we grope after all the short night of our duration here, will (I conceive) by the first approaches of the light of our never setting day, be plain and illustrate to us: The First and Wisest of Men had not larger notices of the Creation, than the uncaptived Spirit instantly enters upon; for that (as Adam at first) is born and springs forth from its clay, arrayed with the same connate beams of knowledge as of life. And the wisdom of Solomon was that Celestial Charisma, which in its very illapses enlarged his Soul to its reception. Thus ennobled, the Spirit rises to the dignity of an Empyreal Guest, presently as it feels itself unmanacled from dust, and above its distresses and fears, finding eternal joys set wide open to him: Otherwise it would be a surprise of such amazing happiness, enough to make it fall into such a Syncope it left the body in, were it not instantly transformed and adapted with generous instincts of its Glorious inheritance. To demonstrate the quick dispatch of so great a transaction, its means and methods, you shall respite me; Till you find any one determine the instant and manner of the Souls connexion to the body, and the affections it brought with it: Or let another tell me how long time he is learning to see, and by what degrees he apprehends the benefit and use of light: Or a Third when he first knew he had Reason, and what was to be done by it: Or another show, how an Antipathy or Sympathy immediately break forth, and act all their violences, without calling the Soul down to Counsel.  
'Tis enough, that these, and more inconceivable Truths, are not only the subject of our rational examinations, but shall once be the convictions and experiences of our apprehensions: which affords me a wide field of wonder, that the unhappy curiosity of our Nature; which has (I believe) drawn many to converse with any order of Spirits; Either that they might be satisfied in the being of such Creatures, or from them gain some intelligence and notices above ordinary disquisitions; does not produce in us all an extraordinary satisfaction and delight, in the knowing that Truth which is our Light and Way to arrive at a blessed Communion, and Union with the Father and Fountain of all Spiritual beings. I cannot, to the highest Speculators, urge a greater cogency of their duty to their Creator. The very addresses to the Father of our Spirits intimate no less than our return to, and quiet, in that bosom which delighted to give us a being: And to be brought to the knowledge and favour of the most pure Origine of all Spirits as strongly imports our arrival, at that Centre of Truth and happiness, which is the Sum of All that created beings can possibly know or enjoy. Neither will your capacities be contracted, but as infinite Perfection is the object of your Fruitions, so will your Souls (emptied of the burdens, and coarctation of encumbering matter) be dilated and stretched out, into your proportionable entertainments of overflowing Beatitude. And what more can any desire than he can enjoy? The Soul itself can go no farther; because it cannot, need not to, desire any thing more.  
And those that are in such eager quest of the Chiefest Good and present happiness, will find the Soul possessed of uninterrupted Joy, and Serenity; only as enjoying the favour of the Moderator of all things. The quiet content and fixation flowing from this assurance no distractions, incertitudes or impediments abroad can intercept, or diminish: And hence you will have an Argument as full as its brevity will bear, to invite your Soul to trample on all the dross and defilements, which steal away your hearts, and obstruct your early engrossing of happiness and ascent to Heaven.  
As ignorance is the Parent of Superstition, so is Atheism the unhappy birth of Inconsideration: That is willing to rest on any thing; this repudiates, and carelessly rejects all: that requires sobriety and attention; and this, because the inconsiderate will not be at leisure, thoroughly to be acquainted with any thing, much less themselves. Would they be so kind to their own Souls to hear what they can say for their own Original, how they derive their Genealogy by Authentic Patents from Heaven above; they would not so easily relinquish their Title to it, & pass away their primogeniture for every ready mess of Vanity. Nor do they understand more of the rest of the World, and regard all they know as little, as if wholly Ignorant of it. They live as on a wide open Ocean, where every wave and wind commands them from Anchor; whither they cannot, nor care to learn. How 'tis with them they cannot inform you, nor how they would have it, nor what they shall be next day, or year; much less, all their life time.  
While He that own's a Providence, and depends upon it, has one certain scope to which he directs all his designs, and moderates all his hopes and fears, in a certain persuasion of the Divine Wisdom Supremely disposing him, and all Events for the best purposes. So that, among the greatest elegancies and utmost beauty of the Creation, nothing is more fair and lovely, than the uniform obedience, and constant acquiescence of the Good Soul with his Maker's Commands and Pleafure; to be without the rule and support whereof, would be his very Hell, as tormenting as it would be destructive to him: For 'tis that extirpates his doubts, and dark ratiocinations to a most satisfactory submission. Hence is he that Cube, which way soever turned, still resting on the same equal Square. So that he can be as infallible in the conjectures of himself, through the many hidden changes of Futurity, and whatsoever shall on any juncture occur; as he can safely and contentedly judge of his present state of life and enjoyment.  
The rest of the world have their minds still under suspense, as so many Crows met and hover over some Carrion; Or as a lose flight of Atoms broken and wafting away from them, and they left an empty lodging for the next kind gale of a new life and intention. For here they live without any determinate and proper designment of life to bind them together; they never account with themselves for what purpose they live, not what they aim at, or where they would rest: but from this, hast to another delight, and so to the next; Still upon the wing, and still frighted, or tired off, from their enjoyments. Thus they, like mere sensitive beings, neither know, nor have any other business of life, but still to live on, as far as they can go, in the mere determinations of Matter and Motion: Like those Creatures altogether, who are but the plainer and ruder pieces of Workmanship, to the nobler and most exquisite frame of the body of man: they being as it were made but with one single and easy motion, but we with the wonderful movements, of finer complications▪ of wheels within one another: The observation of that Great Luminary of Philosophy and Physic, from whose unwearied abilities and penetrations Anatomical, I beg leave to borrow one of Singular consideration, distinguishing the enginry which our Spirits employ, of more special and curious contrivances, than are to be found in other animals.  
In his accurate discovery of the use of the Intercostal nerves, in the fair branches thereof Communicated to the Region of the Heart, He maintains: that by these are kept up a continued commerce between the Brain and Heart: so that hence are derived advices of each others affections, and all the diversity of their fancies and sentiments. Divinity and Nature hitherto teaching us that Wisdom's residence is in the Heart: we here (says the same admirable Person) learn it to be rather in its clear conclusions, from the conferences and constant intercourses between the Heart and Brain, and that this reciprocal correspondence maintains the heat and light of mutual intelligence; and, duly interchanged, perfects our most complete intendments of Virtue and Prudence. Dissecting a Natural, this texture of Nerves was found very small and of fewer strings than that branch in man oridnarily grows up with. In the body of an Ape this shooting forth some few insertions toward the heart twined its fibres with the Nerve of the Diaphragm. Hence he infers this Creature has its ingeny and docility, not only expressing us in our gestures, but even to some faint resemblances of our very manners and affections.  
Thus far that Inimitable Professor gives us light to our Brain and Heart to judge that they would be thought, in this stupendous Fabric, not the bare conflux only of lose Atoms; But that we have a body instructed to execute the orders of the Nobler Soul, and to act in joint Commission with it; in a faithful observance of those distinct regular motions, their most wise Creator designed them unto: beyond the utmost abilities of the nearest order, and most similar of all inferior Creatures. So that for man to own no dependence on his Maker, not to raise his thoughts to the contemplation, and adoration of that hand, which stretched out the rule of his being and motions, and lengthens out all his lines as seems good to It, is to renounce the Heart and Brain of a reasonable being; And like the Assyrian Monarch while he views the stately and glorious built of his body, Cry out in a Philosophic Rapture; Is not this the wonderful Machine of Nature, which I with the strength of my deep wisdom have found to be raised upon my own Atoms, and can to my Honour ennoble these very particles with excellent Ornaments and Riches, out of the store of my own admirable Understanding, which soars above the low and timorous flight of Vulgar knowledge, and scorns to own any Deity to Rival me in the boundless Empire of my self-advancing Reason, Will, and Affections? Do we not, presently upon these haughty Rodomontad's, see the just decree of the Great Watcher fulfilled upon the Romantic Sophies? Who turning themselves into Commons with the Beasts, and refusing to hold of the Sovereignty of Heaven, forfeit the shape & heart of Man: nor fill up the business of their life with the true designs of Prudence and Virtue; to the happiness whereof, they were in their very make and motions born and instructed.  
But the Soul, whose foundations are laid on unerring Providence, and affections enlarged and raised to a perfect dependence and conformity with the mind of Heaven, can now truly say (what another Emperor as fond vaunted, when his vast Palace was contrived) that now at length it has began to live like a man.  
The sum of all is this, these Primates of the world of knowledge, lose themselves and the knowledge of their God, in the Mist of their affected ignorance and inconsideration. They that think nothing impenetrable to their sharp Judgement, and that their understandings are large enough to draw in the Ocean of all Science; a Fly straying into their Eye, blunts and blinds the one; and a few Atoms on the breach, gravel and dam up the narrow entrance of the other. While they imagine they comprehend and encircle Nature in a Girdle of their own weaving, and know all the intrigues of indiscernible Wheels, as plainly as the face and outside of the work: Take but the least part of this Creature in pieces; You will at once admire their folly, and the fearful Art shut up in so little room; and that all this unaccountable workmanship, and cost is laid out on him, who so undervalues and abuses his Maker's Wisdom, and bounty still waiting upon him. For it is an incessant miracle that prolongs the Creation, and maintains our lives with the even uninterrupted paces of so many curious Wheels and Motions, as we turn upon; the unstringing of the least whereof may dissolve the whole order, break the chain which links all together, and put a full stop to the work and life of it. So little do they understand of their own dreadfully organised Frame, and but just nothing how their understanding acts that by which they are become such Monopolizers of knowledge.  
Did they not rest on some airy contrivances of the fancy, which comparing one part of the Creation with another, blending the Originals, pawses and periods of several beings with the pleasant power of creating; did not ambiguous terms, and some bold defiances against Heaven, engage and confirm them; they would confess a Providence: and would they consider and attentively examine themselves, and the works of Time and Nature (which word retains with me it's innocent power and subserviency) they would certainly acknowledge the hand of God in all this. A light and desultory glance upon the Creation puffs up Sciolists, with an opinion of their omniscience; but who ever seriously, constantly, intimatly acquaints himself with any part and passage thereof, shall behold such amazing mysteries of infinite Power, Wisdom, Goodness, as will reduce him joyfully to resolve all into that Primary Great Mover, and Ultimate Centre of All.  
Of whom to have any mean and unworthy apprehensions is as impious, as the conception it gives to Atheism can make it: So that what represents God less adorable in his Goodness and Justice, thereby destroying the hopes of an invited and willing duty; or takes off our obligations, and dispenseth with our least indulgencies and relaxations; aught to be the abomination of our conceptions, as much as they be the direct contradiction of the Nature of God, and clearest manifestos of his Will. Those seem to be the most Honourable Apprehensions of the Divine Attributes, which debasing man most, do possess the Soul with a pure Love, and awful dread of that Glorious Majesty, which our weak intellectuals can more securely contemplate in the reflex, than the direct essence and acts of tremendous Perfections.  
Though Providence appear writing itself every where, with the point of a Diamond darting a Sunbeam; Yet we endeavour to puzzle our interpretations and acknowledgements of it with our confused shallow and biased notions, impeaching the equity of the great Ruler of the World. But may I advise such subtle disputants, and aggreived peevishness, to await the Judgement of the last day, not doubting but that all the most blessed Attributes will be then vindicated from the silly interests, petty arguments, and calumnies, with which wretched Creatures asperse their Great Maker and Judge, darkening the secret Counsels of the Almighty, with words that want ingenuity and candour, no less than knowledge and wisdom.  
The Meditation of those summons to a General Account yields me another satisfaction to the curiosity of busy and inquisitive man, which that day will afford. How far would not an active prying brain travel, to make a faithful collection and relation of the History of the whole World? even to an Amara for the fragments of Livy, and as far for the Supplements of Tacitus would some venture. What labour and price, nay, fraud is thought too great to unlock some Cabinet Counsels, perhaps those no otherwise concerning our times, than for the high opinion they left of their influences upon their own; with the notable aims and instruments of their manage (in whose breasts they died) would be the sweat of many brains to recover, and embalm, with politic remarks of their own, from putrefaction in secret.  
This may be no small inducement, considering our daily Inspection and bold censures and examinations into the lives, actions and relations of all that are round about us, and the accounts we make of all events; to enjoin us the greatest care of our own particular duties: that so we may appear unconcerned and acquitted in that great Rendezvous of spirits; and look for that blessed day with desires, and expectations to receive in it a full narrative, and faithful History, of the lives and most famous actions of all Mankind: when we shall behold with what apprehensions and Justifications, Alexander, the Coesars, and all the haughty Conquerors of the World will enter on that dreadful Theatre, and be brought also to the knowledge and admiration, of so many Noble Souls most deserving of their Generations, by their unvaluable and suppressed worth; who, trampling on the gaieties and follies of the World, with their own Rich Stock of Virtue and content, have silently (like the kind of subterranean fraternity of Bohemia) stolen into the dark and quiet of their Graves. All the Mysteries of Providence we are now solicitously and too curiously inquisitive into, so far as concerns our revolutions, shall be there unfolded; and of Prophecy also, that we are strangers unto, as to the manner of their accomplishment.  
For may I have leave to suppose, many obscurities, in the last and constantly mistaken Revelation of Futurities, cannot possibly be brought down to our lower Stage of Earth, in the dress they are there represented. I should rather suppose great part of those visions of the bosom Evangelist to figure out the State, Glory, and Polity of the Great Court and Council of Heaven, giving dispatches and orders to our Affairs below; which both speaks the care, and consultations (as I may phrase it) our Maker graciously determines us withal: And somewhere it seems to me, not unlike the great convention, wherein the wicked King of Israel's ruin was resolved. And considering so much of the history thereof acted in Heaven, within the Veil (as I may say) of the Temple; and our succeeding revolutions to be but the immediate consequents of those mysterious Conclave results; and that Angels are Ministers of State to the most High, and Guardians of Persons, Nations, and Places; with Reverence due to the Arcana of the Empire, I should the rather retain this Opinion. For were it also necessary to take place in our clear revealments of knowledge, or of use and influence on our practice, I am assured, it would as clearly and fully answer the name it bears unto us; unless that also be to be understood, of what remains to be uncovered and revealed in after times.  
Without breach however of Faith, and obedience unto the divine disposure: Let us wait the opening of these grand Truths to us, so far as is fit for the Courtiers and Favourites of Heaven to be acquainted with them. But if the greatest part of its History be by its accomplishment to be explained, the World has a duration beyond what we ordinarily allot it: And they are to be reprehended who think their own Age so great a portion of Time, and of such eminent regard; That there shall be no great instance of extraordinary moment, which they will not bring down to be born therein: and that their own persons and concerns are so wholly the peculiar care of divine benignity and conduct, that there is no eye nor hand of goodness watching to be favourable to the rest of the Family (which is an inveterate tincture of the spirit of Judaisme) so that if they feel any pressures or contradictions, the current of Providence must be supposed at a stand, and no less than fire from Heaven fetched down, to rescue their pitiful proper Concerns: If the times they live in prove favourable, they gilled them over with such transcendent Glories as must make them outshine and overweigh all other: But if they encounter deserved or but ordinary difficulties; esteeming themselves the only true Gold of their Age, for whose refining these Trials are permitted, they will not want the pleasure of heating the Furnace hotter than in those famous Persecutions, when the Church was yet in the mint: In the midst whereof they are so far from the Doxologies of the Primitive Martyrs; that a meek Christian would judge their mouths had contracted the whole fire, and that their Tongues only were under the scorching heat of tormenting Flames. But if through various emergencies they land on a good old age, upon the secure brink of the Grave; as if when their pa●ts are over, there was nothing more to be acted on the world, and it became insignificant when they are to be left out: They unwilling to spare their beloved Carcases the time of a Patriarches life (much less so long as theirs have been under divorce from the flood) presently design with cruel Nero's wish the conclusion, (if not confusion) of all the rest of mankind; hastening the Funerals of the Universe upon their own, that nothing may retard their private hopes and advantages: not reckoning up the Excellency of every member to rest in the compliment of the whole body; which considered extensively, would enlarge the latitude of our converse and mutual Charity.  
If then these will be persuaded to attend the infinitely wise motions of their Maker, we may guests by them, the World's age not so full of the aggravated symptoms of its senescency: Take but that one Intention, and the only for which the Creation seems to have been raised from its nothing; the grand work of man's redemption: wherein the Power, Wisdom, goodness of the Almighty concur, to give us an evidence of all engaged for our redress: to the design whereof so incomprehensively mysterious, to the work of it wonderfully gracious; All we know or can desire beside, is but Vain and Despicable: and the whole not worthy nor able, to be the shell of this ineffable transaction of mercy. Yet this we see not till a full expired Period manifested; Heaven permitting some thousand of years to ripen its birth, and so long keep off the desire and longing of the whole Creation. So that if it shall now please the only Wisdom, to prolong this free exhibition of Grace, and replenish every corner of Earth with the joyful visits and abode of this light; That a day may spring forth proportionate to the shades and twilight of a long morning (dwelling in the dawning East of the Jews) by a culminating high Glory, and the leisurable progressions of Time: if it have not yet ascended its Meridian Lustre, and greater beams and glories will be displayed unto after ages; if there be reserved a succession of greater wonders, in which the whole world shall at once see and adore the Sceptre of their Redeemer, and every part of it feel the power glory and Joy of their Deliverance from Death and Hell: Why should our evil eye envy this happy exaltation of Light, and the munificence of our Lord? Why should we bind up the hands, and restrain the sweet influences of Heaven? Rather may we suppose that this late manifestation was no Niggardice to the Happiness of man; but that it will be extended, with the most free and open effusions and largesses of divine bounty.  
But I dread to approach these Mysteries with a bold hand and profane foot; and advise others against timeratious putting forth theirs to the Sacred Ark, which needs not humane support. For we may be so mistaken in our dark conceptions, and self relations; as to run into a quite contrary resolution, of the egresses and motions of the Deity. And all the liberty we take in meditation on these hidden verities, will be most allowable; which makes way for our enlarged apprehensions and adorations of Infinite Goodness. And indeed a wise man is not so much in prospective, and foreseeing Futurities; as (if I may use the word) in a continued Retrospect, here he may attain certainty in his knowledge of things Past; a sober conjecture of the following, an insight into himself seeing the Errors overseen; and setting up a fair rule for the time to come.  
But I would not be thought all this while apologizing for Christianity, especially to those great Souls, who by their solemn initial Vows, more special obliges, and all the marks and bonds of their Nobility are engaged to defend the honour thereof with their utmost perils. For notwithstanding that Sarcasm of railing Julian to the complaints of the poor persecuted Christians, To you it is given to suffer: I am confident the greatest opposition of the mad world cannot prevail against this greatest Truth.  
I might spend Volumes, to give you the Arguments our Religion defends itself withal. While Reason and the tongues of men and Angels can speak, they cannot be silent nor want demonstrative justifications, of that Goodness, which formed them to a communication and declaration thereof. Christianity (for I will not divide and weaken it into factions) has of late been so powerfully vindicated, that Atheism can find out no new irreligion, which has not been beaten down, prevented and obviated. And may that Tongue be for ever useless, which will not speak in defence of his glorious Maker: Our Profession having suffered of late by ostentation of those who had no Religion; may not another Thief come on this hand, and steal away that necessary Declaration and maintenance of our Faith and hopes, in too nice and modest Concealment of the truly devote Soul.  
I may fear a trespass on the Labours and Victories of our late Crowned Champions of Christianity; whose Learning and Piety will render this our Age notoriously famous, by the challenges they have answered of bold impiety. Nor can I quit myself perfectly in the rules and method of my discourse; wherein I have rather taken the liberty of a Letter (and pray allow it to be like what it was born) the rest is most of the notions, and long retained Sentiments of my own mind. And I believe would every one turn over those of his own Brain, many would be found so connatural to the being of the Soul, and Truth itself: and those in a distinct Character from others legible: that I may imagine, as God has given each its specific Spirit, so by differing Ideas this Principle is stamped and visible upon every one: for we see a Diversity of all faculties and capacities distinguishing the minds of men, God revealing himself also according to the module of our Intellectuals; Yet so, as all confess and read this one great Truth of his Essence, though in various impressions on the Soul.  
And that our conceptions of the Existence of a Deity so much differ, destroys not the reality of what we diversely apprehend. For bring into any Company (how great soever) some exotic and unknown Rarity, There shall not two agree perfectly, in all the modes of apprehending it; because they have an essential Diversity in the Faculties and Organs; as also a different stock and possession of former Notions, to which they have recourse, and refer this present object. If it be so in things incurring sense, and where often no affection is touched; In this Pure Abstraction from all sense, and a notion that stirs up and works on every passion (which are all so variable, that none of them can ever be said to appear again in their former Phases) no wonder that our Conceptions hereupon are as divers as our Souls and Countenances. But that all have their proper and innate notions of the being of their Maker, I have greatest reason to affirm; and confidently appeal to any person, whether he found not this, the only Indelible Principle upon his Soul, and after all his labour and art of oblivion, if it does not yet fairly upbraid the sponge?  
But this is a subject so copiously and methodically elsewhere, and by those whose profession has exercised their notions and parts, eventilated; That I refer all mine to their Better directed, and therefore more confident Speculations; only craving pardon of those our venerable Guides in Holy things, for any sudden escapes of long confined thoughts: which (without offence [I hope] to their consecrate function) I have bundled up together to try how consentaneous they will be one with another; and out of an humble hope to serve our hopeful Young Gentry, in the early measures they are to take of themselves, and their Age.  
My whole design being, to gain but so favourable an influence on our young Nobless, now fairly blossoming; that outliving the noisome Blasts, and Morning Nipping of the dangerous Vices, their Age and Quality are too obnoxious unto (no season being more bewailed than that of the forward and tender Spring, killed by hard and unnatural Colds) They may yield a pleasant shade and protection to Virtue, and derive the wholesome and lasting Fruits thereof to succeeding Ages, flourishing in the Cions of their Noble stock. May you therefore thus revive the high Renown of your Famous Grandfathers that their great Images may seem inspired to live again in you the Genuine Heirs of their Noblest Possessions. May you among all Nations recover, and advance the high Honour and Interest of your dear Coutry. May the Glory and Puissance of your long desired Sovereign be aggrandized by the happy Aceessions of your wisdom, integrity and courage: That the Sagacity and Gravity of your Heads may seem to constitute under him a Judicature and Council as large as his Dominions: The Loyalty and Generosity of your Hearts, be the Beams and Security of the Crown: The Valour and Activity of your Arms, his Forts, and Navy Royal: and your very private Families represent, and every where maintain the Splendour and Sanctions of a Regal Court. Then shall that good hand of Divine Providence (which we have seen to rise in a small cloud, and suddenly span o'er the face of our whole Horizon, with amazing darkness and desolations) turn all its terrors upon our Enemies, and shower down [as of old] the wonderful Deliverances of his Power and benignity upon us: which shall fill up our furrows, with the blessed increase of Truth and Peace. And England cleared of all its noxious weeds and Briars: under the constant irrigation of Heavenly munificence and care, shall no longer bear the folly ingratitude and curse of so long Barrenness: but become a fair planted Enclosure of all its former Plenty and Prosperity.  
FINIS.    

THE CONTENTS OF THE Principal HEADS, Herein contained.  

IDLENESS Pag. 8.  
PRIDE Pag. 26.  
INTEMPERANCE Pag. 37.  
LUST Pag. 50.  
GAMING Pag. 75.  
SWEARING Pag. 85.  
ATHEISM Pag. 94.