Raise early batteries against those strong-holds built upon the rock of nature, and make this a great part of the militia of thy life. The politic nature of vice must be opposed by policy, and therefore wiser honesties project and plot against sin; wherein, notwithstanding, we are not to rest in generals, or the trite stratagems of art. That may succeed with one temper which may prove successless with another. There is no community or commonwealth of virtue; every man must study his own economy, and erect those rules unto the figure of himself. Lastly, if length of days be thy portion, make it not thy expectation. Reckon not upon long life, but live always beyond thy account. He that so often surviveth his expectation, lives many lives, and will hardly complain of the shortness of his days. Time past is gone like a shadow; make times to come present; conceive that near which may be far off; approximate thy last times by present apprehensions of them; live like a neighbour unto death, and think there is but little to come. And since there is something in us that must still live on, join both lives together; unite them in thy thoughts and actions, and live in one but for the other. He who thus ordereth the purposes of this life, will never be far from the next, and is in some manner already in it, by a happy conformity and close apprehension of it.

VULGAR ERRORS.

[The following passages are selected as specimens

from different parts of the and Common Errors."]

66

Enquiries into Vulgar

VULGAR ERRORS.

ADAM'S ERROR.

ADAM, upon the expostulation of God, replied, "I heard thy voice in the garden, and because I was naked I hid myself." In which reply there was included a very gross mistake, and if with pertinacity maintained, a high and capital error. For thinking by this retirement to obscure himself from God, he infringed the omnisciency and essential ubiquity of his Maker; who, as he created all things, so is he beyond and in them all, not only in power, as under his subjection, or in his presence, as being in his cognition, but in his very essence, as being the soul of their causalities and the essential cause of their existences. Certainly his posterity, at this distance and after so perpetuated an impairment, cannot but condemn the poverty of his conception, that thought to obscure himself from his Creator in the shade

of the garden, who had beheld him before in the darkness of his chaos and the great obscurity of nothing; that thought to fly from God which could not fly himself; or imagined that one tree should conceal his nakedness from God's eye, as another had revealed it unto his own. Those tormented spirits, that wish the mountains to cover them, have fallen upon desires of minor absurdity, and chosen ways of less improbable concealment. Though this be also as ridiculous unto reason as fruitless unto their desires; for he that laid the foundations of the earth cannot be excluded the secrecy of the mountains; nor can there any thing escape the perspicacity of those eyes which were before light, and in whose optics there is no opacity. This is the consolation of all good men, unto whom his ubiquity affordeth continual comfort and security; and this is the affliction of hell, unto whom it affordeth despair and remediless calamity. For those restless spirits that fly the face of the Almighty, being deprived of the fruition of his eye, would also avoid the extent of his hand; which being impossible, their sufferings are desperate and their afflictions without evasion, until they can get out of Trismegistus's circle, that is, to extend their wings above the universe and pitch beyond ubiquity.