Real and Apparent Happiness.

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

Does he not drink more sweetly that takes his beverage in an earthen vessel, than he that looks and searches into his golden chalices, for fear of poison, and looks pale at every sudden noise, and sleeps in armour, and trusts nobody, and does not trust God for his safety ?

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

Adversity.

All is well as long as the sun shines, and the fair breath of heaven gently wafts us to our own purposes. But if you will try the excellency and feel the work of faith, place the man in a persecution: let him ride in a storm; let his bones be broken with sorrow, and his eyelids loosed with sickness; let his bread be dipped with tears, and all the daughters of music be brought low: let us come to sit upon the margin of our grave, and let a tyrant lean hard upon our fortunes, and dwell upon our wrong; let the storm arise, and the keels toss till the cordage crack, or that all our hopes bulge under us, and descend into the hollowness of sad misfortunes.

Miseries of Man's Life.

How few men in the world are prosperous! What an infinite number of slaves and beggars, of persecuted and oppressed people, fill all corners of the earth with groans, and heaven itself with weeping, prayers, and sad remembrances! How many provinces and kingdoms are afflicted by a violent war, or made desolate by popular diseases! Some whole countries are remarked with fatal evils or periodical sicknesses. Grand Cairo, in Egypt, feels the plague every three years returning like a quartan ague, and destroying many thousands of persons. All the inhabitants of Arabia the desert are in continual fear of being buried in huge heaps of sand, and therefore dwell in tents and ambulatory houses, or retire to unfruitful mountains, to prolong an uneasy and wilder life. And all the countries round about the Adriatic Sea feel such violent convulsions, by tempests and intolerable earthquakes, that sometimes whole cities find a tomb, and every man sinks with his own house, made ready to become his monument, and his bed is crushed into the disorders of a grave. It were too sad if I should tell how many persons are afflicted with evil spirits, with spectres and illusions of the night.

He that is no fool, but can consider wisely, if he be in love with this world, we need not despair but that a witty man might reconcile him with tortures, and make

E. L. v. ii.-13

him think charitably of the rack, and be brought to dwell with vipers and dragons, and entertain his guests with the shrieks of mandrakes, cats, and screech-owls, with the filing of iron and the harshness of rending of silk, or to admire the harmony that is made by a herd of evening wolves, when they miss their draught of blood in their midnight revels. The groans of a man in a fit of the stone are worse than all these; and the distractions of a troubled conscience are worse than those groans; and yet a merry careless sinner is worse than all that. But if we could, from one of the battlements of heaven, espy how many men and women at this time lie fainting and dying for want of bread; how many young men are hewn down by the sword of war; how many poor orphans are now weeping over the graves of their father, by whose life they were enabled to eat; if we could but hear how many mariners and passengers are at this present in a storm, and shriek out because their keel dashes against a rock or bulges under them; how many people there are who weep with want and are mad with oppression, or are desperate by a too quick sense of a constant infelicity; in all reason we should be glad to be out of the noise and the participation of so many evils. This is a place of sorrows and tears, of so great evils and a constant calamity; let us remove from hence at least in affections and preparation of mind.

A Calm Religious Life.

In all her [Lady Carbery's] religion, and in all her actions of relation towards God, she had a strange evenness and untroubled passage, sliding towards her ocean of God and of infinity with a certain and silent motion. So have I seen a river deep and smooth passing with a still foot and a sober face, and paying to the Fiscus, the great exchequer of the sea, the prince of all watery bodies, a tribute large and full; and hard by it a little brook skipping and making a noise upon its unequal and neighbour bottom; and after all its talking and bragged motion, it paid to its common audit no more than the revenues of a little cloud or a contem tible vessel. So have I sometimes compared the issues of her religion to the solemnities and famed outsides of another's piety.

On Death.

Nature calls us to meditate of death, by those things which are the instruments of acting it; and God by all the variety of his providence, makes us see death everywhere in all variety of circumstances, and dressed up for all the fancies and the expectation of every single person. Nature has given us one harvest every year, but death hath two; and the spring and the autumn send throngs of men and women to charnel-houses: and all the summer long, men are recovering from their evils of the spring, till the dog-days come, and then the Sirian star makes the summer deadly; and the fruits of autumn are laid up for all the year's provision, and the man that gathers them eats and surfeits, and dies and needs them not, and himself is laid up for eternity; and he that escapes till winter, only stays for another opportunity, which the distempers of that quarter minister to him with great variety. Thus death reigns in all the portions of our time. The autumn with its fruits provides disorders for us, and the winter's cold turns them into sharp diseases, and the spring brings towers to strew our hearse, and the summer gives green torf and brambles to bind upon our graves. Calentures and surfeit, cold and agues, are the four quarters of the year; and you can go no whither but you tread upon a dead

man's bones

The wild fellow in Petronius, that escaped upon a broken table from the furies of a shipwreck, as he was sunning himself upon the rocky shore, espied a man rolled upon his floating bed of waves, ballasted with sand in the folds of his garment, and carried by his civil enemy, the sea, towards the shore to find a grave. And it east him into some sad thoughts; that peradventure this man's wife in some part of the continent, safe and warin, looks next month for the good man's return; er, it may be, his son knows nothing of the tempest; or his father thinks of that affectionate kiss which still is warm upon the good old man's cheek, ever since he took a kind farewell, and he weeps with joy to think how blessed he shall be when his beloved boy returns into the circle of his father's arms. These are the thoughts of mortals, this is the end and sum of all their designs: a dark night and an ill guide, a boisterous sea and a broken cable, a hard rock and a rough wind, dashed in pieces the fortune of a whole family; and they that shall weep loudest for the accident are not

yet entered into the storm, and yet have suffered shipwreck. Then, looking upon the carcass, he knew it, and found it to be the master of the ship, who, the day Sefore, cast up the accounts of his patrimony and his trade, and named the day when he thought to be at home. See how the man swims who was so angry two days since! His passions are becalmed with the storm, his accounts cast up, his cares at an end, his voyage done, and his gains are the strange events of death, which, whether they be good or evil, the men that are alive seldom trouble themselves concerning the interest of the dead.

It is a mighty change that is made by the death of every person, and it is visible to us who are alive. Beckon but from the sprightfulness of youth, and the fair cheeks and full eyes of childhood; from the vigorousness and strong flexure of the joints of five-and-twenty, to the hollowness and deadly paleness, to the loathsomeness and horror of a three days' burial, and we shall perceive the distance to be very great and very strange. But so have I seen a rose newly springing from the clifts of its hood, and, at first, it was fair as the morning, and full with the dew of heaven, as a lamb's fleece; but when a ruder breath had forced open its virgin modesty, and dismantled its too youthful and unripe retirements it began to put on darkness, and to decline to softness and the symptoms of a sickly age; it bowed the head, and proke its stalk; and at night, having lost some of its leaves, and all its beauty, it fell into the portion of weeds and out-worn faces. The same is the portion of every mau and every woman; the heritage of worms and serpents, rottenness and cold dishonour, and our beauty so changed, that our acquaintance quickly knew us not; and that change mingled with so much horror, or else meets so with our fears and weak discoursings, that they who, six hours ago, tended upon us either with charitable or ambitious services, cannot, without some regret. stay in the room alone where the body lies stripped of its life and honour. I have re id of a fair young German gentleman, who, living, often refused to be pictured, but put off the impor tunity of his friends' desire by giving way, that after a few days' burial, they might send a painter to his vault, and, if they saw cause for it, draw the Image of his death Ento the life. They did so, and found his face half eaten, and his midriff and backbone full of serpents; and so he stands pictured among his armed ancestors. So does the fairest beauty change; and it will be as bad with you and me; and then what servants shall we have to wait upon as in the grave? what friends to visit us? what officions people to cleanse away the moist and unwholesome cloud reflected upon our faces from the sides of the weeping vaults, which are the longest weepers for our funeral?

The Day of Judgment.

Exen you and I, and all the world, kings and priests, nobles and learned, the crafty and the ea y, the wise and the foolish, the rich and the poor, the prevailing tyrant and the oppressed party, shall all appear to receive their symbol; and this is so far from abating anything of its terror and our dear concernment, that it much increases it. For although concerning precepts and discourses we are apt to neglect in particular what is recommended in general, and in incidences of mortality and sad events, the singularity of the chance heightens the apprehensions of the evil; yet it is so by accident, and only in regard of our imperfection; it being an effect of self-love, or some little creeping envy, which adheres too often to the unfortunate and miserable; or being apprehended to be in a rare case, and a singular unworthiness in ina who is afficted otherwise than is common to the sons of men, companions of his sin, and brethren of his nature, and partners of his usual accidents. yet in final and extreme events, the multitude of sufferers Coes not lessen, Lut Increase the sufferings; and when the first day of judgment happened-that. I meau, of the universal deluge of water upon the old world-the calamity swelled like the food, and every man saw his friend perish, and the neighbours of his dwelling, and the relatives of his house, and the sharers of his joys, and yesterday's bride, and the new-born heir, the priest of the family, and the honour of the kindred, all dying or dead, drenched in water and the divine vengeance; and then they had no place to fiee unto, no man cared for their souls; they had none to go anto for counsel, no sanctuary high enough to keep them from the vengeance that rained down from heaven; and so it shall be at the day of judgment, when that

world and this, and all that shall hereafter be born, shall pass through the same Red Sea, and be all baptised with the same fire, and be involved in the same cloud, in which shall be thunderings and terrors infinite. Every man's fear shall be increased by his neighbour's shrieks, and the amazement that all the world shall be in, shall unite as the sparks of a raging furnace into a globe of fire, and roll upon its own principle, and increase by direct appearances and intolerable reflectious. He that stands in a churchyard in the time of a great plague, and hears the passing-bell perpetually telling the sad stories of death, and sees crowds of infected bodies pressing to their graves, and others sick and tremulous, and death dressed up in all the images of sorrow round about him, is not supported in his spirit by the variety of his sorrow; and at doomsday, when the terrors are universal, besides that it is in itself so much greater, because it can affright the whole world, it is also made greater by communication and a sorrowful influence; grief being then strongly infectious, when there is no variety of state, but an entire kingdom of fear; and amazement is the king of all our passions, and all the world its subjects. And that shriek must needs be terrible, when millions of men and women, at the same instant, shall fearfully cry out, and the noise shall mingle with the trumpet of the archangel, with the thunders of the dying and groaning heavens, and the crack of the dissolving world, when the whole fabric of nature shall shake into dissolution and eternal ashes!

Consider what an infinite multitude of angels, and men, and women, shall then appear! It is a huge assembly when the men of one kingdom, the men of one age in a single province are gathered together into heaps and confusion of disorder; but then, all kingdoms of all ages, all the armies that ever mustered, all that world that Augustus Cæsar taxed, all those hundreds of millions that were slain in all the Roman wars, from Numa's time till Italy was broken into principalities and small exarchates: all these, and all that can come into numbers, and that did descend from the loins of Adam, shall at once be represented; to which account, if we add the armies of heaven, the nine orders of blessed spirits, and the infinite numbers in every order, we may suppose the numbers fit to express the majesty of that God, and the terror of that Judge, who is the Lord and Father of all that animaginable multitude! The majesty of the Judge, and the terrors of the judgment, shall be spoken aloud by the immediate forernuning accidents, which shall be so great violences to the old constitutions of nature, that it shall break her very bones, and disorder her till she be destroyed. St. Jerome relates out of the Jews' books, that their doctors used to account fifteen days of prodigy immediately before Christ's coming, and to every day assign a wonder; any one of which, if we should chance to see in the days of our flesh, it would affright us into the like thoughts which the old world had, when they saw the countries round about them covered with water and the divine vengeance; or as these poor people near Adria and the Mediterranean Sea. when their houses and cities were entering into graves, and the bowels of the earth rent with convulsions and horrid tremblings. The sea, they say, shall rise fifteen cubits above the highest mountains, and thence descend into hollowness and a prodigious drought; and when they are reduced again to their usual proportions, then all the beasts and creeping things, the monsters and the usual inhabitants of the sea, shall be gathered together, and make fearful noises to distract mankind: the birds shall mourn and change their song into threnes and sad accents; rivers of fire shall rise from east to west, and the stars shall be rent into threads of light, and scatter like the beards of comets; then shall be fearful earthquakes, and the rocks shall rend in pieces, the trees shall distil blood, and the mountains and fairest structures shall return into their primitive dust; the wild beasts shall leave their dens, and shall come into the companies of men, so that you shall hardly tell how to call them, herds of men or congregations of beasts; then shall the graves open and give up their dead, and those which are alive in nature and dead in fear shall be forced from the rocks whither they went to hide them, and from caverns of the earth where they would fain have been concealed: because their retirements are dismantled, and their rocks are broken into wider ruptures, and admit a strange light into their secret bowels; and the men being forced abroad into the theatre of mighty horrors, shall run up and down distracted, and at their wits' end; and then some shall die, and some shall be changed; and by this time the elect shall be gathered together from the four quarters of the world, and Christ shall come along with them to judgment.

ARCHBISHOP LEIGHTON.

6

ROBERT LEIGHTON (1611–1684) was the son of a Scottish physician, Dr. Alexander Leighton, whose tyrannical and barbarous treatment by the Star-chamber of Charles I. forms a foul blot on the government of that monarch.* * Robert Leighton was educated at the university of Edinburgu, and afterwards resided for some time at Douay, in France, where the acquaintance of some accomplished French students polished and liberalised his mind. In December 1641, he was ordained minister of Newbattle, near Edinburgh, and there be delivered the sermons composing his celebrated Commentary on the First Epistle of St. Peter.' His incumbency extended to February 1653, when he resigned his parish of Newbattle, and became Principal of the university of Edinburgh, which office he held till March 1662, when he was induced to separate himself from the Presbyterian Church, and accept preferment in the Church of England. He did this with reluctance, and chose at first the small and obscure diocese of Dunblane, where he officiated for about eight years. At Dunblane, Leighton's favourite walk is still pointed out, and it has been made the subject of an interesting little poetical work (The Bishop's Walk,' by ORWELL, or the Rev. Walter C. Smith, Glasgow). Leighton left his library to Dunblane, and the greater part of it is still preserved.

In 1670, he was made Archbishop of Glasgow, having accepted that appointment on condition that he should be assisted in his efforts to carry out such conciliatory measures as might include the Presbyterians. The selfishness and brutality of Sharp and Lauderdale, and the resolute determination of the Presbyterians to consent to no compromise, frustrated the pious wishes and designs of the archbishop, and he tendered his resignation, which the king, after some delay, accepted. He afterwards lived in retirement with a sister at Broadhurst, in Sussex, but being suddenly summoned to London, he died there, after a few day's illness, June 25, 1684. None of Archbishop Leighton's writings were published during his lifetime. They consist of the 'Commentary on St. Peter; Sermons,' preached at Newbattle; Lectures and Addresses,' delivered in Latin before the university of Edinburgh; and Spiritual Exercises, Letters, &c.' Various editions of the collected works have been published in England and America, the most complete being that edited by the Rev. W. West, Nairn (1869-70): Burnet has eulogised Leighton (to whom

*The elder Leighton wrote an intemperate polemical work, an Appeal to the Parlia ment: or son's Pien ogast the Price (648), for which he was. two years afterwards, sentenced to be publicly whipped at Westminster and set in the pillory, to have one side of his nose slit, one car cut off, and one side of his cheek branded with a hot iron; to have the whole of this repeated the next week at Cheapside, with the addition of S. S. (sower of sedition branded on his cheek, a fine of £10.00) to be paid. and to suffer perpetual imprisonment in the Fleet! The fine probably could not be paid but the rest of the sentence was put in force. After eleven years' eonfinement, the sufferer was liberated by the Long Parliament.