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fever to the plague, fear into despair, anger into rage, and loss into madness, and sorrow to amazement and confusion: but if either we were innocent, or else, by the sadness, are made penitent, we are put to school, or into the theatre, either to learn how, or else actually to combat for a crown; the accident may serve an end of mercy, but is not a messenger of wrath.

Let us therefore be governed by external, and present, and seeming things; nor let us make the same judgment of things that common and weak understandings do; nor make other men, and they not the wisest, to be judges of our felicity, so that we be happy or miserable, as they please to think us: but let reason, and experience, and religion, and hope relying upon the divine promises, be the measure of our judgment. No wise man did ever describe felicity without virtue*; and no good man did ever think, virtue could depend upon the variety of a good or bad fortune. It is no evil to be poor, but to be vicious and impatient.

Means to obtain Content by way of considerations.

To these exercises and spiritual instruments, if we add the following considerations concerning the nature and circumstances of human chance, we may better secure our peace. For as to children, who are afraid of vain images, we use to persuade confidence by making them to handle and look nearer such things, that when, in such a familiarity, they perceive them innocent, they may overcome their fears: so must timorous, fantastical, sad, and discontented persons, be treated; they must be made to consider and on all sides to look upon the accident, and to take all its dimensions, and consider its consequences, and to behold the purpose of God, and the common mistakes of men, and their evil sentences, they usually pass upon them. For then we shall perceive, that, like colts of unmanaged horses, we start at dead bones and lifeless blocks, things that are inactive as they are innocent. But if we secure our hopes and our fears, and make them moderate and within government, we may the sooner overcome the evil of the accident; for nothing that we feel is so bad as what we fear.

* Beatitudo pendet à rectis consiliis in affectionem animi constantem desinentibus. Plut.

1. Consider that the universal providence of God hath so ordered it, that the good things of nature and fortune are divided, that we may know how to bear our own, and relieve each other's wants and imperfections. It is not for a man, but for a God, to have all excellences and all felicities. He supports my poverty with his wealth; I counsel and instruct him with my learning and experience. He hath many friends, I many children: he hath no heir, I have no inheritance: and any one great blessing, together with the common portions of nature and necessity, is a fair fortune, if it be but health or strength, or the swiftness of Ahimaaz. For it is an unreasonable discontent to be troubled, that I have not so good cocks or dogs or horses as my neighbour, being more troubled that I want one thing that I need not, than thankful for having received all that I need. Nero had this disease, that he was not content with the fortune of the whole empire, but put the fiddlers to death for being more skilful in the trade, than he was: and Dionysius the elder was so angry at Philoxenus for singing, and with Plato for disputing, better than he did, that he sold Plato a slave into Ægina, and condemned the other to the quarries.

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This consideration is to be enlarged by adding to it, that there are some instances of fortune and a fair condition, that cannot stand with some others, but if desire this, you must lose that, and unless you be content with one, you lose the comfort of both. If you covet learning, you must have leisure and a retired life: if to be a politician, you must go abroad and get experience, and do all businesses, and keep all company, and have no leisure at all. If you will be rich, you must be frugal: if you will be popular, you must be bountiful: if a philosopher, you must despise riches. The Greek, that designed to make the most exquisite picture, that could be imagined, fancied the eye of Chione, and the hair of Pægnium, and Tarsia's lip, Philenium's chin, and the forehead of Delphia, and set all these upon Milphidippa's neck, and thought that he should outdo both art and nature. But when he came to view the proportions, he found, that what was excellent in Tarsia, did not agree with the other excellency of Philenium; and although, singly, they were rare pieces, yet

Non te ad omnia læta genuit, O Agamemnon, Atreus. Opus est te gaudere et mærere: mortalis enim natus es, et ut haud velis: superi sic constituerunt.

in the whole, they made a most ugly face. The dispersed excellences and blessings of many men, if given to one, would not make a handsome, but a monstrous fortune. Use therefore that faculty which nature hath given thee, and thy education hath made actual, and thy calling hath made a duty. But if thou desirest to be a saint, refuse not his persecution if thou wouldst be famous as Epaminondas or Fabricius, accept also of their poverty; for that added lustre to their persons, and envy to their fortune, and their virtue without it could not have been so excellent. Let Euphorion sleep quietly with his old rich wife; and let Medius drink on with Alexander; and remember thou canst not have the riches of the first, unless you have the old wife too; nor the favour, which the second had with his prince, unless you buy it at his price, that is, lay thy sobriety down at first, and thy health a little after; and then their condition, though it look splendidly, yet when you handle it on all sides, it will prick your fingers.

2. Consider, how many excellent personages in all ages have suffered as great or greater calamities than this, which now tempts thee to impatience. Agis was the most noble of the Greeks, and yet his wife bore a child by Alcibiades: and Philip was prince of Ituræa, and yet his wife ran away with his brother Herod into Galilee; and certainly, in a great fortune, that was a great calamity. But these are but single instances. Almost all the ages of the world have noted, that their most eminent scholars were most eminently poor, some by choice, but most by chance, and an inevitable decree of Providence and, in the whole sex of women, God hath decreed the sharpest pains of child-birth, to shew, that there is no state exempt from sorrow, and yet that the weakest persons have strength more than enough to bear the greatest evil: and the greatest queens, and the mothers of saints and apostles, have no charter of exemption from this sad sentence. But the Lord of men and angels was also the King of sufferings: and if thy coarse robe trouble thee, remember the swaddlingclothes of Jesus: if thy bed be uneasy, yet it is not worse than his manger; and it is no sadness to have a thin table, if thou callest to mind, that the King of heaven and earth

:

z Prandet Aristoteles, quando Philippo lubet; Diogenes, quando Diogeni.

was fed with a little breast-milk and yet, besides this, he suffered all the sorrows which we deserved. We therefore have great reason to sit down upon our own hearths, and warm ourselves at our own fires, and feed upon content at home: for it were a strange pride to expect to be more gently treated by the Divine Providence, than the best and wisest men, than apostles and saints, nay, the Son of the eternal God, the heir of both the worlds.

man.

This consideration may be enlarged by surveying all the states and families of the world: and he that at once saw Ægina and Megara, Pyræus and Corinth, lie gasping in their ruins, and almost buried in their own heaps, had reason to blame Cicero for mourning impatiently the death of one woIn the most beauteous and splendid fortune, there are many cares and proper interruptions and allays in the fortune of a prince there is not the coarse robe of beggary; but there are infinite cares; and the judge sits upon the tribunal with great ceremony and ostentation of fortune", and yet, at his house or in his breast, there is something, that causes him to sigh deeply. Pittacus was a wise and valiant man, but his wife overthrew the table when he had invited his friends: upon which the good man, to excuse her incivility and his own misfortune, said, "That every man had one evil, and he was most happy, that had but that alone." And if nothing else happens, yet sicknesses so often do embitter the fortune and content of a family, that a physician, in a few years, and with the practice upon a very few families, gets experience enough to administer to almost all diseases. And when thy little misfortune troubles thee, remember that thou hast known the best of kings and the best of men put to death publicly by his own subjects.

3. There are many accidents, which are esteemed great calamities, and yet we have reason enough to bear them well and unconcernedly; for they neither touch our bodies nor our souls: our health and our virtue remain entire, our life

a Servius Sulpicius.

b Hic in foro beatus esse creditur,

Cùm foribus apertis sit suis miserrimus;

Imperat mulier, jubet omnia, semper litigat.
Multa adferunt illi dolorem, nihil mihi.—
Ferre, quam sortem patiuntur omnes,

Nemo recusat.

and our reputation. It may be I am slighted, or I have received ill language; but my head aches not for it, neither hath it broke my thigh, nor taken away my virtue, unless I lose my charity or my patience. Inquire, therefore, what you are the worse, either in your soul or in your body, for what hath happened: for upon this very stock many evils will disappear, since the body and the soul make up the whole man. And when the daughter of Stilpo proved a wanton, he said it was none of his sin, and therefore there was no reason it should be his misery. And if an enemy hath taken all that from a prince, whereby he was a king he may refresh himself by considering all that is left him, whereby he is a man.

4. Consider, that sad accidents and a state of affliction is a school of virtue: it reduces our spirits to soberness, and our counsels to moderation: it corrects levity, and interrupts the confidence of sinning. "It is good for me (said David) that I have been afflicted, for thereby I have learned thy law." And "I know (O Lord) that thou of very faithfulness hast caused me to be troubled." For God, who, in mercy and wisdom, governs the world, would never have suffered so many sadnesses, and have sent them especially to the most virtuous and the wisest men, but that he intends they should be the seminary of comfort, the nursery of virtue, the exercise of wisdom, the trial of patience; the venturing for a crown, and the gate of glory.

5. Consider, that afflictions are oftentimes the occasions of great temporal advantages; and we must not look upon them, as they sit down heavily upon us, but as they serve some of God's ends, and the purposes of universal Providence. And when a prince fights justly, and yet unprosperously, if he could see all those reasons for which God hath so ordered it, he would think it the most reasonable thing in the world, and that it would be very ill to have it otherwise. If a man could have opened one of the pages of the Si natus es tu, Trophime, solus omnium

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