knowledge the impressions of Majesty in that upright face of his. Wherefore are they, but for man? Some for his labour; as the ox: some for his service; as the horse: some for his pleasure; as the dog, or the ape: some for his exercise; as the beasts of the forest: All for man.

But, when we look up at his Infinite Creator, Lord, what is man? O God, thou art an intelligible sphere, whose centre is every where, whose circumference is no where but in thyself: man is a mere centre, without a circumference. Thou, O God, in una essentiá omnia præhabes; "in one essence fore-comprisest all things;" as Aquinas, out of Dionysius: man, in a poor imperfect composition, holds nothing. Thou art light, hast light, dwellest in light inaccessible: man, of himself, is as dark as earth; yea, as hell. Thou art God all-sufficient; the very heathen could say, undevòs deeσÌ DεTOV; “It μηδενὸς δεεσθαὶ θεῖον is for none but God to want nothing:" man wants all but evil. Shortly, thou art all holiness, power, justice, wisdom, mercy, truth, perfection: man is nothing but defect, error, ignorance, injustice, impotence, corruption. Lord then, what is man to thee, but a fit subject for thy wrath? Yet, let it be rather a mere object of thy commiseration. Behold, we are vile: thou art glorious. Let us adore thine infiniteness: do thou pity our wretchedness. Lord, what is man?

Leave we comparisons. Let us take man as he is himself. It is a rule of our old countryman of Hales, the acute master of Bonaventure, that a man should be rigidus sibi, pius aliis; "rigorous to himself, kind to others." Surely, as Nazianzen observes, in one kind, that nothing is more pleasing to talk of than other men's businesses; so, there is nothing more easy, than for a man to be wittily bitter in invectives against his own condition. Who hath not brain and gall enough to be a Timon; depreciari carnem hanc, as Tertullian speaks; "to disparage humanity;" and, like an angry lion, to beat himself to blood with his own stern. Neither is it more rife for dogs to bark at men, than men at themselves. Alas! to what purpose is this currish clamour? We are miserable enough, though we would flatter ourselves. To whose insultation can we be thus exposed, but to our own? I come not hither to sponge you with this vinegar and gall; but, give me leave a little, though not to aggravate, yet to deplore our wretchedness. There can be no ill blood in this. Amaritudo sermonum medicina animarum; "This bitterness is medicinal;" saith St. Ambrose. I do not fear we shall live so long, as to know ourselves too well: Lord, then, what is man? What, in his being? What, in his deprivation? How miserable in both!

1. What should I fetch the poor wretched infant out of the blind caverns of nature, to shame us with our conceptions; and to make us blush at the substance, nourishment, posture of that, which shall be a man? There he lies senseless for some months, as the heathen orator truly observes, as if he had no soul. When he comes forth into the large womb of the world, his first greeting of his mother is with cries and lamentations; and more he would cry, if

he could know into what a world he comes; recompensing her painful throes, with continual unquietness. What sprawling, what wringing, what impotence is here! There lies the poor little Lordling of the World, not able to help himself; while the new-yeaned Lamb rises up on the knees, and seeks for the teats of her dam, knowing where and how to find relief so soon as it begins to be. Alas! what can man do, if he be let alone; but make faces, and noises, and die? Lord, what is man? This is his Ingress into the world.

2. His Progress in it is no better. From an impotent birth, he goes on to a silly childhood. If nobody should teach him to speak, what would he do? Historians may talk of "Bec," that the untaught infant said: I dare say he learnt it of the goats; not of nature. I shall as soon believe, that Adam spake Dutch in Paradise, according to Goropius Beccanus's idle fancy, as that the child meant to speak an articulate word unbidden. And, if a mother or nurse did not tend him, how soon would he be both noisome, and nothing; where other creatures stand upon their own feet, and are wrapt in their own natural mantles, and tend upon their dams for their sustenance, and find them out among ten thousand! yea, the very spider weaves, so soon as ever it comes out of the egg. soon as age and nurture can feoff him in any wit, he falls to shifts. All his ambition is to please himself, in those crude humours of his young vanity. If he can but elude the eyes of a nurse or tutor, how safe he is! Neither is he yet capable of any other care, but how to decline his own good, and to be a safe truant. It is a large time, that our casuists give him, that at seven years he begins to lie. Upon time and tutorage, what devices he hath to feed his appetite! what fetches to live!

As

And, if now many successions of experiments have furnished him with a thousand helps, yet, as it is in the text, On, What is Adam, and the son of Enosh?

How was it with the first man? how with the next? Could we look so far back as to see Adam and Eve, when they were new turned out of Paradise? in dignam exilio terram, as Nazianzen speaks of his Pontic habitation, Oh that hard-driven and miserable pair! the perfection of their invention and judgment was lost in their sin: their soul was left no less naked than the body. How woefully do we think they did scramble to live? They had water and earth before them; but fire, an active and useful element, was yet unknown. Plants they had; but metals, whereby they might make use of those plants, and redact them to any form for instruments of work, were yet, till Tubal-Cain, to seek. Here was Adam, delving with a jaw-bone, and harrowing with sticks tied uncouthly together, and paring his nails with his teeth: there, Eve, making a comb of her fingers, and tying her raw-skinned breeches together, with rinds of trees; or pinning them up, with thorns. Here was Adam, tearing off some arm of a tree, to drive in those stakes, which he hath pointed with some sharp flint; there Eve, fetching in her water in a shell: here, Adam the first midwife to his

miserable consort; and Eve wrapping her little one in a skin lately borrowed from some beast, and laying it on a pillow of leaves or grass. Their fist was their hammer; their hand, their dish; their arms and legs, their ladder; heaven, their canopy; and earth, their feather-bed. And now, ON, What is Adam?

In time, art began to improve nature. Every day's experiments brought forth something; and now, man durst affect to dwell, not safe, but fair: to be clad, not warm, but fine; and the palate waxed, by degrees, wanton and wild: the back and the belly strove whether should be more luxurious; and the eye affected to be more prodigal than they both: and, ever since, the ambition of these three hath spent and wearied the world; so as, in the other extreme, we may well cry out, Lord, what is man?

For, to rise up with his age and the world's, now, when man is grown ripe in all professions, an exquisite artist, a learned philosopher, a stout champion, a deep politician, whither doth he bend all his powers, but to attain his own ends, to cross another's? to greaten himself; to supplant a rival; to kill an enemy; to embroil a world. Man's heart, as Bernard well, is a mill; ever grinding some grist or other of his own device: and, I may add, if there be no grain to work upon, sets itself on fire.

Lord, what is man, even after the accession of a professed Christianity, but a butcher of his own kind? Seneca told his Lucilius, the same that Job hath, that vivere militare est. It is true now; not morally, but literally. What a woeful shambles is Christendom itself, ever since the last comet be come. Friar Dominic was, according to his mother's dream, a dog with a firebrand in his mouth: sure, ever since, religion hath been fiery and bloody. Homicida cucurbitarum, was the stile, that St. Austin gave to Manicheus: now, every man abroad strives to be homicida Christianorum: as if men were grown to the resolution of the old Tartars, of whom Haytonus; they thought it no sin to kill a man, but not to pull off their horse's bridle when he should feed, this they held mortal. What hills of carcases are here! What rivers of blood! At tu, Domine, usquequo? How long, Lord, how long shall men play the men in killing; and seek glory in these ambitious murders? Oh stay, stay, thou Preserver of Men, these impetuous rages of inhuman mankind; and scatter the people, that delight in war.

And, blessings be upon the anointed head of the king of our peace, under whose happy sceptre we enjoy these calm and comfortable times; while all the rest of the world is weltering in blood, and scorching in their mutual flames! May all the blessings of our peace return upon him, who is, under God, the author of these blessings, and upon his seed for ever and ever!

How willingly would I now forget, as an old man easily might, to turn back to the dispositions, studies, courses of man; commonly bent upon the prosecution, whether of his lust or malice. Woe is me! how is his time spent? In hollow visits; in idle courtings; in epicurean pamperings; in fantastic dressings; in lawless disports; in deep plots, crafty conveyances, quarrellous law-suits, spiteful

underminings, corroding of riches, cozening in contracts, revenging of wrongs, suppressing the emulous, oppressing inferiors, mutiny ing against authority, eluding of laws, and what shall I say? in doing all but what he should: so as, in this, man proves Polybius's word too true, That he is both the craftiest of all creatures and most vicious; and, in the best and all his ways, makes good the word in my Text, even in this sense, Man is like unto vanity: yea, like is not the same; Man is altogether vanity; Psalm xxxix. 6: indeed so more than vanity, that we may rather say vanity is like to man. What a deal of variety of vanity here is! one's is a starved vanity; another's, a pampered one: one's, a jovial vanity; another's, a sullen one: one's, a silken vanity; another's, a ragged one: one's, a careless vanity; another's, a carking: And all these rivulets run into one common ocean of vanity; at last, universa vanitas omnis homo. In this busy variety doth he wear out the time and himself, till age or sickness summon him to his dissolution.

But, the while, in the few minutes of our life, how are our drachms of pleasure lost in our pounds of gall! Anguish of soul, troubles of mind, distempers of body, losses of estate, blemishes of reputation, miscarriages of children, mis-casualties, unquietness, pains, griefs, fears take up our hearts; and forbid us to enjoy, not happiness, but our very selves: so as our whole life sits, like Augustus, inter suspiria et lachrymas; "betwixt sighs and tears:" and all these hasten us on to our end; and, woe is me, how soon is that upon us! I remember Gerson brings in an Englishman asking a Frenchman, Quot annos habes? "How many years are you?" usual Latin phrase, when we ask after a man's age: His answer is, Annos non habeo; "I am of no years at all, but death hath forborne me these fifty."

3. Surely, we cannot make account of one minute. Besides the vanity of unprofitableness, here is the vanity of Transitoriness. How doth the momentariness of this misery add to the misery! What a flower, a vapour, a smoke, a bubble, a shadow, a dream of a shadow our life is! We are going; and then a careless life is shut up in a disconsolate end, and God thinks it enough to threat, Ye shall die like men. Alas! this worm-eaten apple soon falls. Vitreum hoc corpusculum, as Erasmus terms it, is soon cracked and broken.

It is not for every one, to have his soul sucked out of his mouth with a kiss; as the Jews say of Moses. He, that came into the world with cries, goes out with groans: the pangs of death, the anguish of conscience, the shrieking of friends, the frights of hell meet now together, to render him perfectly miserable; and now, Lord, what is man?

Well, he dies, saith the Psalmist, and then all his thoughts perish. Lo, what a word here is! All his thoughts perish. What is man, but for his thoughts? Those are the only improvement of reason; and that, in an infinite variety. One bends his thoughts upon some busy controversies; perhaps, nec gemino ab ovo: another, upon some deep plot of state to be moulded up, like to China

clay, some hundred years after: another hath cast models in his brain of some curious fabric, wherewith he will enrich the surface of the earth: another hath, in his active imagination, hooked in his neighbour's inheritance; and takes care to convey it: one studies art; another, fraud; another, the art of fraud: one is laying a foundation for future greatness, as low as hell; another is laying on a gilded roof, where is no firm foundation: each one is taken up with several thoughts; when he dies, all those thoughts perish; all those castles in the air, νεφελοκοκυγια as Aristophanes his word is, vanish to nothing: only his ill thoughts stick by him, and wait on his soul to hell.

But I have not yet done with the body. Rameses, which signifieth worms, is our last station in this wilderness: yet one step lower è corpore vermes, è vermibus fætor; as Bernard well. He, that was rotted with disorder, would be sweetened with odours; but it is more than all Arabia can do; neither is there more horror in the face of death, than in his breath noisomeness. Lord, what is man?

But, alas! it is well for this part, that it is for the time senseless: the living spirit pays the while for all; which, if it be but a meer man's, is hurried by devils immediately into the dreadful regions of horror and death, and there lies for ever and ever and ever in unsufferable, unutterable, unconceivable torments, without all possibility of intermission or mitigation. Oh, woe, woe, woe to those miserable souls, that ever they were created! And now, Lord, what is man?

Ye have seen man divided by his times; in his Ingress, Progress, Egress: or, in Lactantius's terms; in his original, state, dissolution. See him now, at one glance, divided in his parts; Bernard's two mites; a body and a soul.

What is man, then? A goodly creature he is. When I look upon his stirring pile, I can say, I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Lord, I can admire thee in me, and yet abase myself: thou art so much more wonderful in thy works, by how much I am viler. What is this body of mine, but a piece of that I tread upon; a sack of dust, if not saccus stercorum, as Bernard; a sewer of ill humours; a magazine of diseases; a feast of worms. And, as for that better part, the inmate of this ragged cottage, though, as it proceeds from thee, it is a pure immortal spirit, a spark of thy heavenly fire, a glimpse of that divine light; yet, as it is mine, how can I pity it! Alas, how dark it is with ignorance! For what have I here, but that cognitionem nocturnam, which Aquinas yields to worse creatures? How foul and muddy with error! Nec quis error turpitudine caret; "There is no error that is not nasty;" as Austin truly. How earthly and gross with mis-affections! Præcedit carnem in crimine; "It ushers the flesh in sinful courses;" as Bernard. How as unlike thee, as like him that marred it! And, if both parts in their kind were good; yet, put together, they are naught. Earth is good, and water is good; yet, put together, they make mud and mire. Lord, then, what is man?