Even Sylla,
that thought himself safe in his urn, could not prevent
revenging tongues, and stones thrown at his monument.
Happy are they whom privacy makes innocent, who
deal so with men in this world, that they are not
afraid to meet them in the next; who, when they die,
make no commotion among the dead, and are not
touched with that poetical taunt of Isaiah.*
Pyramids, arches, obelisks, were but the irregularities
of vain-glory, and wild enormities of ancient magna-
nimity. But the most magnanimous resolution rests in
the Christian religion, which trampleth upon pride and
sits on the neck of ambition, humbly pursuing that
infallible perpetuity, unto which all others must
diminish their diameters, and be poorly seen in angles
of contingency.+
Pious spirits who passed their days in raptures of
futurity, made little more of this world, than the world
that was before it, while they lay obscure in the chaos
of pre-ordination, and night of their fore-beings. And
if any have been so happy as truly to understand
Christian annihilation, ecstasies, exolution, liquefaction,
transformation, the kiss of the spouse, gustation of
God, and ingression into the divine shadow, they have
already had an handsome anticipation of heaven; the
glory of the world is surely over, and the earth in ashes
unto them.
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