ture into the body of another man, should at the sounding of the last trumpet be raked together again from all the corners of the earth, and be made up anew into the same body it was before of the first man. Yet if we will be Christians, and rely upon God's promises, we must believe that we shall rise again with the same body that walked about, did eat, drink, and live here on earth; and that we shall see our Saviour and Redeemer with the same, the very same eyes, wherewith we now look upon the fading glories of this contemptible world.

How shall these seeming contrarieties be reconciled? If the latter be true, why should not the former be admitted? To explicate this riddle the better, give me leave to ask your lordship, if you now see the cannons, the ensigns, the arms, and other martial preparations at Oxford, with the same eyes wherewith many years agone you looked upon Porphyry's and Aristotle's leases there? I doubt not but you will answer me, assuredly with the very same. Is that noble and graceful person of yours, that begetteth both delight and reverence in every one that looketh upon it; is that body of yours, that now is grown to such comely and full dimensions, as nature can give her none more advantageous, the same person, the same body, which your virtuous and excellent mother bore nine months in her chaste and honoured womb, and that your nurse gave suck unto? Most certainly it is the same. yet if you consider it well, it cannot be doubted, but that sublunary matter, being in a perpetual flux, and in bodies which have internal principles of heat and motion, much continually transpiring out to make room for the supply of new aliment; at the length, in long process of time, all is so changed, as that ship at Athens may as well be called the same ship that was there two hundred years before, and whereof, by reason of the continual reparations, not one foot of the timber is remaining in her that builded her at the first, as this body now can be called the same it was forty years agone, unless some higher considera

And

tion keep up the identity of it. Now what that is, let us examine, and whether or no it will reach to our difficulty of the resurrection. Let us consider, then, how that which giveth the numerical individuation to a body is the substantial form. As long as that remaineth the same, though the matter be in a continual flux and motion, yet the thing is still the same. There

is not one drop of the same water in the Thames, that ran down by Whitehall yesternight; yet no man will deny, but that is the same river that was in Queen Elizabeth's time, as long as it is supplied from the same common stock, the sea. Though this example reacheth not home, it illustrateth the thing. If then the form remain absolutely the same after separation from the matter, that it was in the matter, (which can hap-` pen only to forms that subsist by themselves, as human souls,) it followeth then, that whensoever it is united to matter again, all matter coming out of the same common magazine, it maketh again the same man, with the same eyes, and all the same limbs that were formerly. Nay, he is composed of the same individual matter, for it hath the same distinguisher and individuator, to whit, the same form or soul. Matter, considered singly by itself, hath no distinction: all matter is in itself the same; we must fancy it, as we do the indigested chaos; it is a uniformly wide ocean. Particularize a few drops of the sea, by filling a glassfull of them, then that glassfull is distinguished from all the rest of the watery bulk. But return back those few drops to from whence they were taken, and the glassfull that even now had an individuation by itself, Ioseth that, and groweth one and the same with the other main stock. Yet if you fill your glass again, wheresoever you take it up, so it be of the same uniform bulk of water you had before, it is the same glassfull of water that you had. But as I said before, this example fitteth entirely, no more than the other did. In such abstracted speculations, where we must consider matter without form, which hath no actual being, we must not expect adequated examples

in nature. But enough is said to make a speculative man see, that if God should join the soul of a lately dead man, (even whilst his dead corpse should lie entire in his winding-sheet here,) unto a body made of earth, taken from some mountain in America, it were most true and certain, that the body he should then lie by were the same identical body he lived with before his death, and late resurrection. It is evident that sameness, thisness, and thatness, belongeth not to matter by itself, for a general indifference runneth through it all, but only as it is distinguished and individuated by the form; which, in our case, whensoever the same soul doth, it must be understood always to be the same matter and body.

This point thus passed over, I may piece to it what our author saith of a magazine of subsistent forms, residing first in the chaos, and hereafter, when the world shall have been destroyed by fire, in the general heap of ashes, out of which God's voice did, and shall draw them out, and clothe them with matter. This language were handsome for a poet or rhetorician to speak; but in a philosopher that should ratiocinate strictly and rigorously, I cannot admit it; for certainly there are no subsistent forms of corporeal things, excepting the soul of man, which besides being an informing form hath another particular consideration belonging to it, too long to speak of here. But whensoever that compound is destroyed the form perisheth with the whole. And for the natural production of corporeal things, I conceive it to be wrought out by the action and passion of the elements among themselves, which introducing new tempers and dispositions into the bodies where these conflicts pass, new forms succeed old ones, when the dispositions are raised to such a height as can no longer consist with the preceding form, and are in the immediate degree to fit the succeeding one which they usher in. The mystery of all which, I have at large unfolded in my above-mentioned treatise of the "Immortality of the Soul."

I shall say no more to the first part of our phy

sician's discourse, after I have observed how his consequence is no good one, where he inferreth, that if the devils foreknew who would be damned or saved, it would save them the labour, and end their work of tempting mankind to mischief and evil. For whatsoever their moral design and success be in it, their nature impelleth them to be always doing it; for on the one side it is active in the highest degree, (as being pure acts, that is, spirits,) so on the other side they are malign in as great an excess. By the one they must be always working, wheresoever they may work, (like water in a vessel full of holes, that will run out of every one of them which is not stopped ;) by the other, their whole work must be malicious and mischievous. Joining then both these qualities together, it is evident they will always be tempting mankind, though they know they shall be frustrate of their moral end.

But were it not time that I made an end? Yes, it is more than time; and therefore having once passed the limit that confined what was becoming, the next step carried me into the ocean of error, which being infinite, and therefore more or less bearing no proportion in it, I will proceed a little further, to take a short survey of his Second Part, and hope for as easy pardon after this addition to my sudden and undigested remarks, as if I had enclosed them up now.

Methinks he beginneth with somewhat an affected discourse, to prove his natural inclination to charity, which virtue is the intended theme of all the remainder of his discourse; and I doubt he mistaketh the lowest orb or limb of that high seraphic virtue for the top and perfection of it, and maketh a kind of human compassion to be divine charity. He will have it to be a general way of doing good. It is true, he addeth then, for God's sake; but he allayeth that again with saying, he will have that good done, as by obedience, and to accomplish God's will, and looketh at the effects it worketh upon our souls but in a narrow compass; like one in the vulgar throng, that considereth God as a judge, and as a rewarder or a punisher. Whereas

perfect charity is that vehement love of God for his own sake, for his goodness, for his beauty, for his excellency, that carrieth all the motions of our soul directly and violently to him, and maketh a man disdain, or rather hate all obstacles that may retard his journey to him. And that face of it that looketh toward mankind with whom we live, and warmeth us to do others good, is but like the overflowing of the main stream, that swelling above its banks, runneth over in a multitude of little channels.

I am not satisfied that in the likeness which he putteth between God and man, he maketh the difference between them to be but such as between two creatures that resemble one another; for between these there is some proportion, but between the others none at all. In the examining of which discourse, wherein the author observeth, that no two faces are ever seen to be perfectly alike; nay, no two pictures of the same face were exactly made so, I could take occasion to insert a subtle and delightful demonstration of Mr. White's, wherein he showeth how it is impossible that two bodies (for example, two bowls) should ever be made exactly like one another; nay, not rigorously equal in any one accident, as namely in weight, but that still there will be some little difference and inequality between them (the reason of which observation our author meddled not with) were it not that I have been so long already, as digressions were now very unseasonable.

Shall I commend or censure our author for believing so well of his acquired knowledge, as to be dejected at the thought of not being able to leave it a legacy among his friends? Or shall I examine whether it be not a high injury to wise and gallant princes, who out of the generousness and nobleness of their nature do patronize arts and learned men, to impute their so doing to vanity of desiring praise, or to fear of reproach? I will not engage any that may

But let these pass.