at tables; for even in sortileges and matters of greatest
uncertainty there is a settled and pre-ordered course of effects. It is
we that are blind, not fortune. Because our eye is too dim to discover
the mystery of her effects, we foolishly paint her blind, and hoodwink
the providence of the Almighty.

'Tis, I confess, the common fate of men of singular gifts of mind to be
destitute of those of fortune; which doth not any way deject the spirit
of wiser judgments, who thoroughly understand the justice of this
proceeding; and, being enriched with higher donatives, cast a more
careless eye on these vulgar parts of felicity. It is a most unjust
ambition to desire to engross the mercies of the Almighty.

I have heard some with deep sighs lament the lost lines of Cicero;
others with as many groans deplore the combustion of the library of
Alexandria; for my own part, I think there be too many in the world, and
could with patience behold the urn and ashes of the Vatican, could I,
with a few others, recover the perished leaves of Solomon. Some men have
written more than others have spoken. Of those three great inventions in
Germany, there are two which are not without their incommodities. Tis
not a melancholy wish of my own, but the desires of better heads, that
there were a general synod--not to unite the incompatible difference of
religion, but for the benefit of learning, to reduce it, as it lay at
first, in a few and solid authors; and to condemn to the fire those
swarms and millions of rhapsodies, begotten only to distract and abuse
the weaker judgments of scholars and to maintain the trade and mystery
of typographers.

As all that die in the war are not termed soldiers, so neither can I
properly term all those that suffer in matters of religion, martyrs.
There are many, questionless, canonised on earth that shall never be
saints in heaven, and have their names in histories and martyrologies
who, in the eyes of God, are not so perfect martyrs as was that wise
heathen Socrates, that suffered on a fundamental point of religion--the
unity of God. The leaven and ferment of all, not only civil but
religious actions, is wisdom; without which to commit ourselves to the
flames is homicide, and, I fear, but to pass through one fire into
another.

_III.--THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY_

I thank God I have not those strait ligaments or narrow obligations to
the world as to dote on life or tremble at the name of death. Not that I
a