vigour of being an antidote or cordial against it. And as the noblest
and most generous cordials that nature or art afford, or can prepare, if
they be often taken and made familiar, become no cordials, nor have any
extraordinary operation, so the greatest cordial of the heart, patience,
if it be much exercised, exalts the venom and the malignity of the
enemy, and the more we suffer the more we are insulted upon. When God
had made this earth of nothing, it was but a little help that he had, to
make other things of this earth: nothing can be nearer nothing than this
earth; and yet how little of this earth is the greatest man! He thinks
he treads upon the earth, that all is under his feet, and the brain
that thinks so is but earth; his highest region, the flesh that covers
that, is but earth, and even the top of that, that wherein so many
Absaloms take so much pride, is but a bush growing upon that turf of
earth. How little of the world is the earth! And yet that is all that
man hath or is. How little of a man is the heart, and yet it is all by
which he is; and this continually subject not only to foreign poisons
conveyed by others, but to intestine poisons bred in ourselves by
pestilential sicknesses. O who, if before he had a being he could have
sense of this misery, would buy a being here upon these conditions?

XI. EXPOSTULATION.

My God, my God, all that thou askest of me is my heart, _My Son, give me
thy heart_.[147] Am I thy Son as long as I have but my heart? Wilt thou
give me an inheritance, a filiation, any thing for my heart? O thou, who
saidst to Satan, _Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is
none like him upon the earth_,[148] shall my fear, shall my zeal, shall
my jealousy, have leave to say to thee, Hast thou considered my heart,
that there is not so perverse a heart upon earth; and wouldst thou have
that, and shall I be thy son, thy eternal Son's coheir, for giving that?
_The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who
can know it?_[149] He that asks that question makes the answer, I the
Lord search the heart. When didst thou search mine? Dost thou think to
find it, as thou madest it, in Adam? Thou hast searched since, and found
all these gradations in the ill of our hearts, _that every imagination
of the thoughts of our hearts is only evil continually_.[150] Dost thou
remember this, and wouldst thou have my heart? O God of all light, I
know thou knowest all, and it is tho