but his game is our earnest; and his drums, rattles, and hobby-horses, but the emblems and mocking of man's business. His father hath writ him as his own little story, wherein he reads those days of his life that he cannot remember, and sighs to see what innocence he hath out-lived. The elder he grows, he is a stair lower from God; and, like his first father, much worse in his breeches.[3] He is the Christian's example, and the old man's relapse; the one imitates his pureness, and the other falls into his simplicity. Could he put off his body with his little coat, he had got eternity without a burden, and exchanged but one heaven for another.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] So Washbourne, in his Divine Poems, 12mo. 1654:
"—— ere 'tis accustom'd unto sin,
The mind white paper is, and will admit
Of any lesson you will write in it."—p. 26.
[2] This, and every other passage throughout the volume, [included between brackets,] does not appear in the first edition of 1628.
[3] Adam did not, to use the words of the old Geneva Bible, "make himself breeches," till he knew sin: the meaning of the passage in the text is merely that, as a child advances in age, he commonly proceeds in the knowledge and commission of vice and immorality.