While some have studied Monuments, others have studiously declined them: and some have been so vainly boisterous, that they durst not acknowledge their Graves; wherein Alaricus[102] seems most subtle, who had a Rever turned to hide his bones at the bottome. Even Sylla that thought himself safe in his Urne, 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 toucht with that poeticall taunt of Isaiah.[103]
Pyramids, Arches, Obelisks, were but the irregularities of vain-glory, and wilde enormities of ancient magnanimity. But the most magnanimous resolution rests in the Christian Religion, which trampleth upon pride, and sets 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.[104]
Pious spirits who passed their dayes in raptures of futurity, made little more of this world, then the world that was before it, while they lay obscure in the Chaos of preordination, and night of their fore-beings. And if any have been so happy as truly to understand Christian annihilation, extasis, exolution, liquefaction, transformation, the kisse 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.
To subsist in lasting Monuments, to live in their productions, to exist in their names, and prædicament of Chymera’s, was large satisfaction unto old expectations and made one part of their Elyziums. But all this is nothing in the Metaphysicks of true belief. To live indeed is to be again our selves, which being not only an hope but an evidence in noble beleevers; ’Tis all one to lie in St. Innocents Church-yard,[105] as in the Sands of Ægypt: Ready to be any thing, in the extasie of being ever, and as content with six foot as the Moles of Adrianus.[106]
Lucan
——Tabesne cadavera solvat
An rogus haud refert.——
Footnotes
[90] Tibullus.
[91] Oracula Chaldaica cum scholiis Pselli et Phethonis. Βίη λιπóντων σῶμα ψυχαὶ καθαρώταται. Vi corpus relinquentium animæ purissimæ.
[92] In the Psalme of Moses.
[93] According to the ancient Arithmetick of the hand wherein the little finger of the right hand contracted, signified an hundred. Pierius in Hieroglyph.