therefore, if we expect to be satisfied, modestly confine our desires within the limits he has set us, and then every accession which he superadds will appear (what it is) a largess and bounty. But whilst our appetites are boundless, and rather stretched than filled with our acquests, what possibility is there of their satisfaction? and when we importune God for it, we do but assign him such a task the poets made a representation of their hell,— the filling a sieve with water, or the rolling a stone up a precipice.

10. A great expedient for contentment is to confine our thoughts to the present, and not to let them loose to future events. Would we but do this, we might shake off a great part of our burden; for we often heap fantastic loads upon ourselves by anxious presages of things which perhaps will never happen, and yet sink more under them than under the real weight that is actual upon us; and this is certainly one of the greatest follies imaginable; for either the evil will come, or it will not: if it will, it is, sure, no such desirable guest that we should go out to meet it, we shall feel it time enough when it falls on us, we need not project to anticipate our sense of it; but if it will not, what extreme madness is it for a man to torment himself with that which will never be, to create engines of tortures, and by such aerial afflictions make himself as miserable as the most real ones could do! And truly this is all that we usually

get by our foresights. Prevision is one of God's attributes; and he mocks at all our pretences to it, by a frequent defeating of all our forecasts. He does it often in our hopes; some little cross circumstance many times demolishes those goodly machines we raise to ourselves: and he does it no less in our fears; those ills we solemnly expected often balk us, and others from an unexpected coast suddenly invade us. And since we are so blind, so short-sighted, let us never take upon us to be scouts, to discover danger at a distance (for it is manifold odds we shall only bring home false alarms), but let us rest ourselves upon that most admirable aphorism of our blessed Lord, "Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof" (Matt. vi. 34); apply ourselves with Christian courage to bear the present, and leave God either to augment or diminish, as he sees fit, for the future. Or if we will needs be looking forward, let it be in obedience, not contradiction to our duty; let us entertain ourselves with those futurities which we are sure are not chimeras, death and judgment, heaven and hell. The nearer we draw these things to our view, the more insensible will all intermedial objects be; they will deceive our sense of present, and much more forestall the apprehension of future evils; for it is our neglect of things eternal that leaves us thus at leisure for the transitory.

11. In the last place, let us in all our distresses supersede our anxieties and solicitudes by that most

effectual remedy the apostle prescribes, "Is any man afflicted, let him pray" (James v. 13). And this sure is a most rational prescription; for, alas, what else can we do towards the redress of our griefs; we who are so impotent, that we have not power over the most despicable excrescence of our own body, cannot make "one hair white or black" (Matt. v. 36),—what can we do towards the newmoulding our condition, or modelling things without us? Our solicitudes serve only to bind our burdens faster upon us; but this expedient of prayer will certainly relieve us. "Call upon me," says God, "in the time of trouble, and I will hear thee, and thou shalt praise me" (Ps. 1. 15). Whenever, therefore, we are sinking in the floods of affliction, let us thus support ourselves by representing our wants unto our gracious Lord, cry unto him as St. Peter did, and he will take us by the hand, and, be the winds never so boisterous or contrary, preserve us from sinking (Matt. xiv. 30): the waves or billows of this troublesome world will serve but to toss us closer into his arms, who can with a word appease the roughest tempest, or rescue from it. O, let us not, then, be so unkind to ourselves as to neglect this infallible means of our deliverance, but, with the psalmist, take our refuge under the "shadow of the divine wings till the calamity be over-passed" (Ps. lvii. 1). And as this is a sure expedient in all our real important afflictions, so is it a good test by which to try what are so. We

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are often peevish and disquieted at trifles, nay, we take up the quarrels of our lusts and vices, and are discontented when they want their wished supplies. Now, in either of these cases, no man that at all considers who he prays to, will dare to insert these in his prayers, it being a contempt of God to invoke him in things so slight as the one, or impious as the other: it will, therefore, be good for every man, when he goes to address for relief, to consider which of his pressures they are that are worthy of that solemn deprecation; and when he has singled those out, let him reflect, and he will find he has in that prejudged all his other discontents as frivolous or wicked; and then sure he cannot think fit to harbour them, but must for shame dismiss them, since they are such as he dares not avow to Him from whom alone he can expect relief. God always pities our real miseries, but our imaginary ones dare not demand it. Let us not, then, create such diseases to ourselves as we cannot declare to our physician; and when those are precluded, for all the rest St. Paul's recipe is a catholicon, “Be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayers and supplications, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God" (Phil. iv. 6).

9 Catholicon,-an universal medicine.

OF RESIGNATION.

ND now, amidst such variety of receipts, it will be hard to instance any one sort of calamity which can escape their efficacy, if they be but duly applied. But, indeed, we have generally a compendious way of frustrating all remedies by never making use of them; like fantastic patients, we are well enough content to have our disease discoursed and medicines prescribed, but when the physic comes, have still some pretence or other to protract the taking it. But I shall beseech the reader to consider, that counsels are no charms, to work without any co-operation of the concerned person; they must be adverted to, they must be pondered and considered, and finally they must be practised, or else the utmost good they can do us, is to give us a few hours' divertisement in the reading; but they do us a mischief that infinitely outweighs it, for they improve our guilts by the ineffective tender they make of rescuing us from