ON PASSION AND REASON. TRUTH enters into the heart of man when it is empty, and clean, and still; but when the mind is shaken with passion as with a storm, you can never hear the voice of the charmer though he charm ever so wisely and you will very hardly sheathe a sword when it is held by a loose and a paralytic arm.+ : THE PROSTITUTE. THEY pay their souls down for the bread they eat, buying this day's meal with the price of the last night's sin.‡ ON ANGER. IN contentions be always passive, never active upon the defensive, not the assaulting part; and then also give a gentle answer, receiving the furies and indiscretions of the other like a stone into a bed of moss and soft compliance ;§ and you + Sermon preached to the University of Dublin. Holy Dying, ch. i. · When Sir Matthew Hale dismissed the jury because he was convinced that it had been illegally selected, to favour the Protector, Cromwell was highly displeased with him, and at his return from the circuit, he told him in anger he was not fit to be a judge, to which all the answer he made was, that it was very true." Abou Hanifah fut le chef des Hanifites. Ce Socrate shall find it sit down quietly: whereas anger and violence make the contention loud and long, and injurious to both the parties. Consider that anger is a professed enemy to counsel; it is a direct storm, in which no man can be heard to speak or call from without: for if you counsel gently, you are despised; if you urge it and be vehement, you provoke it more. Be careful therefore to lay up before-hand a great stock of reason and prudent consideration, that like a besieged town, you may be provided for, and be defensible from within, since you are not likely to be relieved from without. Anger is not to be suppressed but by something that is as inward as itself and more habitual. To which purpose add, that of all passions it endeavours most to make reason useless: that it is a universal poison, of an infinite object; for no man was ever so amorous as to love a toad, none so envious as to repine at the condition of the miserable, no man so timorous as to fear a dead bee; but anger is troubled at every thing, and every man, and every accident, and therefore unless it be suppressed, it will make a man's condition restless. If it proceeds from a great cause, it Mulman donnoit a sa secte des leçons et des exemples. Un brutal lui ayant donné un souflet ce Mahometan répondit ces paroles dignes d' un Chretien : si j'etois vindicatif, je vous rendrois outrage pour outrage; si j'etois un délateur je vous accuserois devant le Calife: mais j'aime mieux démander a Dieu, qu'au jour du jugement il me fasse entrer au ciel avec vous." * turns to fury; if from a small cause, it is peevishness; and so is always either terrible or ridiculous. It makes a man's body monstrous, deformed, and contemptible, the voice horrid, the eyes cruel, the face pale or fiery, the gait fierce, the speech clamorous and loud. It is neither manly nor ingenuous. It proceeds from softness of spirit and pusillanimity; which makes that women are more angry than men, sick persons more than healthful, old men more than young, unprosperous and calamitous people than the blessed and fortunate. It is a passion fitter for flies and insects than for persons professing nobleness and bounty. It is troublesome not only to those that suffer it, but to them that behold it; there being no greater incivility of entertainment than for the cook's fault, or the negligence of the servants, to be cruel, or outrageous, or unpleasant in the presence of the guests. It makes marriage to be a necessary and unavoidable trouble; friendships, and societies, and familiarities to be intolerable. It multiplies the evils of drunkenness, and makes the levities of wine to run into madness. It makes innocent jesting to be the beginning of tragedies. It turns friendship into hatred: it makes a man lose himself and his reason and his argument in disputation. It turns the desires of knowledge into an itch of wrangling. It adds insolency to power. It turns justice into cruelty, and judgment into oppression. It changes dis * See Bacon's Essay on Anger. cipline into tediousness and hatred of liberal institution. It makes a prosperous man to be envied, and the unfortunate to be unpitied. It is a confluence of all the irregular passions: there is in it envy and sorrow, fear and scorn, pride and prejudice, rashness and inconsideration, rejoicing in evil and a desire to inflict it, self-love, impatience, and curiosity. And lastly, though it be very troublesome to others, yet it is most troublesome to him that hath it. Only observe that such an anger alone is criminal which is against charity to myself or my neighbour; but anger against sin is a holy zeal, and an effect of love to God and my brother, for whose interest I am passionate, like a concerned person and, if I take care that my anger makes no reflection of scorn or cruelty upon the offender, or of pride and violence, or transportation to myself, anger becomes charity and duty.* And when one commended Charilaus, the king of Sparta, for a gentle, a good, and a meek prince, his colleague said well, “How can he be good, who is not an enemy even to vicious persons ?"+ ON SICKNESS. AT the first address and presence of sickness stand still and arrest thy spirit, that it may without amazement or affright consider that this * Hooker's Anger is said to have been like a vial of clear water, which, when shook, beads at the top, but instantly, subsides, without any soil or sediment of uncharitableness. + Holy Living, chap. iv. sect. 8. was that thou lookedst for, and wert always certain should happen, and that now thou art to enter into the actions of a new religion, the agony of a strange constitution: but at no hand suffer thy spirits to be dispersed with fear, or wildness of thought, but stay their looseness and dispersion by a serious consideration of the present and future employment. For so doth the Libyan lion,* spying the fierce huntsman, he first beats himself with the strokes of his tail, and curls up his spirits, making them strong with union and recollection; till, being struck with a Mauritanian spear, he rushes forth into his defence and noblest contention; and either scapes into the secrets of his own dwelling, or else dies the bravest of the forest. In sickness the soul begins to dress herself for immortality. And first, she unties the strings of vanity that made her upper garment cleave to the world and sit uneasy. First she puts off the light and fantastic summer-robe of lust and wanton appetite. Next to this, the soul by the help of sickness knocks off the fetters of pride, and vainer complacencies. Then she draws the curtains, and stops the light from coming in, and takes the pictures down, those fantastic images of self-love, and gay remembrances of vain opinion, and popular noises. Then the spirit stoops into the sobrieties of humble thoughts, and feels corruption chiding the forwardness of fancy and allaying the vapours of conceit and factious opinions. See Theocritus, Idyll. 25, line 230. |