second death shall prove a miserable life, and destruction shall be courted.
Sect xii.—Although their thoughts may seem too severe, who think that few ill-natured men go to heaven; yet it may be acknowledged that good-natured persons are best founded for that place; who enter the world with good dispositions and natural graces, more ready to be advanced by impressions from above, and christianized unto pieties; who carry about them plain and downright dealing minds, humility, mercy, charity, and virtues acceptable unto God and man. But whatever success they may have as to heaven, they are the acceptable men on earth, and happy is he who hath his quiver full of them for his friends. These are not the dens wherein falsehood lurks, and hypocrisy hides its head; wherein frowardness makes its nest; or where malice, hard-heartedness, and oppression love to dwell; nor those by whom the poor get little, and the rich sometime lose all; men not of retracted looks, but who carry their hearts in their faces, and need not to be looked upon with perspectives; not sordidly or mischievously ingrateful; who cannot learn to ride upon the neck of the afflicted, nor load the heavy laden, but who keep the temple of Janus[1] shut by peaceable and quiet tempers; who make not only the best friends, but the best enemies, as easier to forgive than offend, and ready to pass by the second offence before they avenge the first; who make natural royalists, obedient subjects, kind and merciful princes, verified in our own, one of the best-natured kings of this throne. Of the old Roman emperors the best were the best-natured: though they made but a small number, and might be writ in a ring. Many of the rest were as bad men as princes; humourists rather than of good humours; and of good natural parts rather than of good natures, which did but arm their bad inclinations, and make them wittily wicked.
Sect. xiii.—With what shift and pains we come into the world, we remember not: but 'tis commonly found no easy matter to get out of it. Many have studied to exasperate the
- ↑ Janus.] The temple of Janus among the Romans was shut in time of peace, and opened at a declaration of war.—Dr. J.
