stances, as at forty; but swells and doubles from the
circumstance of our ages, wherein, besides the constant
and inexcusable habit of transgressing, the maturity of
our judgment cuts off pretence unto excuse or pardon.
Every sin, the oftener it is committed, the more it
acquireth in the quality of evil; as it succeeds in time,
so it proceeds in degrees of badness; for as they proceed
they ever multiply, and, like figures in arithmetick, the
last stands for more than all that went before it. And,
though I think no man can live well once, but he that
could live twice, yet, for my own part, I would not live
over my hours past, or begin again the thread of my
days; not upon Cicero's ground,* because I have lived
them well, but for fear I should live them worse. I
find my growing judgment daily instruct me how to
be better, but my untamed affections and confirmed
vitiosity make me daily do worse. I find in my con-
firmed age the same sins I discovered in my youth; I
committed many then because I was a child; and,
because I commit them still, I am yet an infant.
Therefore I perceive a man may be twice a child,
before the days of dotage; and stand in need of AEson's
bath<59> before threescore.

Sect. 43.--And truly there goes a deal of providence
to produce a man's life unto threescore; there is more
required than an able temper for those years: though
the radical humour contain in it sufficient oil for seventy,
yet I perceive in some it gives no light past thirty: men
assign not all the causes of long life, that write whole