fore to adore, honour, and admire him, is a debt of
gratitude due from the obligation of our nature, states,
and conditions: and with these thoughts he that knows
them best will not deny that I adore him. That I
obtain heaven, and the bliss thereof, is accidental, and
not the intended work of my devotion; it being a
felicity I can neither think to deserve nor scarce in
modesty to expect. For these two ends of us all, either
as rewards or punishments, are mercifully ordained and
disproportionably disposed unto our actions; the one
being so far beyond our deserts, the other so infinitely
below our demerits.

Sect. 54.--There is no salvation to those that believe
not in Christ; that is, say some, since his nativity, and,
as divinity affirmeth, before also; which makes me
much apprehend the end of those honest worthies and
philosophers which died before his incarnation. It is
hard to place those souls in hell, whose worthy lives do
teach us virtue on earth. Methinks, among those many
subdivisions of hell, there might have been one limbo
left for these. What a strange vision will it be to see
their poetical fictions converted into verities, and their
imagined and fancied furies into real devils! How
strange to them will sound the history of Adam, when
they shall suffer for him they never heard of! When
they who derive their genealogy from the gods, shall
know they are the unhappy issue of sinful man! It is
an insolent part of reason, to controvert the works of
God, or question the justice of his proceedings. Could