SUBSEC. 5. Melancholy in disposition, improperly so called, Æquivocations.

Melancholy, the subject of our present Discourse, is either in Disposition, or Habit. In Disposition, is that transitory Melancholy which goes and comes upon every smal occasion of sorrow, need, sickness, trouble, fear, grief, passion, or perturbation of the minde, any manner of care, discontent, or thought, which causeth anguish, dulness, heaviness and vexation of spirit, any wayes opposite to pleasure, mirth, joy, delight, causing frowardness in us, or a dislike. In which equivocal & improper sense, we cal him melancholy, that is dull, sad, sowre, lumpish, ill disposed, solitary, any way moved, or displeased.

And from these Melancholy Dispositions, no man living is free, no Stoick, none so wise, none so happy, none so patient, so generous, so godly, so divine that can vindicate himself; so well composed, but more or less, sometime or other he feeles the smart of it. Melancholy in this sense is the character of Mortality. Man that is borne of a woman, is of short continuance, and full of trouble.

Zeno, Cato, Socrates himself, whom Ælian so highly commends for a moderate temper, that nothing could disturb him, but going out, and coming in, still Socrates kept the same serenity of countenance, what misery soever befell him, (if we may believe Plato his Disciple) was much tormented with it.

Q. Metellus, in whom Valerius gives instance of all happiness, the most fortunate man then living, borne in that most flourishing city of Rome, of noble parentage, a proper man of person, well qualified, healthful, rich, honourable, a Senatour, a Consul, happy in his wife, happy in his children, &c. yet this man was not void of Melancholy, he had his share of sorrow.

Polycrates Samius, that flung his ring into the sea, because he would participate of discontent with others, and had it miraculously restored to him again shortly after, by a fish taken as he angled, was not free from Melancholy dispositions.

No man can cure himself; the very gods had bitter pangs, & frequent passions, as their own Poets put upon them. In general, as the heaven, so is our life, sometimes fair, sometimes overcast, tempestuous, and serene; as in a rose, flowers and prickles; in the year it self, a temperate summer sometimes, a hard winter, a drowth, and then again pleasant showrs: so is our life intermixt with joyes, hopes, feares, sorrowes, calumnies: Invicem cedunt dolor & voluptas, there is a succession of pleasure and paine.

——medio de fonte leporum, Surgit amari aliquid in ipsis floribus angat.

Even in the midst of laughing there is sorrow, (as Solomon holds:) even in the midst of all our feasting and jollity, as Austin infers in his Com. on the 41. Psal. there is grief and discontent. Inter delitias semper aliquid sævi nos strangulat, for a pinte of hony thou shalt here likely find a gallon of gaul, for a dram of pleasure a pound of pain, for an inch of mirth an ell of mone; as Ivie doth an Oke, these miseries encompass our life.

And ’tis most absurd & ridiculous, for any mortal man to look for a perpetual tenor of happiness in his life. Nothing so prosperous & pleasant, but it hath some bitterness in it, some complaining, some grudging; ’tis all γλυκύπικρον, a mixt passion, and like a Chequer table black and white, men, families, cities, have their falls & wanes, now trines, sextiles, then quartiles and oppositions.

We are not here as those Angels; celestiall powers and Bodies, Sunne and Moone, to finish our course without all offence, with such constancy, to continue for so many ages: but subject to infirmities, miseries, interrupt, tossed and tumbled up and down, carried about with every small blast, often molested and disquieted upon each slender occasion, uncertain, brittle, and so is all that we trust unto.

And he that knows not this, & is not armed to endure it, is not fit to live in this world (as one condoles our time) he knows not the condition of it, where with a reciprocalty, pleasure and paine are still united, and succeed one another in a ring. Exi è mundo, get thee gone hence if thou canst not brook it;

There is no way to avoid it, but to arme thy self with patience, with magnanimity, to oppose thy self unto it, to suffer affliction as a good souldier of Christ; as Paul adviseth constantly to bear it.

But forasmuch as so few can embrace this good counsel of his, or use it aright, but rather as so many bruit beasts, give a way to their passion, voluntary subject & precipitate themselves into a Labyrinth of cares, woes, miseries, & suffer their souls to be overcome by them, cannot arme themselves with that patience as they ought to do, it falleth out oftentimes that these Dispositions become Habits,

and many Affects contemned (as Seneca notes) make a disease. Even as one Distillation, not yet grown to custome, makes a cough, but continual and inveterate causeth a consumption of the lungs: so do these our melancholy provocations: and according as the humor it self is intended, or remitted in men, as their temperature of body, or Rational soul is better able to make resistance: so are they more or less affected.