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← ExitCenturies of Meditations

The Third Century

7

The first Light which shined in my Infancy in its primitive and innocent clarity was totally eclipsed insomuch that I was fain to learn all again. If you ask me how it was eclipsed? Truly by the customs and manners of men, which like contrary winds blew it out: by an innumerable company of other objects, rude, vulgar and worthless things, that like so many loads of earth and dung did overwhelm and bury it: by the impetuous torrent of wrong desires in all others whom I saw or knew that carried me away and alienated me from it: by a whole sea of other matters and concernments that covered and drowned it: finally by the evil influence of a bad education that did not foster and cherish it. All men’s thoughts and words were about other matters, They all prized new things which I did not dream of. I was a stranger and unacquainted with them; I was little and reverenced their authority; I was weak, and easily guided by their example; ambitious also, and desirous to approve myself unto them. And finding no one syllable in any man’s mouth of those things, by degrees they vanished, my thoughts (as indeed what is more fleeting than a thought?) were blotted out; and at last all the celestial, great, and stable treasures to which I was born, as wholly forgotten, as if they had never been.

8

Had any man spoken of it, it had been the most easy thing in the world, to have taught me, and to have made me believe that Heaven and Earth was God’s House, and that He gave it me. That the Sun was mine, and that men were mine, and that cities and kingdoms were mine also: that Earth was better than gold, and that water was, every drop of it a precious jewel. And that these were great and living treasures and that all riches whatsoever else was dross in comparison. From whence I clearly find how docible our Nature is in natural things, were it rightly entreated. And that our misery proceedeth ten thousand times more from the outward bondage of opinion and custom, than from any inward corruption or depravation of Nature: And that it is not our parents’ loins, so much as our parents’ lives, that enthrals and blinds us. Yet is all our corruption derived from Adam inasmuch as all the evil examples and inclinations of the world arise from his sin. But I speak it in the presence of God and of our Lord Jesus Christ, in my pure primitive virgin Light, while my apprehensions were natural, and unmixed, I cannot remember but that I was ten thousand times more prone to good and excellent things than evil. But I was quickly tainted and fell by others.

9

It was a difficult matter to persuade me that the tinseled ware upon a hobby-horse was a fine thing. They did impose upon me, and obtrude their gifts that made me believe a ribbon or a feather curious. I could not see where [was] the curiousness or fineness: And to teach me that a purse of gold was at any value seemed impossible, the art by which it becomes so, and the reasons for which it is accounted so, were so deep and hidden to my inexperience. So that Nature is still nearest to natural things, and farthest off from preternatural; and to esteem that the reproach of Nature, is an error in them only who are unacquainted with it. Natural things are glorious, and to know them glorious but to call things preternatural, natural, monstrous. Yet all they do it, who esteem gold, silver, houses, lands, clothes, &c., the riches of Nature, which are indeed the riches of invention. Nature knows no such riches: but art and error make them. Not the God of Nature, but Sin only was the parent of them. The riches of Nature are our Souls and Bodies, with all their faculties, senses, and endowments. And it had been the easiest thing in the whole world [to teach me] that all felicity consisted in the enjoyment of all the world, that it was prepared for me before I was born, and that nothing was more divine and beautiful.

10

Thoughts are the most present things to thoughts, and of the most powerful influence. My soul was only apt and disposed to great things; but souls to souls are like apples to apples, one being rotten rots another. When I began to speak and go, nothing began to be present to me, but what was present in their thoughts. Nor was anything present to me any other way, than it was so to them. The glass of imagination was the only mirror, wherein anything was represented or appeared to me. All things were absent which they talked not of. So I began among my play-fellows to prize a drum, a fine coat, a penny, a gilded book, &c., who before never dreamed of any such wealth. Goodly objects to drown all the knowledge of Heaven and Earth! As for the Heavens and the Sun and Stars they disappeared, and were no more unto me than the bare walls, So that the strange riches of man’s invention quite overcame the riches of Nature, being learned more laboriously and in the second place.

11

By this let nurses, and those parents that desire Holy Children learn to make them possessors of Heaven and Earth betimes; to remove silly objects from before them, to magnify nothing but what is great indeed, and to talk of God to them, and of His works and ways before they can either speak or go. For nothing is so easy as to teach the truth because the nature of the thing confirms the doctrine: As when we say the sun is glorious, a man is a beautiful creature, sovereign over beasts and fowls and fishes, the stars minister unto us, the world was made for you, &c. But to say this house is yours, and these lands are another man’s, and this bauble is a jewel and this gew-gaw a fine thing, this rattle makes music, &c., is deadly barbarous and uncouth to a little child; and makes him suspect all you say, because the nature of the thing contradicts your words. Yet doth that blot out all noble and divine ideas, dissettle his foundation, render him uncertain in all things, and divide him from God. To teach him those objects are little vanities, and that though God made them, by the ministry of man, yet better and more glorious things are more to be esteemed, is natural and easy.

12

By this you may see who are the rude and barbarous Indians: For verily there is no savage nation under the cope of Heaven, that is more absurdly barbarous than the Christian World. They that go naked and drink water and live upon roots are like Adam, or Angels in comparison of us. But they indeed that call beads and glass buttons jewels, and dress themselves with feather, and buy pieces of brass and broken hafts of knives of our merchants are somewhat like us. But we pass them in barbarous opinions, and monstrous apprehensions, which we nick-name civility and the mode, amongst us. I am sure those barbarous people that go naked, come nearer to Adam, God, and Angels in the simplicity of their wealth, though not in knowledge.

13

You would not think how these barbarous inventions spoil your knowledge. They put grubs and worms in men’s heads that are enemies to all pure and true apprehensions, and eat out all their happiness. They make it impossible for them, in whom they reign, to believe there is any excellency in the Works of God, or to taste any sweetness in the nobility of Nature, or to prize any common, though never so great a blessing. They alienate men from the Life of God, and at last make them to live without God in the World. To live the Life of God is to live to all the Works of God, and to enjoy them in His Image, from which they are wholly diverted that follow fashions. Their fancies are corrupted with other gingles.

14

Being swallowed up therefore in the miserable gulf of idle talk and worthless vanities, thenceforth I lived among ~~dreams and~~ shadows, like a prodigal son feeding upon husks with swine. A comfortless wilderness full of thorns and troubles the world was, or worse: a waste place covered with idleness and play, and shops, and markets, and taverns. As for Churches they were things I did not understand, and schools were a burden so that there was nothing in the world worth the having, or enjoying, but my game and sport, which also was a dream, and being passed wholly forgotten. So that I had utterly forgotten all goodness, bounty, comfort, and glory: which things are the very brightness of the Glory of God for lack of which therefore He was unknown.

177.An ironic echo of Hebrews 12:22, where believers come “to an innumerable company of angels”; the child’s company is of rude, vulgar and worthless things, vulgar meaning common. The loads of earth and dung recall Paul’s “and do count them but dung” (Philippians 3:8).

178.Education is the whole bringing-up of a child, its rearing and training at home as much as its schooling (Latin educare, to rear). Influence, in evil influence, is the astrologers’ word for the power that flows down from the stars.

179.The Church of England’s Article IX says that original sin “standeth not in the following of Adam (as the Pelagians do vainly talk)” but in the corruption of every man’s nature. Pelagius was charged with making sin pass by imitation rather than by birth, and the weight of this sentence, lives more than loins, custom more than inward corruption, falls on imitation. The next sentence restores the link to Adam, and III.43 lists “Sin, original and actual” among the subjects of divinity. Augustine, by contrast, judged that an infant’s limbs are innocent but not its mind (Confessions I.7.11). On this passage rests the view, often repeated, that Traherne plays down original sin.

180.A hobby-horse is a child’s toy horse, a stick with a horse’s head, here trimmed with tinsel, thin glittering foil. Earle’s character of a child (see the note at I.1) calls him “the best copy of Adam before he tasted of Eve or the apple” and gives him the same playthings, “his drums, rattles, and hobby-horses, but the emblems and mocking of man’s business”. Earle’s sketch runs close to these meditations throughout; it is a parallel, not a known source.

181.The distinction between natural wealth and the wealth men invent is ancient. Aristotle separates natural acquisition from money-making and says that coin has its value by convention, not by nature (Politics I.9, 1257b; Nicomachean Ethics V.5, 1133a). Seneca, after Epicurus, writes that he who lives by nature is never poor and he who lives by opinion never rich (Epistles 16.7); elsewhere he says that men’s vices are not born with them but heaped on them, and that nature put gold and silver under their feet and turned their faces to the sky (Epistles 94.55-56). In More’s Utopia (1516) gold makes chamber-pots and fetters, and jewels are children’s toys. These are parallels, not demonstrable sources.

182.The native peoples of America, familiar to English readers from the collections of voyages. Montaigne had turned the charge round in Of Cannibals (Essays I.31, I.30 in John Florio’s English of 1603), calling them barbarous by reason’s rules “but not in respect of us that exceede them in all kinde of barbarisme”. Civility below is civilisation, polish, and the mode is fashion, a word lately taken from French.

183.The prodigal son of Luke 15:11-16, who wasted his inheritance in a far country and “would fain have filled his belly with the husks that the swine did eat”. Thorns and troubles recall the ground cursed after the Fall (Genesis 3:18).