III.61-65. A short metaphysics follows. God cannot make a God, but He can make His image, and every creature is as it seemed in infancy, the work of power wholly exerted, so that the child’s vision turns out to have been simply accurate. God is pure act, His essence one with His operations. The movement ends with Gregory of Nazianzus on goodness overflowing into the creation of the angels, and with time itself seen in God eternally, and it adds a metaphysical foundation for the child’s vision.

III.66-70. Then David appears. The author found that his thoughts, which he had supposed new, were already in Scripture, in the Fathers and above all in David, and that he had been conversing with God without knowing it. Moses, Jacob and Abraham appear in the same light, and Aristotle’s definition of felicity is read anew. A poem on David follows. The movement ends by calling a life retired to contemplate God’s works the only way to become, like David, a man after God’s own heart, and it adds the Century’s turn from autobiography to Scripture.

III.71-77. The Psalms are read in order. Psalms 8, 19, 22, 24, 28, 33, 35, 36 and 45 are quoted and glossed, each for what it shows of God’s works given to man, of His law and of His love. The movement ends with Psalm 45 and the royal Bride, whose sons are princes over all the earth and whose daughters are brides of the King of Heaven, and it adds David’s joy in creation as the pattern for the reader’s own.

III.78-84. The reading turns to true and false joy. Psalms 46 to 51 show the river of grace, expose the folly of trusting in wealth, and teach that praises and groans are the sacrifices God desires, since praise is the end for which the world was made. The movement ends with an invitation to clothe oneself with divine feelings, so that the world becomes a valley of vision, and it adds penitence as a way of seeing.

III.85-94. Memory becomes the theme. The later Psalms keep God’s deliverances and judgements in memory, bring His works into the sanctuary and call on every generation to record His ways, since what is past can still be enjoyed if it is remembered. Memory is a region of celestial light, where past things are as visible as the heavens. The movement ends with David’s soul like an infinite ocean, full of joys and overflowing through every channel, and it adds memory as a faculty of enjoyment.

III.95-100. The Century ends in recovered freedom. David’s soul regained its first freedom and saw through the walls of flesh, and he lived in the spirit with kingdoms and ages about him. The Century then asks what it is to be sons of God, sharing His glory, how the angels serve on earth without leaving the vision of God, and why only glory gives certainty. The movement ends with communion in all God’s works and the fountains of joy in the house of eternity, and it adds the goal towards which the whole life was moving.

The Fourth Century

IV.1-8. The voice changes. Having told of his entrance into felicity, the narrator will now give the principles by which the author enjoyed it, since there is an active happiness as well as a contemplative one. To be a philosopher, a Christian and a divine is a single vocation, and the resolve to be happy is stated without apology. The movement ends with the divine philosopher who lives by rule upon noble principles, and it adds the change of voice, from the I of the Third Century to he.

IV.9-17. The first principles are practical. Happiness is not to be deferred, riches are its servants, and a man who has the Philosopher’s Stone should use it. Happiness was made to be enjoyed, not boasted of, and if no one will come a man must go on alone and be happy alone, since a happiness that waits for company will never begin. The movement ends with a resolve to prize what one has, since a single crooked principle in the mind is of infinite consequence, and it adds a rule of life.

IV.18-21. Enjoyment is communication, and God is the only secure friend. The happy man must be happy among vipers, since all men have fallen, and must see the world as a madhouse and himself as its physician, tending the mad rather than resenting them. The movement ends with the royal chemist who extracts good out of evil and brings light out of darkness, and it adds the art of happiness under provocation, the hardest of the arts the book teaches.

IV.22-30. Charity is the next principle. The author called his house the house of Paradise and welcomed strangers as angels. Charity must supply the defects of the cursed ground, men are more to be loved since the Fall than before it, and every man is to be treated as mankind and as Christ, an incarnate angel. The movement ends with the narrator’s disclaimer that he reports his friend’s principles, not his practices, at his friend’s request, and it adds the social ethic of the book.

IV.31-37. Riches are redefined. Holiness and happiness are one, and his only prayer was to be a blessing to mankind. Covetousness is rooted out, as it was in the reformer Martin Luther and in Phocion, the poor Athenian statesman, and the true treasures are named. Nakedness itself is shown to be wealth, as it was for Adam in Eden. The movement ends with heaven as a state rather than a place, established by principles well practised, and it adds a doctrine of poverty rightly understood.

IV.38-41. The principles are summed up. A run of summary maxims presents the world as a stage on which virtue is exercised, and teaches that the objects of our joy are also the objects of our care. The friend found that he was miserable exactly as far as he had swerved from justice and right. The movement ends with the heart kept with all diligence, since out of it are the issues of life and death, and it adds a brief ethics of the inner life.

IV.42-48. Freedom comes next. God made man a free agent, able even to offend Him infinitely, and the speaker breaks into astonished prayer that he might therefore be the friend of God. The desire to please is first called the greatest snare and then pure gold, and to give is God’s happiness, to receive man’s. The movement ends with the lesson that what you are matters more to your happiness than what you enjoy, since everything depends on your love, and it adds freedom to the list of gifts.

IV.49-57. Self-love is defended. God made the soul capable of love by planting self-love in it, and upright nature climbs by steps from self-love to the love of God and all things. The pool must be filled before it can overflow, and the author spent ten years satisfying his self-love before he found it easy to love others better than himself. The movement ends with the lover living in others in order to receive their joys, and it adds a psychology of love that makes generosity the fruit of a satisfied self rather than its denial.

IV.58-65. Love’s sacrifice raises a riddle. Love will die for a brother and lose nothing by it, and it reaches across the veil between this life and the next, and here the first person breaks through the narrator’s disguise. Some men say that all love is self-love, and the riddle is answered by distinguishing true glory from vain, since true glory is to love another for his own sake. The movement ends by commanding love after God’s likeness, and it adds the book’s answer to the moralists of self-interest.

IV.66-73. Love is praised as infinite. It is an endless sphere hidden in a centre, the Bride of God, able to love all persons in all ages, all angels and all worlds, and to love every person as though he were the only one. It is in its infancy here and will reach its full stature in heaven, and to sit in God’s throne is to inhabit eternity and omnipresence. The movement ends with the claim that God is nothing less than infinite and cannot be enjoyed as finite, and it adds the enlarging of the soul by its objects.

IV.74-81. Pico enters the book. His Oration is quoted in Latin and translated, from Abdala the Saracen and Hermes to God’s speech to Adam and the seeds of every kind of life planted in him. Traherne then judges it, finding poetic fancy and deep things hidden together, calls the creation story a fable, grants the angels freedom too, and makes man’s best choice the choice to become love. The movement ends by declaring a single soul enough to convince every atheist in the world, and it adds the book’s fullest statement of human dignity.

IV.82-87. Is the soul a mirror or a fountain? Its beams of love are God’s reflected and yet its own, like a looking-glass that seems to be a real fountain of the sun’s light, while souls on earth are mirrors with lids, free to love or to refuse. The movement ends with the diviner love of the estate of grace, which can love sinners as God loved Adam out of nothing, and it adds the book’s final word on the soul’s freedom.

IV.88-93. Gratitude and contentment follow. God is to be thanked for His intention even where the gift seems small, and every estate, afflictions included, is the best for the one who has it, since God’s purpose in it is love. Praise is owed day and night, and in public. The movement ends with this life as the most precious season in all eternity, since only here can faith and hope be exercised, and it adds a theology of the present moment.

IV.94-100. The Century ends in practice. The principles must be practised, since the soul is made for action and idleness is its rust, and then the soul’s secret sufficiency and its freedom from every limit are shown. The movement ends with ten consequences of the soul’s infinite understanding and affection, from the manifestation of God’s love to the perfect indwelling of God in the soul, and a doxology, and it closes the teaching of the book.

The Fifth Century

V.1-5. The Fifth Century starts afresh. A new plan is announced, in which God is both the object of felicity and the way of enjoying it, and His attributes are to be treated in turn, beginning with infinity. Infinite space is the room of all treasures and the seat of souls, seen without eyes, required by almighty power, and like a painter’s panel prepared for a picture as large as itself. The movement ends with the spectator who owns every view, and it adds a fresh start, which treats the doctrine of the Centuries as a treatise.

V.6-10. Eternity and omnipresence follow. Eternity is the duration of infinite space, an absence of times in which all ages stand together, and we pass through it like men in a ship who see the shore move. Omnipresence is a field of joys and a transparent temple, and the Bridegroom governs all worlds. The movement ends in the middle of the plan, on God busied in every place in perfecting our happiness, three attributes into a treatise that meant to treat them all. After it the manuscript has only the number 11.