Centuries of Meditations

II.84-92. Thought is set above things. God is Mind, all eye and all ear, and minds grow like Him by containing all things. The idea of heaven and earth in a soul is dearer to God than heaven and earth, and every thought is another world to Him, while at II.88 the manuscript’s numbering passes from 87 to 89. The movement ends by calling the soul a living temple and telling the reader she is never her true self until she lives by her soul, and it adds the book’s boldest claim for the worth of thought.

II.93-100. The Century ends by asking what the world is for. It obliges the reader to honour every heir, feeds praise, and teaches the price of redemption through the story of Zopyrus and the pomegranate. It is the theatre of God’s justice. The Roman scholar Varro’s two hundred and eighty-eight opinions on happiness are reconciled, and philosophers who define felicity by negatives are rebuked. The movement ends by summing up the mystery of felicity, God the giver and the soul the receiver, and closes the Century’s teaching.

The Third Century

III.1-6. The Third Century turns to a life. It asks whether the reader would see the infancy of greatness, and answers with the author’s first apprehensions, pure, virgin and learned from no book. Everything seemed his, at rest and immortal, and the city seemed to stand in Eden. A poem on the God who walked with him in childhood follows, and then Christ’s call to become as little children. The movement ends with a promise to show by what steps he came to his present joy, and it adds the evidence of experience to the argument of reason.

III.7-14. Then the light goes out. The first light was blown out by custom, buried under worthless things, carried off by others’ desires and left unfed by a bad education. Misery comes more from custom than from inward corruption, though all corruption is traced to Adam, and nurses and parents are warned. The boy learned to prize a drum and a penny, and the Christian world is shown more barbarous than the peoples it despises. The movement ends with him like the prodigal among the husks, and it adds the anatomy of a fall that blames custom and example more than nature.

III.15-21. The return begins with want. Even while he forgot, he felt at times that he wanted something, and at about four he reasoned that a good God must give infinite riches, and asked why he was so poor. Afterwards he wondered where the earth ended, rejoiced to learn that it was round, and asked why bodies were no bigger than they are. The movement ends with a poem on the virtue of bounded power, and it adds the child as philosopher, whose questions are the seed of the book.

III.22-26. Solitude teaches him next. An empty dining room taught him that motion and company make a place glad, and an evening alone in a field filled him with dread until hope came to him from every side. He learned that he was made to be present everywhere, and hungered for news from beyond the seas, as if his treasure lay in some far country. The movement ends with the poem On News, in which the infant never dreams that the treasures of the world lie all around him, and it adds the lesson of solitude.

III.27-35. Scripture enters the story. He longed for a book brought by an angel, and found that God had already sent the Bible, which told him that he was God’s son and heir of all things. Its matter delighted him, and only its manner, without angels or wonders, was for a while the ground of his unbelief. Seven reasons show why the plain way is the better. The movement ends in full satisfaction, a joy greater than all the joys of Eden, and it adds the author’s account of his faith.

III.36-45. The University both helps and fails him. There he learned that every art pertains to felicity, but no tutor taught felicity itself, and study without an end went astray, so he sets out what ought to be studied, humanity, divinity, natural philosophy and ethics, each for its use to happiness. The movement ends with the claim that no miracle can prove religion to one who lacks a clear sight of the truth of things, which proves itself by its own beauty, and it adds a plan of education.

III.46-51. A life is then chosen. In the country he resolved to spend all his time in the search of happiness, choosing ten pounds a year and leather clothes over wealth that would devour his hours, and found himself provided for ever after. Poems on the holy life, on sin and on recovery follow. The movement ends with sin as the only calamity, a long interruption in the enjoyment of every joy, and it adds the cost and the danger of the chosen life.

III.52-60. Now comes the method. Like a traveller who cannot visit every coast and so chooses the most flourishing cities, he needed a rule, and an implicit faith in God’s goodness led him to study the most common things and find them the most valuable. He learned to consider things in their places and relations. The movement ends with the sight of happiness itself, in which all was well except himself, who needed mending, and it adds the discovery that the change required is inward.