REAL AND APPARENT HAPPINESS.
By Jeremy Taylor
If we should look under the skirt of the prosperous and prevailing tyrant, we should find even in the days of his joys such alloys and abatements of his pleasure as may serve to represent him presently miserable, besides his final infelicities. For I have seen a young and healthful person warm and ruddy under a poor and thin garment, when at the same time an old rich person hath been cold and paralytic under a load of sables and the skins of foxes. It is the body that makes the clothes warm, not the clothes the body; and the spirit of a man makes felicity and content, not any spoils of a rich fortune wrapt about a sickly and an uneasy soul. Apollodorus was a traitor and a tyrant, and the world wondered to see a bad man have so good a fortune; but knew not that he nourished scorpions in his breast, and that his liver and his heart were eaten up with spectres and images of death. His thoughts were full of interruptions, his dreams of illusions; his fancy was abused with real troubles and fantastic images, imagining that he saw the Scythians flaying him alive, his daughters like pillars of fire dancing round about a caldron in which himself was boiling, and that his heart accused itself to be the cause of all these evils. Does not he drink more sweetly that takes his beverage in an earthen vessel, than he that looks and searches into his golden chalices for fear of poison, and looks pale at every sudden noise, and sleeps in armor, and trusts nobody, and does not trust God for his safety, but does greater wickedness only to escape a while unpunished for his former crimes? “Auro bibitur venenum.” No man goes about to poison a poor man’s pitcher, nor lays plots to forage his little garden made for the hospital of two beehives, and the feasting of a few Pythagorean herb-eaters. They that admire the happiness of a prosperous, prevailing tyrant, know not the felicities that dwell in innocent hearts, and poor cottages, and small fortunes. Can a man bind a thought with chains, or carry imaginations in the palm of his hand? Does the hand intermeddle with the joys of the heart? or darkness, that hides the naked, make him warm? Does the body live, or does the spirit? or can the body of Christ be like to common food? Indeed the sun shines upon the good and bad; and the vines give wine to the drunkard as well as to the sober man; pirates have fair winds and a calm sea at the same time when the just and peaceful merchantmen have them. But although the things of this world are common to good and bad, yet sacraments and spiritual joys, the food of the soul, and the blessing of Christ, are the peculiar right of saints.—Jeremy Taylor.