Though the Godhead never departed from the carcase ... yet because the human soul was departed from it, he was no man. Donne was a poor metaphysician; that is, he never closely questioned himself as to the absolute meaning of his words. What did he mean by the 'soul?' what by the 'body?' [13] Ib. D. And I know that there are authors of a middle nature, above the philosophers, and below the Scriptures, the Apocryphal books. A whimsical instance of the disposition in the mind for every pair of opposites to find an intermediate,--a 'mesothesis' for every 'thesis' and 'antithesis'. Thus Scripture may be opposed to philosophy; and then the Apocryphal books will be philosophy relatively to Scripture, and Scripture relatively to philosophy. Ib. p. 159. B. And therefore the same author (Epiphanius) says, that because they thought it an uncomely thing for Christ to weep for any temporal thing, some men have expunged and removed that verse out of St. Luke's Gospel, that 'Jesus, when he saw that city, wept'. [14] This, by the by, rather indiscreetly lets out the liberties, which the early Christians took with their sacred writings. Origen, who, in answer to Celsus's reproach on this ground, confines the practice to the heretics, furnishes proofs of the contrary himself in his own comments. Ib. p. 161. D. That world, which finds itself in an authumn in itself, finds itself in a spring in our imaginations. Worthy almost of Shakspeare! Serm. XVII. Matt. xix. 17. p. 163. Ib. E. The words are part of a dialogue, of a conference, between Christ and a man who proposed a question to him; to whom Christ makes an answer by way of another question, 'Why callest thou me good?' &c. In the words, and by occasion of them, we consider the text, the context, and the pretext; not as three equal parts of the building; but the context, as the situation and prospect of the house, the pretext, as the access and entrance into the house, and then the text itself, as the house itself, as the body of the building: in a word, in the text the words; in the context the occasion of the words; in the pretext the purpose, the disposition of him who gave the occasion. What a happy example of elegant division of a subject! And so also the 'compendium' of Christianity in the preceding paragraph (D). Our great divines were not ashamed of the learned discipline to which they had submitted their minds under Aristotle and Tully, but brought the purified products as sacrificial gifts to Christ. They baptized the logic and manly rhetoric of ancient Greece. Ib. p. 164. A. B. Excellent illustration of fragmentary morality, in which each man takes his choice of his virtues and vices. Ib. D. Men perish with whispering sins, nay, with silent sins, sins that never tell the conscience they are sins, as often as with crying sins.