Marston's literary career barely covers a space of ten years: his satires were published in 1598, and he seems to have entered the Church, and to have abandoned the writing of plays, about the year 1607. It is hard to picture Marston as a preacher of the Gospel of Glad Tidings. Were we to judge him by his writings we should say that he was a scornful spirit, at strife with himself and with the world; a man convinced of the hollowness of present life, and yet not looking forward hopefully to any future sphere of activity; only anxious to drop into the jaws of that oblivion which he invoked in his verse and courted even on his gravestone. There was another, a greater than Marston, who began by writing satires and ended by writing sermons. Marston's sermons have perished, but the sermons of John Donne,[31] Dean of St. Paul's, are imperishable. At the thought of that oblivion for which Marston hungered the soul of Donne turned sick. "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God." Fearful indeed; but "_to fall out of the hands of the living God_," said Donne in a sermon preached before the Earl of Carlisle, "is a horror beyond our expression, beyond our imagination." In a strain of marvellous eloquence he proceeds; and surely no utterance of poet or divine is more pitiful and passionate than this cry wrung from the heart of the great Dean Donne:-- "That God should let my soul fall out of His hand into a bottomless pit and roll an unremovable stone upon it, ... and never think more of that soul, never have more to do with it; that of that providence of God, that studies the life of every weed, and worm, and ant, and spider, and toad, and viper, there should never, never any beam flow out upon me; that that God, who looked upon me, when I was nothing, and called me when I was not, as though I had been, out of the womb and depth of darkness, will not look upon me now, when, though a miserable, and a banished, and a damned creature, yet I am His creature still, and contribute something to His glory, even in my damnation; that that God, who hath often looked upon me in my foullest uncleanness, and when I had shut out the eye of the day, the sun, and the eye of the night, the taper, and the eyes of all the world, with curtains and windows and doors, did yet see me, and see me in mercy, by making me see that He saw me, and sometimes brought me to a present remorse and (for that time) to a forbearing of that sin, should so turn Himself from me to His glorious Saints and Angels, as that no Saint nor Angel nor Christ Jesus Himself should ever pray Him to look towards me, never remember Him that such a soul there is; that that God,--who hath so often said to my soul _Quare morieris_? Why wilt thou die? and so often sworn to my soul _Vivit Dominus_, As the Lord liveth I