As all that die in the war are not termed soldiers, so neither can I properly term all those that suffer in matters of religion, martyrs. There are many, questionless, canonised on earth that shall never be saints in heaven, and have their names in histories and martyrologies who, in the eyes of God, are not so perfect martyrs as was that wise heathen Socrates, that suffered on a fundamental point of religion--the unity of God. The leaven and ferment of all, not only civil but religious actions, is wisdom; without which to commit ourselves to the flames is homicide, and, I fear, but to pass through one fire into another. _III.--THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY_ I thank God I have not those strait ligaments or narrow obligations to the world as to dote on life or tremble at the name of death. Not that I am insensible of the horror thereof, or, by raking into the bowels of the deceased and continual sight of anatomies, I have forgot the apprehension of mortality; but that, marshalling all the horrors, I find not anything therein able to daunt the courage of a man, much less a well-resolved Christian. Were there not another life that I hope for, all the vanities of this world should not entreat a moment's breath from me. Those strange and mystical transmigrations that I have observed in silkworms turned my philosophy into divinity. There is in these works of Nature which seem to puzzle reason, something divine, that hath more in it than the eye of a common spectator doth discover. Some, upon the courage of a fruitful issue, wherein, as in the truest chronicle, they seem to outlive themselves, can with greater patience away with death. This seems to me a mere fallacy, unworthy the desires of a man that can but conceive a thought of the next world; who, in a nobler ambition, should desire to live in his substance in heaven rather than his name and shadow in the earth. Were there any hopes to outlive vice, or a point to be superannuated from sin, it were worthy our knees to implore the days of Methuselah. But age doth not rectify but brings on incurable vices, and the number of our days doth but make our sins innumerable. There is but one comfort left, that though it be in the power of the weakest arm to take away life, it is not in the strongest to deprive us of death. There is no happiness within this circle of flesh, nor is it in the optics of these eyes to behold felicity. But besides this literal and positive kind of death, there are others whereof divines make mention, as mortification, dying unto sin and the world. In these moral acceptations, the way to be immortal is to die daily; and I have enlarged that common "Remember death" into a more Christian memorandum--"Remember the four last things"--death, judgment, heaven, and hell. I believe that the world grows near its end; but that general opinion, that the world grows near its end, hath possessed all ages past as nearly as ours.