Power, wisdom, goodness, sure did frame
  This universe, and still guide the same. 
  But thoughts from passions sprung, deceive
  Vain mortals.  No man can contrive
  A better course than what’s been run
  Since the first circuit of the sun.

  He that beholds all from on high
  Knows better what to do than I.
  I’m not mine own:  should I repine
  If he dispose of what’s not mine? 
  Purge but thy soul of blind self-will,
  Thou straight shall see God doth no ill. 
  The world he fills with the bright rays
  Of his free goodness.  He displays
  Himself throughout.  Like common air
  That spirit of life through all doth fare,
  Sucked in by them as vital breath
  That willingly embrace not death. 
  But those that with that living law
  Be unacquainted, cares do gnaw;
  Mistrust of God’s good providence
  Doth daily vex their wearied sense.

  Now place me on the Libyan soil,
  With scorching sun and sands to toil,
  Far from the view of spring or tree,
  Where neither man nor house I see;

* * * * *

  Commit me at my next remove
  To icy Hyperborean ove;
  Confine me to the arctic pole,
  Where the numb’d heavens do slowly roll;
  To lands where cold raw heavy mist
  Sol’s kindly warmth and light resists;
  Where lowering clouds full fraught with snow
  Do sternly scowl; where winds do blow
  With bitter blasts, and pierce the skin,
  Forcing the vital spirits in,
  Which leave the body thus ill bested,
  In this chill plight at least half-dead;
  Yet by an antiperistasis[136]
  My inward heat more kindled is;
  And while this flesh her breath expires,
  My spirit shall suck celestial fires
  By deep-fetched sighs and pure devotion. 
  Thus waxen hot with holy motion,
  At once I’ll break forth in a flame;
  Above this world and worthless fame
  I’ll take my flight, careless that men
  Know not how, where I die, or when.

  Yea, though the soul should mortal prove,
  So be God’s life but in me move
  To my last breath—­I’m satisfied
  A lonesome mortal God to have died.

This last paragraph is magnificent as any single passage I know in literature.

Is it lawful, after reading this, to wonder whether Henry More, the retired, and so far untried, student of Cambridge, would have been able thus to meet the alternations of suffering which he imagines?  It is one thing to see reasonableness, another to be reasonable when objects have become circumstances.  Would he, then, by spiritual might, have risen indeed above bodily torture?  It is possible for a man to arrive at this perfection; it is absolutely necessary that a man should some day or other reach it; and I think the wise doctor would have proved the truth of his principles.  But there are many