From a review of “Religio Medici” addressed to the Earl of Dorset.

IT falleth fit in this place to examine our author’s apprehension of the end of such honest worthies and philosophers (as he calleth them) that died before Christ’s incarnation, whether any of them could be saved, or no. Truly, my lord, I make no doubt at all but if any followed in the whole tenor of their lives, the dictamens of right reason, but that their journey was secure to heaven. Out of the former discourse appeareth what temper of mind is necessary to get thither. And that reason would dictate such a temper to a perfectly judicious man (though but in the state of nature), as the best and most rational for him, I make no doubt at all. But it is most true, they are exceeding few, if any, in whom reason worketh clearly, and is not overswayed by passion and terrene affections; they are few that can discern what is reasonable to be done in every circumstance.

	———“Pauci, quos æquus amavit
	Jupiter, aut ardens evixit ad æthera virtus,
	Diis geniti, potuere.”———

And fewer, that knowing what is best, can win of themselves to do accordingly (video meliora proboque deteriora sequor, being most men’s cases); so that after all that can be expected at the hands of nature and reason in their best habit, since the lapse of them, we may conclude it would have been a most difficult thing for any man, and a most impossible one for mankind, to attain unto beatitude, if Christ had not come to teach, and by his example to show us the way.

  And this was the reason of his incarnation, teaching life and death. For being God, we could not doubt his veracity, when he told us news of the other world; having all things in his power, and yet enjoying none of the delights of this life, no man should stick at foregoing them, since his example showeth all men that such a course is best, whereas few are capable of the reason of it: and for his last act, dying in such an afflicted manner; he taught us how the securest way to step immediately into perfect happiness is to be crucified to all the desires, delights, and contentments of this world.

  But to come back to our physician. Truly, my lord, I must needs pay him, as a due, the acknowledging his pious discourses to be excellent and pathetical ones, containing worthy motives to incite one to virtue, and to deter one from vice; thereby to gain heaven and to avoid hell. Assuredly he is owner of a solid head and of a strong, generous heart. Where he employeth his thoughts upon such things as resort to no higher or more abstruse principles than such as occur in ordinary conversation with the world, or in the common track of study and learning, I know no man would say better. But when he meeteth with such difficulties as his next, concerning the resurrection of the body, wherein, after deep meditation upon the most abstracted principles and speculations of the metaphysics, one hath much ado to solve the appearing contradictions in nature, there I do not at all wonder he should tread a little awry, and go astray in the dark: for I conceive his course of life hath not permitted him to allow much time unto the unwinding of such entangled and abstracted subtleties. But if it had, I believe his natural parts are such, as he might have kept the chair from most men I know: for even where he roveth widest, it is with so much wit and sharpness, as putteth me in mind of a great man’s censure upon Joseph Scaliger’s Cyclometrica, a matter he was not well versed in; that he had rather err so ingeniously, as he did, than hit upon truth in that heavy manner, as the Jesuit, his antagonist, stuffeth his books. Most assuredly his wit and smartness in this discourse is of the finest standard, and his insight into severer learning will appear as piercing unto such as use not strictly the touchstone and the test to examine every piece of glittering coin he payeth his reader with. But to come to the resurrection, methinks it is but a gross conception, to think that every atom of the present individual matter of a body, every grain of ashes of a burned cadaver, scattered by the wind throughout the world, and, after numerous variations, changed peradventure into the body of another man, should at the sounding of the last trumpet be raked together again from all the corners of the earth, and be made up anew into the same body it was before of the first man. Yet if we will be Christians, and rely upon God’s promises, we must believe that we shall rise again with the same body that walked about, did eat, drink, and live here on earth; and that we shall see our Savior and Redeemer with the same, the very same eyes, wherewith we now look upon the fading glories of this contemptible world.