Complete. From “Resolves, Divine, Moral, and Political.”

NO man can live conveniently unless he propounds something to himself that may bound the whole course of his actions. There must be something for him to fly to beyond the reach of his caviling senses and corrupted reason; otherwise, he will waver in his ways and ever be in a doubtful unsettledness. If he takes policy, that is both endless and uncertain, and oftentimes depends more upon circumstances than upon the main act. What to-day is good is to-morrow unsaving; what benefits one may be the undoing of another. Besides, policy is not a flower which grows in every man’s garden. All the world is not made up of wit and stratagem. If it were, policy would then be but a fight of wit, a brain war; and in all wars how doubtful, and how unsure is victory! The cunning of Œdipus in resolving the Sphinx’s riddle only betrayed him into the fatal marriage of his mother. Though Palamedes discovered the feigned madness of Ulysses, yet Ulysses afterwards, by hidden gold and forged letters, found means to have him stoned, even while he pretended to defend him. No man has an exclusive monopoly of craft. Again, craft in private individuals is infinitely limited both in respect of means and lawfulness. Even those who have allowed deceit to be lawful in princes have yet condemned it as sinful in private persons. And if a man take Nature for his guide, she is obscure and insufficient; nor, if she were sufficient, could we have her pure. Custom hath so mingled her with art that we can hardly separate the one from the other. Nature and policy are but sinking floors, which will fail us when our weight is on them. Reason is contradicting, and so is nature; and so is religion, if we measure it by either of these; but faith, being the rule of it, places it above the cavils of imagination, and so subjects both the others to it. This being above all, is that only, which, setting limits to all our actions, can confine us to a settled rest. Policy governs the world; nature, policy; but religion, all. The first two I may use as counselors, hear what they say, and weigh it; but the last must be my sovereign. They are to religion what the Apocrypha is to the Bible; they are good things, and may be bound up and read with it; but must be rejected when they cross the canonical text. God is the summit of man’s happiness; and religion is the way to it. Till we arrive at him, we are but vapors, tossed about by inconstant winds.