OF TRUTH 3 



the honour of man's nature ; and that mixture of falsehood 

 is like allay in coin of gold and silver, which may make the 

 metal work the better, but it embaseth it. For these 

 winding and crooked courses are the goings of the serpent; 

 which goeth basely upon the belly, and not upon the feet. 

 There is no vice that doth so cover a man with shame as 

 to be found false and perfidious. And therefore Mon- 

 taigne saith prettily, when he inquired the reason, why the 

 word of the lie should be such a disgrace and such an 

 odious charge ? Saith he, * If it be well weighed, to say 

 that a man lieth, is as much to say, as that he is brave 

 towards God and a coward towards men/ For a lie 

 faces God, and shrinks from man. Surely the wickedness 

 of falsehood and breach of faith cannot possibly be so 

 highly expressed, as in that it shall be the last peal to call 

 the judgments of God upon the generations of men ; it 

 being foretold, that when Christ cometh, c he shall not 

 find faith upon the earth.' 



II 

 OF DEATH 



MEN fear Death, as children fear to go in the dark ; and as 

 that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is 

 the other. Certainly, the contemplation of death, as the 

 wages of sin and passage to another world, is holy and 

 religious ; but the fear of it, as a tribute due unto nature, 

 is weak. Yet in religious meditations there is sometimes 

 mixture of vanity and of superstition. You shall read in 

 some of the friars' books of mortification, that a man 

 should think with himself what the pain is if he have but 

 his finger's end pressed or tortured, and thereby imagine 

 what the pains of death are, when the whole body is cor- 

 rupted and dissolved ; when many times death passeth with 

 less pain than the torture of a limb : for the most vital 

 parts are not the quickest of sense. And by him that 

 spake only as a philosopher and natural man, it was well 



