Now for the happiness which they proposed: if they take it as the heathens understood it, it was an Elysium, a place of blessed shades, at best but a handsome retirement from the troubles of this world; if according to the duller Jews, feastings and banquetings (for it is evident that the Sadducees, who were great observers of the Mosaical law, had but faint thoughts of anything to come), there being in Moses' books no promises but of temporal blessings, and (if any) an obscure mention of eternity. The Mahometans are no less sensual, making the renewing of youth, high feasts, a woman with great eyes, and dressed up with a little more fancy, the last and best good.
Then the hell—how gentle with the heathens! but the rolling of a stone, filling of a sieve with water, sitting before banquets and not daring to touch them, exercising the trade and businesses they had on earth: with the Mahometans, but a purgatory acted in the grave, some pains inflicted by a bad angel, and those qualified and mitigated too by an assisting good one. Now, for the Jews, as they had no hopes, so they had no fears; so that if we consider it rightly, neither their punishments were great enough to deter them from doing ill, nor their rewards high enough to invite men to strictness of life; for, since every man is able to make as good a heaven of his own, it were unreasonable to persuade him to quit that certain happiness for an uncertainty; whereas Christians, with as much more noble consideration both in their heaven and hell, took care not only for the body but the soul, and for both above man's apprehension.
The strangest, though most epidemical, disease of all religions has been an imagination men have had that the imposing painful and difficult things upon themselves was the best way to appease the Deity, grossly thinking the chief service and delight of the Creator to consist in the tortures and sufferings of the creature. How laden with chargeable and unnecessary ceremonies the Jews were, their feasts, circumcisions, sacrifices, great Sabbaths and little Sabbaths, fasts, burials, indeed almost all their worship, sufficiently declare; and that the Mahometans are much more infected appears by the cutting of the præpuces, wearing iron rings in the skin of their foreparts, lancing themselves with knives, putting out their eyes upon the sight of their prophet's tomb, and the like. Of these last we can shew no patterns amongst us; for though there be such a thing as whipping of the body, yet it is but in some parts of Christendom, and there perchance too more smiled at than practised. Our religion teaches us to bear afflictions patiently when they
