Page:Works of Sir John Suckling.djvu/364

344 imperfectly and falsely; the last (more clear) left handsome monuments to posterity. The unknown I place in the age before the Flood, for that deluge swept away things as well as men, and left not so much as footsteps to trace them by. The fabulous began after the Flood; in this time godheads were cheap, and men, not knowing where to choose better, made deities one of another. Where this ended, the historical took beginning; for men began to ingrave in pillars, and to commit to letters, as it were by joint consent; for the three great epochs or terms of accompt were all established within the space of thirty years, the Grecians reckoning from their Olympiads, the Romans from the building of their city, and the Babylonians from their King Salmonassar. To bring into the scale with Christian religion anything out of the first age we cannot, because we know nothing of it.

And the second was so fabulous, that those which took it up afterwards smiled at it as ridiculous and false (which, though, was easier for them to do than to show a true). In the historical, it improved and grew more refined; but here the fathers entered the field, and so clearly gained the victory, that I should say nothing in it, did I not know it still to be the opinion of good wits that the particular religion of Christians has added little to the general religion of the world. Let us take it, then, in its perfecter estate, and look upon it in that age, which was made glorious by the bringing forth of so many admirable spirits; and this was about the eightieth Olympiad, in the year of the world 3480; for in the space of an 100 years flourished almost all that Greece could boast of—Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Architas, Isocrates, Pythagoras, Epicurus, Heraclitus, Xenophon, Zeno, Anaxagoras, Democritus, Demosthenes, Parmenides, Zenocrates, Theophrastes, Empedocles, Tymæus, with divers others, orators and poets. Or rather (for they had their religion one from another, and not much different), let us take a view of it in that century in which Nature (as it were to oppose the Grecian insolence) brought forth that happy birth of Roman wits—Varro, Cicero, Caesar, Livie, Salust, Virgil, Horace, Vitruvius, Ovid, Pliny, Cato, Marcus Brutus; and this was from Quintus Servilius his consulship to that of Augustus, 270 years after the other. And to say truth, a great part of our religion, either directly or indirectly hath been professed by heathens, which I conceive not so much an exprobation to it as a confirmation, it being no derogating from truth to be warranted by common consent.

First, then, the creation of the world is delivered almost the