11 They use cordials, to keep the disease from the heart

Where else but from Mans heart can we draw a better argument, a clearer demonstration that all the greatness of this world is built upon the opinions of others?

Greatness has in itself no real being or power or substance.

The heart is always in action and motion. Still busy, still pretending to do all, to furnish all the powers and faculties with all that they have. But if an enemy dare rise up against it, it is the soonest endangered, the soonest defeated of any part.

The brain will hold out longer than the heart, and the liver longer than that - they will endure a siege.

But an unnatural heat, a rebellious heat, will blow up the heart, like a mine, in a minute.

The heart has the birthright and primogeniture and is natures eldest son in us, the part which is first born to life in man. The other parts are like younger brethren and servants in this family, they depend upon the heart.

So treatment must first focus on the heart though it be not the strongest part, just as the eldest is oftentimes not the strongest of the family.

Brain, liver and heart hold not a triumvirate in man, a sovereignty equally shared for his well-being. The heart alone is in the throne as king.

The rest, as subjects, must contribute as children to their parents, as all persons to all kinds of superiors, though oftentimes those parents or those superiors are no stronger than they.

This obligation to put the heart first does not fall upon us by second–order laws of nature, It does not come from consequences and conclusions arising out of nature or derived from nature by discourse.

Many things bind us by the law of nature and yet not by the primary law of nature.

All laws of ownership are of the law of nature, which law is To give every one his own. Yet in the primary law of nature there was no private property, but a universal community over all.

Obedience to superiors is of the law of nature, and yet in the primary law of nature there was no superiority, no magistracy.

This contribution of assistance of all parts to the heart, is from the very first dictates of nature, which is in the first place to have care of our own preservation, to look first to ourselves.

That is why the physician postpones the care of brain or liver, because there is a possibility that they may survive without immediate treatment. There is no possibility that they can survive if the heart perish.

And so, when we seem to begin to help others indeed we do begin with ourselves - we ourselves are principally in our contemplation. All mutual assistances are but compliments towards others and our true end is ourselves.

Sometimes kings need the power of law, to be obeyed. When they seem to be obeyed voluntarily they who do it do it for their own sakes.

O how little a thing is all the greatness of man. Through how false glasses does he make shift to multiply it and magnify it?

This is also another misery of this king of man, the heart, which is also applicable to the kings of this world, great men. The venom and poison of every pestilential disease directs itself to the heart and the malevolence of men is also directed upon the greatest and the best.

Goodness too loses vigour through being an antidote against such malevolence.

The noblest and most generous cordials that nature or art provide lose their effectiveness if they be often taken and made familiar.

And so the greatest virtue of the heart, patience, if it be much exercised exalts the venom and malevolence of the enemy and the more we suffer the more we are insulted upon.

When God had made this earth he had but a little help to make other things of this earth.

Nothing can be nearer nothing than this earth, and yet how little of this earth is the greatest man? He thinks he treads upon the earth, that all is under his feet. But the brain that thinks so is but earth.

Mans highest region, the flesh that covers his brain is but earth and even the hair on top of that, in which so many Absaloms take so much pride, is but a bush growing upon that turf of earth.

How little of the world is the earth? And yet that is all that man has or is.

How little of a man is the heart and yet it is all by which he is. For the heart is continually subject not only to foreign poisons conveyed by others but to internal poisons bred in ourselves by pestilential sicknesses.

O who, if before he had a being he could have sense of this misery, would buy a being here upon these conditions?