On Easter Sunday March 27, 1622, John Donne - as Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral - offered this in his sermon:
How barren a thing is Arithmetique! (and yet Arithmetique will tell you how many grains of sand will fill this hollow Vault to the Firmament) How empty a thing is Rhetorique! (and yet Rhetorique will make absent and remote things present to your understanding) How weak a thing is poetry! (and yet Poetry is a counterfait Creation, and makes things that are not, as though they were) How infirme, how impotent are all assistances, if they be put to express this Eternity!
The best help I can assigne you, is, to use well Aeternum vestrum, your owne Eternity; as S. Gregroy calls our whole course of this life, Aeternum nostrum, our Eternity; Aequum est, ut qui in aeterno suo peccaverit, in aeterno Dei puniatur, sayes he; It is but justice that he hath sinned out his owne Eternity, should suffer out Gods Eternity. So, if you suffer out your owne Eternity, in submitting your selves to God, in the whole course of your life, in surrendring your will intirely to his, and gloryfying of him in a constant patience, under all your tribulations, It is a righteous thing with God, (sayes our Apostle, in his other Epistle to these Thessalonians) To recompence tribulation to them that trouble you, and to you that are troubled, rest with us, sayes yee there; with us, who shall be caught up in the Clouds, to meete the Lord in the Ayre, and so shall be with the Lord for ever. Amen.
