No More Learning

l. 3. _The Sun itselfe, which makes times, as they passe_: i. e. which
makes times and seasons as they pass.

Before the Sunne, the which fram'd daies, was fram'd.
_The Second Anniversary_, l. 23.

The construction is somewhat of an anacoluthon, the sun alone being
given the predicate, 'Is elder by a year,' which has to be supplied
with all the other subjects in the first two lines. Chambers,
inadvertently or from some copy of _1633_, reads 'time', and this
makes 'they' refer back to 'Kings, favourites', &c. This does not
improve the construction.

l. 22. _But wee no more, then all the rest. _ The 'wee' of every MS.
which I have consulted seems to me certainly the correct reading.
The 'now' of all the printed editions is due to the editor of _1633_
imagining that he got thereby the right antithesis to 'then'. But he
was too hasty, for the antithesis is between 'then' when we are in
heaven, and now while we are 'here upon earth'. In heaven indeed we
shall be 'throughly blest', but _all_ in heaven are equally happy,
whereas here on earth,

we'are kings and none but we
Can be such kings, nor of such subjects be.

The 'none but we' is the extreme antithesis to 'But we no more than
all the rest'.

The Scholastic Philosophy held, not indeed that all in heaven are
equally blest, but that all are equally content. Basing themselves on
the verse, 'In domo Patris mei mansiones multae sunt,' John xiv. 2,
they argued that the blessed have in varying degree according to their
merit, the essential happiness of Heaven which is the vision of God:

Only who have enjoy'd
The sight of God, in fulnesse, can think it;
For it is both the object and the wit.
This is essential joy, where neither hee
Can suffer diminution, nor wee;
'Tis such a full, and such a filling good;
Had th'Angells once look'd on him they had stood.
_The Second Anniversary_, ll. 140-6 (p. 264).

But though not all equally dowered with the virtue and the wisdom to
understand God, all are content, for each is full to his measure, and
each is happy in the happiness of the other: 'Solet etiam quaeri an in
gaudio dispares sint, sicut in claritate cognitionis differunt. De hoc
August. ait in lib. de Civ.