A Committee

Cast Knaves my Masters, fortune guide the chance,

No packing I beseech you, no by-glance

To mingle pairs, but fairly shake the bag,

Cheats in their spheres like subtile spirits wag.

Or if you please the Cards run as they will,

There is no choyce in sin and doing ill.

Then happy man by’s dole, luck makes the ods,

He acts most high that best out-dares the gods.

These are that Raw-bon’d Herd of Pharaoh’s Kine,

Which eat up all your Fadings, yet look lean.

These are the after-claps of bioudy showres,

Which, like the Scots, come for your guide and yours.

The Gleaners of the Fielde, where, if a man

Escape the sword, that milder frying-pan;

He leaps into the fire, cramping the claws

Of such can speak no English but the Cause.

Under that foggy term, that Inquisition,

Y’ are wrackt at all adventures On suspition:

No matter what’s the crime, a good estate’s

Delinquency enough to ground their hate.

Nor shall calm innocence so scape, as not

To be made guilty, or at least so thought.

And if the spirit once inform, beware,

The flesh and world but renegadoes are.

Thus once concluded, out the Teazers run,

And in full cry and speed till Wat’s, undone.

So that a poor Delinquent fleec’d and torn

Seems like a man that’s creeping through a horn,

Finds a smooth entrance, wide, and fit, but when

Hee’s squeez’d and forc’d up through the smaller end,

He looks as gaunt and pin’d, as he that spent

A tedious twelve years in an eager Lent;

Or bodies at the Resurrection are

On wing, just rarifying into aire.

The Emblem of a man, the pitied Case

And shape of some sad being once that was.

The Type of flesh and blood, the Skeleton

And superfices of a thing that’s gone.

The winter quarter of a life, the tinder

And body of a corps squeez’d to a cinder;

When no more tortures can be thought upon,

Mercy shall flow into oblivion.

Mercifull Hell! thy Judges are but three,

Ours multiform, and in plurality!

Thy calmer censures flow without recall,

And in one doom souls see their finall All.

We travel with expectance: Suffrings here

Are but the earnests of a second fear.

Thy plagues and pains are infinite; ’tis true;

Ours are not only infinite, but new.

So that the dread of what’s to come, exceeds

The anguish of that part already bleeds.

This only difference swells ’twixt us, and you,

Hell has the kinder Devils of the two.