ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the content of the godly life art of suffering. In Jeremiah Burroughes' Moses his choice there is undoubtedly some tension between the passage on willingness to bear affliction and the climax of the art of suffering on its profitable use. Jeremiah Burroughes quotes Seneca's 'Epistle 67' in the context of anticipating affliction and takes Anaxagoras as his exemplar in a quotation from Plutarch's 'On tranquillity of mind'. But 'tranquillity' was a commonplace topic in all the Schools of philosophy, creating a stock of arguments, similes, and exemplars on which all moral philosophers drew. Otto Werdmueller's 'natural meanes' to qualify and ease affliction, for example, and the instructions on preparation in Joseph Hall's Heaven vpon earth and in John Downame's texts, are largely quotations from moral philosophy. Other sources raided for content on the theme of self-control include the theory of the affections, which provides John Downame with his third 'rule' on mortification.
