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WE ARE BUT DUSTThe same twenty-eight elements found in the dust of the ground makeup and are found in the human body.Dust"Dust, the matter of our substance, the house of our souls, the original grains whereof we were made, the top of all our kindred. The glory of the strongest man, the beauty of the fairest woman, all is but dust. Dust, the only compounder of differences, the absolver of all distinctions. Who can say which was the client, which the lawyer; which the borrower, which the lender; which the captive, which the conqueror, when they all lie together in blended dust?Dust; not marble nor porphyry, gold nor precious stone, was the matter of our bodies, but earth, and the fractions of the earth, dust. Dust, the sport of the wind, the very slave of the besom. This is the pit from whence we are dug, and this is the pit to which we shall be resolved. “Dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return again," Gen. 3:19. They that sit in the dust, and feel their own materials about them, may well renounce the ornaments of pride, the gulf of avarice, the foolish lusts of concupiscence. Let the covetous think, What do I scrape for? A little golden dust,- the ambitious, What do I aspire for? A little honorable dust; the libidinous, What do I languish for? A little animated dust, blown away with the breath of God’s displeasure.Oh, how goodly this building of man appears when it is clothed with beauty and honor! A face full of majesty, the throne of comeliness, wherein the whiteness of the lily contends with the sanguine Of the rose; an active hand, an erected countenance, an eye sparkling out luster, a smooth complexion, arising from an excellent temperature and composition; whereas other creatures, by reason of their cold and gross humor, are grown over, beasts with hair, fowls with feathers, fishes with scales. Oh, what a workman was this, that could raise such a fabric out of the earth, and lay such orient colors upon dust! Yet all is but dust, walking, talking, breathing dust; all this beauty but the effect of a well-concocted food, and life itself but a walk from dust to dust. You, and this man, or that woman, is never so beautiful as when they sit weeping for their sins in the dust: as Mary Magdalene was then fairest when she kneeled in the dust, bathing the feet of Christ with her tears, and wiping them with her hairs; like heaven, fair sightward to us that are without, but fairer to them that are within. The dust comes of the same house that we are, and when she sees us proud and forgetful of ourselves, she thinks with herself, Why should not she that is descended as well as we bear up her plumes as high as ours? Therefore she so often borrows wings of the wind, to mount aloft into the air, and in the streets and highways dasheth herself into our eyes, as if she would say, Are you my kindred, and will not know me? Will you take no notice of your own mother? To tax the folly of our ambition, the dust in the street takes pleasure to be ambitious.