so have I known passionate women to shrike aloud when their neerest relatives were dying and that horrid shrike hath stayed the spirit of the man a while to wonder at the folly and represent the inconvenience and the dying person hath lived one day longer full of pain amazed with an undeterminate spirit distorted with convulsions and onely come again to act one scene more of a new calamity and to die with less decency so also do very many men with passion and a troubled interest they strive to continue their life longer and it may be they escape this sickness and live to fall into a disgrace they escape the storm and fall into the hands of pyrats and instead of dying with liberty they live like slaves miserable and despised servants to a litle time and sottish admirers of the breath of their own lungs Paulus Aemilius did handsomly reprove the cowardice of the King of Macedon who begged of him for pities sake and humanity that having conquered him and taken his kingdom from him he would be content with that and not lead him in triumph a prisoner to Rome Aemilius told him he need not be beholding to him for that himself might prevent that in despite of him But the timorous King durst not die But certainly every wise man will easily believe that it had been better the Macedonian Kings should have dyed in battel then protract their life so long till some of them came to be Scriveners and Joyners at Rome or that the Tyrant of Sicily better had perished in the Adriatic then to be wafted to Corinth safely and there turn Schoolmaster It is a sad calamity that the fear of death shall so imbecill mans courage and understanding that he dares not suffer the remedie of all his calamities but that he lives to say as Liberius did I have lived this one day longer then I should either therefore let us be willing to die when God calls or let us never more complain of the calamities of our life which we feel so sharp and numerous And when God sends his Angel to us with a scroll of death let us look on it as an act of mercy to prevent many sins and many calamities of a longer life and lay our heads down softly and go to sleep without wrangling like babies and froward children For a man at least gets this by death that his calamities are not immortal But I do not onely consider death by the advantages of comparison but if we look on it in it self it is no such formidable thing if we view it on both sides and handle it and consider all its appendages 2. It is necessary and therefore not intolerable and nothing is to be esteemed evil which God and nature have fixed with eternal sancâ—ions It is a law of God it is a punishment of our sins and it is the constitution of our nature Two differing substances were joyned together with the breath of God and when that breath is taken away they part asunder and return to their several principles the soul to God our Father the body to the earth our Mother and what in all this is evil Surely nothing but that we are men nothing but that we were not born immortall but by declining this change with great passion or receiving it with a huge naturall fear we accuse the Divine Providence of Tyranny and exclaim against our naturall constitution and are discontent that we are men 3. It is a thing that is no great matter in it self if we consider that we die daily that it meets us in every accident that every creature carries a dart along with it and can kill us And therefore when Lysimachus threatned Theodorus to kill him he told him that was no great matter to do and he could do no more then the Cantharides could a little flie could do as much 4. It is a thing that every one suffers even persons of the lowest resolution of the meanest vertue of no breeding of no discourse Take away but the pomps of death the disguises and solemn bug-bears the tinsell and the actings by candle-light and proper and phantastic ceremonies the minstrels and the noise-makers the women and the weepers the swoonings and the shrikings the Nurses and the Physicians the dark room and the Ministers the Kinred and the Watchers and then to die is easie ready and quitted from its troublesome circumstances It is the same harmelesse thing that a poor shepherd suffered yesterday or a maid-servant to day and at the same time in which you die in that very night a thousand creatures die with you some wise men and many fools and the wisdom of the first will not quit him and the folly of the latter does not make him unable to die 5. Of all the evils of the world which are reproached with an evil character death is the most innocent of its accusation For when it is present it hurts no body and when it is absent 't is indeed troublesome but the trouble is owing to our fears not to the affrighting and mistaken object and besides this if it were an evil it is so transient that it passes like the instant or undiscerned portion of the present time and either it is past or it is not yet for just when it is no man hath reason to complain of so insensible so sudden so undiscerned a change 6. It is so harmelesse a thing that no good man was ever thought the more miserable for dying but much the happier When men saw the graves of Calatinus of the Servicij the Scipio's the Metelli did ever any man among the wisest Romans think them unhappy And when S. Paul fell under the sword of Nero and S. Peter died upon the crosse and S. Stephen from an heap of stones was carried into an easier grave they that made great lamentation over them wept for their own interest and after the manner of men but the Martyrs were accounted happy and their dayes kept solemnly and their memories preserved in never dying honours When S. Hilary Bishop of Poictiers in France went into the East to reproove the Arian heresie he heard that a young noble Gentleman treated with his daughter Abra for marriage The Bishop wrote to his daughter that she should not ingage her promise nor do countenance to that request because he had provided for her a husband fair rich wise and noble farre beyond her present offer The event of which was this She obeyed and when her father returned from his Eastern triumph to his Western charge he prayed to God that his daughter might die quickly and God heard his prayers and Christ took her into his bosome entertaining her with antepasts and caresses of holy love till the day of the marriage Supper of the Lamb shall come But when the Bishops wife observed this event and understood of the good man her husband what was done and why she never left
us from that but our own uncharitablenesse 7. Be obedient unto thy Physitian in those things that concern him if he be a person fit to minister unto thee God is he onely that needs no help and God hath created the Physitian for thine therefore use him temperately without violent confidences and sweetly without uncivil distrustings or refusing his prescriptions upon humors or impotent fear A man may refuse to have his arme or leg cut off or to suffer the pains of Marius his incision and if he believes that to dye is the lesse evil he may compose himself to it without hazarding his patience or introducing that which he thinks a worse evil but that which in this article is to be reproved and avoided is that some men will choose to die out of fear of death and send for Physitians and do what themselves list and call for counsel and follow none When there is reason they should decline him it is not to be accounted to the stock of a sin but where there is no just cause there is a direct impatience Hither is to be reduced that we be not too confident of the Physitian or drain our hopes of recovery from the â—ountain through so imperfect chanels laying the wells of God dry and digging to our selves broken cisterns Physitians are the Ministers of Gods mercies and providence in the matter of health and ease of restitution or death and when God shall enable their judgements and direct their counsels and prosper their medicines they shall do thee good for which you must give God thanks and to the Physitian the honour of a blessed instrument But this cannot alwayes be done and Lucius Cornelius the Lieutenant in Portugal under Fabius the Consul boasted in the inscription of his monument that he had lived a healthful and vegete age till his last sicknesse but then complained he was forsaken by his Physitian and railed upon Esculapius for not accepting his vow and passionate desire of preserving his life longer and all the effect of that impatience and the folly was that it is recorded to following ages that he died without reason and without religion But it was a sad sight to see the favour of all France confined to a Physitian and a Barber and the King Lewis the XI to be so much their servant that he should acknowledge and own his life from them and all his ease to their gentle dressing of his gout and friendly ministeries for the King thought himself undone and robbed if he should die his portion here was fair and he was loth to exchange his possession for the interest of a bigger hope 8. Treat thy nurses and servants sweetly and as it becomes an obliged and a necessitous person remember that thou art very troublesome to them that they trouble not thee willingly that they strive to do thee ease and benefit that they wish it and sigh and pray for it and are glad if thou likest their attendance that whatsoever is amisse is thy disease and the uneasinesse of thy head or thy side thy distemper or thy disaffections and it will be an unhandsome injustice to be troublesome to them because thou art so to thy self to make them feel a part of thy sorrowes that thou mayest not bear them alone evilly to requite their care by thy too curious and impatient wrangling and fretful spirit That tendernesse is vitious and unnatural that shrikes out under the weight of a gentle cataplasm and he will ill comply with Gods rod that cannot endure his friends greatest kindnesse And he will be very angry if he durst with Gods smiting him that is peevish with his servants that go about to ease him 9. Let not the smart of your sicknesse make you to call violently for death you are not patient unlesse you be content to live God hath wisely ordered that we may be the better reconciled with death because it is the period of many calamities But where ever the General hath placed thee stirre not from thy station until thou beest called off but abide so that death may come to thee by the designe of him who intends it to be thy advantage God hath made sufferance to be thy work and do not impatiently long for evening lest at night thou findest the reward of him that was weary of his work for he that is weary before his time is an unprofitable servant and is either idle or diseased 10 That which remains in the practise of this grace is that the sick man should do acts of patience by way of prayer and ejaculations In which he may serve himself of the following collection SECT II. Acts of patience by way of prayer and ejaculation I Will seek unto God unto God will I commit my cause which doth great things and unsearchable marvellous things without number To set upon high those that be low that those which mourn may be exalted to safety So the poor have hope and iniquity stoppeth her mouth Behold happy is the man whom God correcteth therefore despise not thou the chastening of the Almighty For he maketh sore and bindeth up he woundeth and his hands make whole He shall deliver thee in six troubles yea in seven there shall no evil touch thee Thou shalt come to thy grave in a just age like as a shock of corn cometh in his season I remember thee upon my bed and meditate upon thee in the night watches Because thou hast been my help therefore under the shadow of thy wings will I rejoyce My soul followeth hard after thee for thy right hand hath upholden me God restoreth my soul he leadeth me in the path of righteousnesse for his names sake Yea though I walk thorough the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil for thou art with me thy rod and thy staff they comfort me In the time of trouble he shall hide me in his pavilion in the secret of his tabernacle shal he hide me he shal set me up upon a rock The Lord hath looked down from the height of his sanctuary from the heaven did the Lord behold the earth To hear the groaning of his prisoners to loose those that are appointed to death I cryed unto God with my voice even unto God with my voice and he gave ear unto me In the day of my trouble I sought the Lord my sore ran in the night and ceased not my soul refused to be comforted * I remember God and was troubled I complained and my spirit was overwhelmed thou holdest mine eyes waking I am so troubled that I cannot speak will the Lord cast me off for ever and will he be favourable no more Is his promise clean gone for ever doth his promise fail for evermore Hath God forgotten to be gracious hath he in anger shut up his tender mercies And I said this my infirmity but I will remember the years of the right
God had made appetites of pleasure in man that in them the scene of his obedience should lye For when God made instances of mans obedience he 1. either commanded such things to be done which man did naturally desire or 2. such things which did contradict his natural desires or 3. such which were indifferent Not the first and the last For it could be no effect of love or duty towards God for a man to eat when he was impatiently hungry and could not stay from eating neither was it any contention of obedience or labour of love for a man to look Eastward once a day or turn his back when the North winde blew fierce and loud Therefore for the trial and instance of obedience God made his laws so that they should lay restraint upon mans appetites so that man might part with something of his own that he may give to God his will and deny it to himself for the interest of his service and chastity is the denyall of a violent desire and justice is parting with money that might help to inrich me and meekness is a huge contradiction to pride and revenge and the wandring of our eyes and the greatnesse of our fancy and our imaginative opinions are to be lessened that we may serve God there is no other way of serving God we have nothing else to present unto him we do not else give him any thing or part of our selves but when we for his sake part with what we naturally desire and difficulty is essential to vertue and without choice there can be no reward in the satisfaction of our natural desires there is no election we run to them as beasts to the river or the crib If therefore any man shall teach or practise such a religion that satisfies all our natural desires in the dayes of desire and passion of lust and appetites and only turns to God when his appetites are gone his desires cease this man hath overthrown the very being of vertues and the essential constitution of religion Religion is no religion and vertue is no act of choice and reward comes by chance and without condition if we onely are religious when we cannot choose if we part with our money when we cannot keep it with our lust when we cannot act it with our desires when they have left us death is a certain mortifier but that mortification is deadly not useful to the purposes of a spiritual life When we are compeld to depart from our evil customs and leave to live that we may begin to live then we dye to dye that life is the prologue to death and thenceforth we die eternally S. Cyril speaks of certain people that chose to worship the sun because he was a day God for believing that he was quenched every â—â—ght in the sea or that he had no influence upon them that light up candles and lived by the light of fire they were confident they might be Atheists all night and live as they list Men who divide their little portion of time between religion and pleasures between God and Gods enemy think that God is to rule but in his certain period of time and that our life is the stage for passion and folly and the day of death for the work of our life but as to God both the day and night are alike so are the first and the last of our dayes all are his due and he will account severely with us for the follies of the first and the evil of the last The evils and the pains are great which are reserved for those who defer their restitution to Gods favour till their death And therefore Antisthenes said well It is not the happy death but the happy life that makes man happy It is in piety as in fame and reputation he secures a good name but loosely that trusts his fame and celebritie onely to his ashes and it is more a civilitie 〈◊〉 then the base of a firm reputation that men speak honour of their departed relatives but if their life be vertuous it forces honour from contempt and snatches it from the hand of envy and it shines thorough the crevises of detraction and as it anointed the head of the living so it embalms the body of the dead From these premises if followes that when we discourse of a sick mans repentance it is intended to be not a beginning but the prosecution and consummation of the covenant of repentance which Christ stipulated with us in Baptisme and which we needed all our life and which we began long before this last arrest and in which we are now to make further progresse that we may arrive to that integrity and fulnesse of of dutie that our sins may be blotted out when the times of refreshing shall come from the presence of the Lord. SECT VI. Rules for the practise of Repentance in sicknesse 1. LEt the sick man consider at what gate this sicknesse entred and if he can discover the particular let him instantly passionately and with great contrition dash the crime in pieces lest he descend into his grave in the midst of a sin and thence remove into an ocean of eternal sorrowes but if he onely suffers the common fate of man and knowes not the particular inlet he is to be governed by the following measures 2. Inquire into the repentance of thy former life particularly whether it were of a great and perfect grief and productive of fixed resolutions of holy living and reductive of these to act How many dayes and nights have we spent in sorrow or care in habitual and actual pursuances of vertue what instrument we have chosen and used for the eradication of sin how we have judged our selves and how punished and in summe whether we have by the grace of repentance changed our life from criminal to vertuous from one habit to another and whether we have paid for the pleasure of our sin by smart or sorrow by the effusion of alms or pernoctations or abodes in prayers so as the spirit hath been served in our repentance as earnestly and as greatly as our appetites have been provided for in the dayes of our shame and folly 3. Supply the imperfections of thy repentance by a general or universal sorrow for the sins not onely since the last communion or absolution but of thy whole life for all sins known and unknown repented and unrepented of ignorance or infirmity which thou knowest or which others have accused thee of thy clamorous and thy whispering sins the sinnes of scandall and the sinnes of a secret conscience of the flesh and of the spirit for it would be but a sad arrest to thy soul wandring in strange and unusuall regions to see a scroll of uncancelled sins represented and charged upon thee for want of care and notices and that thy repentance shall become invalid because of its imperfections 4. To this purpose it is usually advised by spirituall persons
The Rule and Exercises of holy Dying by Ier Taylor D. D. THE RVLE AND EXERCISES OF HOLY DYING In which are described The MEANS and INSTRUMENTS of preparing our selves and others respectively for a blessed Death and the remedies against the evils and temptations proper to the state of Sicknesse Together with Prayers and Acts of Vertue to be used by sick and dying persons or by others standing in their Attendance To which are added Rules for the visitation of the Sick and offices proper for that Ministery 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 Isoc ad Demonic LONDON Printed for R. R. and are to be sold by Edward Martin Bookseller in Norwich 1651. To the Right Honourable and most truly Noble RICHARD Lord VAVGHAN Earl of CARBERY Baron of EMLIN and MOLINGAR Knight of the Honourable Order of the BATH My Lord I Am treating your Lordship as a Roman Gentleman did Saint Augustine and his Mother I shall entertain you in a Charnel house and carry your meditations awhile into the chambers of death where you shall finde the rooms dressed up with melancholy arts and fit to converse with your most retired thoughts which begin with a sigh and proceed in deep consideration and end in a holy resolution The sight that S. Augustine most noted in that house of sorrow was the body of Caesar clothed with all the dishonours of corruption that you can suppose in a six moneths burial But I know that without pointing your first thoughts will remember the change of a greater beauty which is now dressing for the brightest immortality and from her bed of darknesse calls to you to dress your soul for that change which shall mingle your bones with that beloved dust and carry your soul to the same Quire where you may both sit and sing for ever My Lord it is your dear Ladies Anniversary and she deserved the biggest honour and the longest memory and the fairest monument and the most solemne mourning and in order to it give me leave My Lord to cover her Hearse with these following sheets this book was intended first to minister to her piety and she desired all good people should partake of the advantages which are here recorded she knew how to live rarely well and she desired to know how to dye and God taught her by an experiment But since her work is done and God supplyed her with provisions of his own before I could minister to her and perfect what she desired it is necessary to present to your Lordship those bundles of Cypresse which were intended to dresse her Closet but come now to dresse her Hearse My Lord both your Lordship and my self have lately seen and felt such sorrows of death and such sad departure of Dearest friends that it is more then high time we should think our selves neerly concerned in the accidents Death hath come so neer to you as to fetch a portion from your very heart and now you cannot choose but digge your own grave and place your coffin in your eye when the Angel hath dressed your scene of sorrow and meditation with so particular and so neer an object and therefore as it is my duty I am come to minister to your pious thoughts and to direct your sorrows that they may turn into vertues and advantages And since I know your Lordship to be so constant and regular in your devotions and so tender in the matter of justice so ready in the expressions of charity and so apprehensive of religion and that you are a person whose work of grace is apt and must every day grow towards those degrees where when you arrive you shall triumph over imperfection and choose nothing but what may please God I could not by any compendium conduct and assist your pious purposes so well as by that which is the great argument and the great instrument of holy living the consideration and exercises of death My Lord it is a great art to dye well and to be learnt by men in health by them that can discourse and consider by those whose understanding and acts of reason are not abated with fear or pains and as the greatest part of death is passed by the preceding years of our life so also in those years are the greatest preparation to it and he that prepares not for death before his last sicknesse is like him that begins to study Philosophy when he is going to dispute publikely in the faculty All that a sick and dying man can do is but to exercise those vertues which he before acquired and to perfect that repentance which was begun more early And of this My Lord my Book I think is a good testimony not onely because it represents the vanity of a late and sick-bed repentance but because it contains in it so many precepts and meditations so many propositions and various duties such forms of exercise and the degrees and difficulties of so many graces which are necessary preparatives to a holy death that the very learning the duties require study and skill time and understanding in the wayes of godlinesse and it were very vain to say so much is necessary and not to suppose more time to learn them more skill to practise them more opportunities to desire them more abilities both of body and mind then can be supposed in a sick amazed timerous and weak person whose naturall acts are disabled whose senses are weak whose discerning faculties are lessened whose principles are made intricate and intangled upon whose eye sits a cloud and the heart is broken with sicknesse and the liver pierced thorow with sorrows and the strokes of death And therefore my Lord it is intended by the necessity of affairs that the precepts of dying well be part of the studies of them that live in health and the dayes of discourse and understanding which in this case hath another degree of necessity superadded because in other notices an imperfect study may be supplied by a frequent exercise and a renewed experience Here if we practise imperfectly once we shall never recover the errour for we die but once and therefore it will be necessary that our skill be more exact since it is not to be mended by triall but the actions must be for ever left imperfect unlesse the habit be contracted with study and contemplation before hand And indeed I were vain if I should intend this book to be read and studied by dying persons and they were vainer that should need to be instructed in those graces which they are then to exercise and to finish For a sick bed is only a school of severe exercise in which the spirit of a man is tried and his graces are rehearsed and the assistances which I have in the following pages given to those vertues which are proper to the state of sicknesse are such as suppose a man in the state of grace or they confirm a good man or they support the weak or adde degrees or minister
change without a spiritual act of him that is to be changed nor work by way of nature or by charme but morally and after the manner of reasonable creatures and therefore I do not think that ministery at all fit to be reckoned among the advantages of sick persons The Fathers of the Councel of Trent first disputed and after their manner at last agreed that extream unction was instituted by Christ. But afterwards being admonished by one of their Theologues that the Apostles ministred unction to infirm people before they were Priests the Priestly order according to their doctrine being collated in the institution of the last Supper for fear that it should be thought that this unction might be administred by him that was no Priest they blotted out the word instituted and put in its stead insinuated this Sacrament and that it was published by Saint Iames. So it is in their Doctrine and yet in their anathematismes they curse all them that shall deny it to have been instituted by Christ. I shall lay no more prejudice against it or the weak arts of them that maintain it but adde this onely that there being but two places of Scripture pretended for this ceremonie some chief men of their own side have proclaimed those two invalid as to the institution of it for Suarez sayes that the unction used by the Apostles in S. Mark 6.13 is not the same with what is used in the Church of Rome and that it cannot be plainly gathered from the Epistle of Saint Iames Cajetan affirms and that it did belong to the miraculous gift of healing not to a Sacrament The sick mans exercise of grace formerly acquired his perfecting repentance begun in the dayes of health the prayers and counsels of the Holy man that ministers the giving the Holy Sacrament the Ministery and assistance of Angels and the mercies of God the peace of conscience and the peace of the Church are all the assistances and preparatives that can help to dresse his lamp But if a man shall go to buy oil when the Bridegroom comes if his lamp be not first furnish'd and then trimmed that in his life this upon his death-bed his station shall be without doors his portion with unbelievers and the unction of the dying man shall no more strengthen his soul then it cures his body and the prayers for him after his death shall be of the same force as if they should pray that he should return to life again the next day and live as long as Lazarus in his return But I consider that it is not well that men should pretend any thing will do a man good when he dies and yet the same ministeries and ten times more assistances are found for fourty or fifty years together to be ineffectual can extreme unction at last cure what the Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist all his life time could not do Can prayers for a dead man do him more good then when he was alive If all his dayes the man belonged to death and the dominion of sin and from thence could not be recovered by Sermons and counsels and perpetual precepts and frequent Sacraments by confessions and absolutions by prayers and advocations by external ministeries and internal acts it is but too certain that his lamp cannot then be furnished his extreme unction is onely then of use when it is made by the oil that burned in his lamp in all the dayes of his expectation and waiting for the coming of the Bridegroom Neither can any supply be made in this case by their practise of praying for the dead though they pretend for this the fairest precedents of the Church and of the whole world The Heathens they say did it and the Jews did it and the Christians did it some were baptized for the dead in the dayes of the Apostles and very many were communicated for the dead for many ages after T is true they were so and did so the Heathens prayed for an easie grave and a perpetual spring that Saffron would rise from their beds of grasse The Jews prayed that the souls of their dead might be in the garden of Eden that they might have their part in Paradise and in the world to come and that they might hear the peace of the fathers of their generations sleeping in Hebron and the Christians prayed for a joyful resurrection for mercy at the day of judgement for the hastning of the coming of Christ the kingdom of God and they named all sorts of persons in their prayers all I mean but wicked persons all but them that liv'd evil lives they named Apostles Saints and Martyrs and all this is so nothing to their purpose or so much against it that the prayers for the dead used in the Church of Rome are moct plainly condemned because they are against the doctrine and practises of all the world in other forms to other purposes relying upon distinct doctrines until new opinions began to arise about S. Augustines time and changed the face of the proposition Concerning prayer for the dead the Church hath received no commandment from the Lord and therefore concerning it we can have no rules nor proportions but from those imperfect revelations of the state of departed souls and the measures of charity which can relate onely to the imperfection of their present condition and the terrors of the day of judgement but to think that any suppletory to an evil life can be taken from such devotions after the sinners are dead may incourage a bold man to sin but cannot relieve him when he hath But of all things in the world me thinks men should be most careful not to abuse dying people not onely because their condition is pitiable but because they shall soon be discovered and in the secret regions of souls there shall be an evil report concerning those men who have deceived them and if we believe we shall go to that place where such reports are made we may fear the shame and the amazement of being accounted impostors in the presence of Angels and all the wise holy men of the world To be erring and innocent is hugely pitiable and incident to mortality that we cannot help but to deceive or to destroy so great an interest as is that of a soul or to lessen its advantages by giving it trifling and false confidences is injurious and intolerable And therefore it were very well if all the Churches of the world would be extremely curious concerning their offices and ministeries of the visitation of the sick that their Ministers they send be holy and prudent that their instructions be severe and safe that their sentences be merciful and reasonable that their offices be sufficient and devout that their attendances be frequent and long that their deputations be special and peculiar that the doctrines upon which they ground their offices be true material and holy that their ceremonies be few and their advices wary that their
vineyards or our King be sick we regard it not but during that state are as disinterest as if our eyes were closed with the clay that weeps in the bowels of the earth At the end of seven years our teeth fall and dye before us representing a formal prologue to the Tragedie and still every seven year it is oddes but we shall finish the last scene and when Nature or Chance or Vice takes our body in pieces weakening some parts and loosing others we taste the grave and the solennities of our own Funerals first in those parts that ministred to Vice and next in them that served for Ornament and in a short time even they that served for necessity become uselesse and intangled like the wheels of a broken clock Baldnesse is but a dressing to our funerals the proper ornament of mourning and of a person entred very far into the regions and possession of Death And we have many more of the same signification Gray hairs rotten teeth dim eyes trembling joynts short breath stiffe limbs wrinkled skin short memory decayed appetite Every dayes necessity calls for a reparation of that portion which death fed on all night when we lay in his lap and slept in his outer chambers The very spirits of a man prey upon the daily portion of bread and flesh and every meal is a rescue from one death and layes up for another and while we think a thought we die and the clock strikes and reckons on our portion of Eternity we form our words with the breath of our nostrils we have the lesse to live upon for every word we speak Thus Nature calls us to meditate of death by those things which are the instruments of acting it and God by all the variety of his Providence makes us see death every where in all variety of circumstances and dressed up for all the fancies and the expectation of every single person Nature hath given us one harvest every year but death hath two and the Spring and the Autumn send throngs of Men and Women to charnel houses and all the Summer long men are recovering from their evils of the Spring till the dog dayes come and then the Syrian star makes the summer deadly And the fruits of Autumn are laid up for all the years provision and the man that gathers them eats and sursets and dies and needs them not and himself is laid up for Eternity and he that escapes till winter only stayes for another opportunity which the distempers of that quarter minister to him with great variety Thus death reigns in all the portions of our time The Autumn with its fruits provides disorders for us and the Winters cold turns them into sharp diseases and the Spring brings flowers to strew our herse and the Summer gives green turfe and brambles to binde upon our graves Calentures and Surâ—et Cold and Agues are the four quarters of the year and all minister to Death and you can go no whither but you tread upon a dead mans bones The wilde fellow in Petronius that escaped upon a broken table from the furies of a shipwrack as he was sunning himself upon the rocky shore espied a man rolled upon his floating bed of waves ballasted w th sand in the folds of his garment and carried by his civil enemy the sea towards the shore to finde a grave and it cast him into some sad thoughts that peradventure this mans wife in some part of the Continent safe and warme looks next moneth for the good mans return or it may be his son knows nothing of the tempest or his father thinks of that affectionate kiss which still is warm upon the good old mans cheek ever since he took a kinde farewel and he weeps with joy to think how blessed he shall be when his beloved boy returns into the circle of his Fathers arms These are the thoughts of mortals this is the end and sum of all their designes a dark night and an ill Guide a boysterous sea and a broken Cable a hard rock and a rough winde dash'd in pieces the fortune of a whole family and they that shall weep loudest for the accident are not yet entred into the storm and yet have suffered shipwrack Then looking upon the carkasse he knew it and found it to be the Master of the ship who the day before cast up the accounts of his patrimony and his trade and named the day when he thought to be at home see how the man swims who was so angry two dayes since his passions are becalm'd with the storm his accounts cast up his cares at an end his voyage done and his gains are the strange events of death which whither they be good or evil the men that are alive seldom trouble themselves concerning the interest of the dead But seas alone do not break our vessel in pieces Every where we may be shipwracked A valiant General when he is to reap the harvest of his crowns and triumphs fights unprosperously or falls into a Feaver with joy and wine and changes his Lawrel into Cypresse his triumphal chariot to an Hearse dying the night before he was appointed to perish in the drunkennesse of his festival joyes It was a sad arrest of the loosenesses and wilder feasts of the French Court when their King Henry 2. was killed really by the sportive image of a fight And many brides have died under the hands of Paranymphs and Maidens dressing them for uneasy joy the new and undiscerned chains of Marriage according to the saying of Bensirah the wise Jew The Bride went into her chamber and knew not what should befall her there Some have been paying their vows and giving thanks for a prosperous return to their own house and the roof hath descended upon their heads and turned their loud religion into the deeper silence of a grave And how many teeming Mothers have rejoyced over their swelling wombs and pleased themselves in becoming the chanels of blessing to a familie and the Midwife hath quickly bound their heads and feet and carried them forth to burial Or else the birth day of an Heir hath seen the Coffin of the Father brought into the house and the divided Mother hath been forced to travel twice with a painful birth and a sadder death There is no state no accident no circumstance of our life but it hath been sowred by some sad instance of a dying friend a friendly meeting often ends in some sad mischance and makes an eternal parting and when the Poet Eschylus was sitting under the walls of his house an eagle hovering over his bald head mistook it for a stone and let fall his oyster hoping there to break the shell but pierced the poor mans skull Death meets us every where and is procured by every instrument and in all chances and enters in at many doors by violence and secret influence by the aspect of a star and the stink of a mist by the emissions
onely to play withall but before a man comes to be wise he is half dead with gouts and consumptions with Catarrhes and aches with sore eyes and a worn out body so that if we must not reckon the life of a man but by the accounts of his reason he is long before his soul be dressed and he is not to be called a man without a wise and an adorned soul a soul at least furnished with what is necessary towards his well being but by that time his soul is thus furnished his body is decayed and then you can hardly reckon him to be alive when his body is possessed by so many degrees of death 3. But there is yet another arrest At first he wants strength of body and then he wants the use of reason and when that is come it is ten to one but he stops by the impediments of vice and wants the strengths of the spirit and we know that Body and Soul and Spirit are the constituent parts of every Christian man And now let us consider what that thing is which we call years of discretion The young man is passed his Tutors and arrived at the bondage of a caytive spirit he is run from discipline and is let loose to passion the man by this time hath wit enough to chuse his vice to act his lust to court his Mistresse to talk confidently and ignorantly and perpetually to despise his betters to deny nothing to his appetite to do things that when he is indeed a man he must for ever be ashamed of for this is all the discretion that most men show in the first stage of their Manhood they can discern good from evil and they prove their skill by leaving all that is good and wallowing in the evils of folly and an unbridled appetite And by this time the young man hath contracted vitious habits and is a beast in manners and therefore it will not be fitting to reckon the beginning of his life he is a fool in his understanding and that is a sad death and he is dead in trespasses and sins and that is a sadder so that he hath no life but a natural the life of a beast or a tree in all other capacities he is dead he neither hath the intellectual nor the spiritual life neither the life of a man nor of a Christian and this sad truth lasts too long For old age seizes upon most men while they still retain the minds of boyes and vitious youth doing actions from principles of great folly and a mighty ignorance admiring things uselesse and hurtfull and filling up all the dimensions of their abode with businesses of empty affairs being at leasure to attend no vertue they cannot pray because they are busie and because they are passionate they cannot communicate because they have quarrels and intrigues of perplexed causes complicated hostilities and things of the world and therefore they cannot attend to the things of God little considering that they must find a time to die in when death comes they must be at leisure for that Such men are like Sailers loosing from a port and tost immediatly with a perpetual tempest lasting till their cordage crack and either they sink or return back again to the same place they did not make a voyage though they were long at sea The businesse and impertinent affairs of most men steal all their time and they are restlesse in a foolish motion but this is not the progress of a man he is no further advanc'd in the course of a life though he reckon many years for still his soul is childish and trifling like an untaught boy If the parts of this sad complaint finde their remedy we have by the same instruments also cured the evils and the vanity of a short life Therefore 1. Be infinitely curious you doe not set back your life in the accounts of God by the intermingling of criminal actions or the contracting vitious habits There are some vices which carry a sword in their hand and cut a man off before his time There is a sword of the Lord and there is a sword of a Man and there is a sword of the Devil Every vice of our own managing in the matter of carnality of lust or rage ambition or revenge is a sword of Sathan put into the hands of a man These are the destroying Angels sin is the Apollyon the destroyer that is gone out not from the Lord but from the Tempter and we hug the poison and twist willingly with the vipers till they bring us into the Regions of an irrecoverable sorrow We use to reckon persons as good as dead if they have lost their limbs and their teeth and are confined to an Hospital and converse with none but Surgeons and Physicians Mourners and Divines those pollinctores the Dressers of bodies and souls to Funeral But it is worse when the soul the principle of life is imployed wholly in the offices of death and that man was worse then dead of whom Seneca tells that being a rich fool when he was lifted up from the baths and set into a soft couch asked his slaves An ego jam sedeo Do I now sit The beast was so drownd in sensuality and the death of his soul that whether he did sit or no he was to believe another Idlenesse and every vice is as much of death as a long disease is or the expence of ten years and she that lives in pleasures is dead while she liveth saith the Apostle and it is the stile of the Spirit concerning wicked persons They are dead in trespasses and sins For as every sensual pleasure and every day of idlenes and useless living lops off a little branch from our short life so every deadly sin and every habitual vice does quite destroy us but innocence leaves us in our natural portions and perfect period we lose nothing of our life if we lose nothing of our souls health and therefore he that would live a full age must avoid a sin as he would decline the Regions of death the dishonors of the grave 2. If we would have our life lengthened let us begin bâ—times to live in the accounts of reason and sober counsels of religion and the Spirit and then we shall have no reason to complain that our abode on earth is so short Many men finde it long enough and indeed it is so to all senses But when we spend in waste what God hath given us in plenty when we sacrifice our youth to folly our manhood to lust and rage our old age to covetousnesse and irreligion not beginning to live till we are to die designing that time to Vertue which indeed is infirm to every thing and profitâ—ble to nothing then we make our lives short and lust runs away with all the vigorous and healthful part of it and pride and animosity steal the manly portion and craftinesse and interest possesse old age velut ex pleno
of mercy to preserve their innocence to overcome temptation to try their vertue to fit them for rewards it is certain that sicknesse never is an evil but by our own faults and if we will do our duty we shall be sure to turn it into a blessing If the sicknesse be great it may end in death and the greater it is the sooner and if it be very little it hath great intervalls of rest if it be between both we may be Masters of it and by serving the ends of Providence serve also the perfective end of humane nature and enter into the possession of everlasting mercies The summe is this He that is afraid of pain is afraid of his own nature and if his fear be violent it is a signe his patience is none at all and an impatient person is not ready dressed for heaven None but suffering humble and patient persons can go to heaven and when God hath given us the whole stage of our life to exercise all the active vertues of religion it is necessary in the state of vertues that some portion and period of our lives be assigned to passive graces for patience for Christian fortitude for resignation or conformity to the Divine will But as the violent fear of sicknesse makes us impatient so it will make our death without comfort and without religion and we shall go off from our stage of actions and sufferings with an unhandsome exit because we were willing to receive the Kindnesse of God when he expressed it as we listed But we would not suffer him to be kinde and gracious to us in his own method nor were willing to exercise and improve our vertues at the charge of a sharp Feaver or a lingring consumption Woe be to the man that hath lost patience for what will he do when the Lord shall visit him SECT VII The second temptation proper to the state of sicknesse Fear of death with its remedies THere is nothing which can make sicknesse unsanctified but the same also will give us cause to fear death If therefore we so order our affairs and spirits that we do noâ— fear death our sickness may easily become our advantage and we can then receive counsel and consider and do those acts of vertue which are in that state the proper services of God and such which men in bondage and fear are not capable of doing or of advices how they should when they come to the appointed dayes of mourning And indeed if men would but place their designe of being happy in the noblenesse courage and perfect resolutions of doing handsome things and passing thorough our unavoidable necessities in the contempt and despite of the things of this world and in holy living and the perfective desires of our natures the longings and pursuances after Heaven it is certain they could not be made miserable by chance and change by sicknesse and death But we are so softned and made effeminate with delicate thoughts and meditations of ease and brutish satisfactions that if our death comes before we have seized upon a great-fortune or enjoy the promises of the fortune tellers we esteem our selves to be robbed of our goods to be mocked and miserable Hence it comes that men are impatient of the thoughts of death hence comes those arts of protraction and delaying the significations of old age thinking to deceive the world men cosen themselves and by representing themselves youthfull they certainly continue their vanity till Proserpina pull the perruke from their heads We cannot deceive God and nature for a coffin is a coffin though it be covered with a pompous veil and the minutes of our time strike on and are counted by Angels till the period comes which must cause the passing bell to give warning to all the neighbours that thou art dead and they must be so and nothing can excuse or retard this and if our death could be put off a little longer what advantage can it be in thy accounts of nature or felicity They that 3000 years agone dyed unwillingly and stopped death two dayes or staid it a week what is their gain where is that week and poor spirited men use arts of protraction and make their persons pitiable but their condition contemptible beeing like the poor sinners at Noahs flood the waters drove them out of their lower rooms then they crept up to the roof having lasted half a day longer and then they knew not how to get down some crept upon the top branch of a tree and some climbed up to a mountain and staid it may be three dayes longer but all that while they endured a worse torment then death they lived with amazement and were distracted with the ruines of mankinde and the horrour of an universal deluge Remedies against the fear of death by way of consideration 1. God having in this world placed us in a sea and troubled the sea with a continual storm hath appointed the Church for a ship and religion to be the sterne but there is no haven or port but death Death is that harbour whither God hath designed every one that there he may finde rest from the troubles of the world How many of the noblest Romans have taken death for sanctuary and have esteemed it less then shame or a mean dishonour And Caesar was cruel to Domitius Captain of Corfinium when he had taken the town from him that he refused to signe his petition of death Death would have hid his head with honour but that cruel mercy reserved him to the shame of surviving his disgrace The Holy Scripture giving an account of the reasons of the divine providence taking Godly men from this world and shutting them up in a hasty grave sayes that they are taken from the evils to come and concerning our selves it is certain if we had ten years agone taken seizure of our portion of dust death had not taken us from good things but from infinite evils such which the sun hath seldom seen Did not Priamus weep oftner then Troilus and happy had he been if he had died when his sons were living and his kingdom safe and houses full and his citie unburnt It was a long life that made him miserable and an early death onely could have secured his fortune and it hath happened many times that persons of a faâ—r life and a clear reputation of a good fortune and an honourable name have been tempted in their age to folly and vanity have fallen under the disgrace of dotage or into an infortunate marriage or have besottted themselves with drinking or outlived their fortunes or become tedious to their friends or are afflicted with lingring and vexatious diseases or lived to see their excellent parts buried and cannot understand the wise discourses and productions of their younger years In all these cases and infinite more do not all the world say but it had been better this man had died sooner But
him alone till he obtained the same favour for her and she also at the prayers of S. Hilary went into a more early grave and a bed of joyes 7. It is a sottish and an unlearned thing to reckon the time of our life as it is short or long to be good or evil fortune life in it self being neither good nor bad but just as we make it and therefore so is death 8. But when we consider death is not onely better then a miserable life not onely an easie and innocent thing in it self but also that it is a state of advantage we shall have reason not to double the sharpnesses of our sicknesse by our fear of death Certain it is death hath some good upon its proper stock praise and a fair memory a reverence and religion toward them so great that it is counted dishonest to speak evil of the dead then they rest in peace and are quiet from their labours and are designed to immortality Cleobis and Biton Throphonius and Agamedes had an early death sent them as a reward to the former for their piety to their Mother to the latter for building of a Temple To this all those arguments will minister which relate the advantages of the state of separation and resurrection SECT VIII Remedies against fear of death by way of exercise 1. HE that would willingly be fearlesse of death must learn to despise the world he must neither love any thing passionately nor be proud of any circumstance of his life O death how bitter is the remembrance of thee to a man that liveth at rest in his possessions to a man that hath nothing to vex him and that hath prosperity in all things yea unto him that is yet able to receive meat said the son of Sirach But the parts of this exercise help each other If a man be not incorporated in all his passions to the things of this world he will lesse fear to be divorced from them by a supervening death and yet because he must part with them all in death it is but reasonable he should not be passionate for so fugitive and transient interest But if any man thinks well of himself for being a handsome person or if he be stronger and wiser then his neighbours he must remember that what he boasts of will decline into weaknesse and dishonour but that very boasting and complacency will make death keener and more unwelcome because it comes to take him from his confidences and pleasures making his beauty equal to those Ladies that have slept some years in Charnel houses and their strength not so stubborn as the breath of an infant and their wisdom such which can be looked for in the land where all things are forgotten 2. He that would not fear death must strengthen his spirit with the proper instruments of Christian fortitude All men are resolved upon this that to bear grief honestly and temperately and to dye willingly and nobly is the duty of a good and of a valiant man and they that are not so are vitious and fools and cowards All men praise the valiant and honest and that which the very Heathen admired in their noblest examples is especially patience and contempt of death Zeno Eleates endured torments rather then discover his friends or betray them to the danger of the Tyrant and Calanus the barbarous and unlearned Indian willingly suffered himself to be burnt alive and all the women did so to do honour to their Husbands Funeral and to represent and prove their affections great to their Lords The religion of a Christian does more command fortitude then ever did any institution for we are commanded to be willing to die for Christ to dye for the brethren to dye rather then give offence or scandal the effect of which is this that he that is instructed to do the necessary parts of his duty is by the same instrument fortified against death As he that does his duty need not fear death so neither shall he the parts of his duty are parts of his security It is certainly a great basenesse and pusillanimitie of spirit that makes death terrible and extremely to be avoided 3. Christian prudence is a great security against the fear of death For if we be afraid of death it is but reasonable to use all spiritual arts to take off the apprehension of the evil but therefore we ought to remove our fear because fear gives to death wings and spurres and darts Death hastens to a fearful man if therefore you would make death harmlesse and slow to throw off fear is the way to do it and prayer is the way to do that If therefore you be afraid of death consider you will have lesse need to fear it by how much the less you do fear it and so cure your direct fear by a reflex act of prudence and consideration Fannius had not dyed so soon if he had not feared death and when Cneius Carbo begged the respite of a little time for a base imployment of the souldiers of Pompey he got nothing but that the basenesse of his fear dishonoured the dignity of his third Consulship and he chose to dye in a place where none but his meanest servants should have seen him I remember a story of the wrastler Polydamas that running into a cave to avoid the storm the water at last swelled so high that it began to presse that hollownesse to a ruine which when his fellowes espied they chose to enter into the common fate of all men and went abroad but Polydamas thought by his strength to support the earth till its intolerable weight crushed him into flatnesse and a grave Many men run for shelter to a place and they onely finde a remedie for their fears by feeling the worst of evils fear it self findes no sanctuary but the worst of sufferance and they that flye from a battel are exposed to the mercy and fury of the pursuers who if they faced about were as well disposed to give laws of life and death as to take them and at worst can but die nobly but now even at the very best they live shamefully or die timorously Courage is the greatest security for it does most commonly safeguard the man but alwayes rescues the condition from an intolerable evil 4. If thou wilt be fearlesse of death endeavour to be in love with the felicities of Saints and Angels and be once perswaded to believe that there is a condition of living better then this that there are creatures more noble then we that above there is a countrey better then ours that the inhabitants know more and know better and are in places of rest and desire and first learn to value it and then learn to purchase it and death cannot be a formidable thing which lets us into so much joy so much felicity And indeed who would not think his condition mended if he passed from conversing with dull
to move the sick man to confession of sins ibid. Instruments by way of consideration to awaken a careless person and a stupid conscience 255. § IV. Of ministring to the restitution and pardon or reconciliation of the sick person by administring the holy Sacrament 268. § V. Of ministring to the sick person by the Spiritual man as he is the Physitian of souls 282. Considerations against unreasonable fears concerning forgivenesse of sins and its uncertainty and danger 283. An exercise against despair in the day of our death 293. § VI. Considerations against Presumption 301. § VII Offices to be said by the Minister in his visitation of the sick 306. The prayer of S. Eustratius the Martyr 310. A prayer taken out of the Greek Euchologion c. 311. The order of recommendation of the soul in its agony 313. Prayers to be said by the surviving friends in behalf of them selves 318. A prayer to be said in the case of a sudden death or pressing fatall danger 321. § VIII A peroration concerning the contingencies and treatings of our departed friends after death in order to their will and buriall 322. Vigilate et Orate quia nescitis horam CHAP. I. A general preparation towards a holy and blessed Death by way of consideration SECT I. Consideration of the vanity and shortnesse of Mans life A Man is a Bubble said the Greek Proverb which Lucian represents with advantages and its proper circumstances to this purpose saying that all the world is a storm and Men rise up in their several generations like bubbles descending à Iove pluvio from God and the dew of Heaven from a tear and drop of Man from Nature and Providence and some of these instantly sink into the deluge of their first parent and are hidden in a sheet of Water having had no other businesse in the world but to be born that they might be able to die others float up and down two or three turns and suddenly disappear and give their place to others and they that live longest upon the face of the waters are in perpetual motion restlesse and uneasy and being crushed with the great drop of a cloud sink into flatness and a froth the change not being great it being hardly possible it should be more a nothing then it was before So is every man He is born in vanity and sin he comes into the world like morning Mushromes soon thrusting up their heads into the air and conversing with their kinred of the same production and as soon they turn into dust and forgetfulnesse some of them without any other interest in the affairs of the world but that they made their parents a little glad and very sorrowful others ride longer in the storm it may be until seven yeers of Vanity be expired and then peradventure the Sun shines hot upon their heads and they fall into the shades below into the cover of death and darknesse of the grave to hide them But if the bubble stands the shock of a bigger drop and outlives the chances of a childe of a carelesse Nurse of drowning in a pail of water of being overlaid by a sleepy servant or such little accidents then the young man dances like a bubble empty and gay and shines like a Doves neck or the image of a rainbow which hath no substance and whose very imagery and colours are phantastical and so he dances out the gayety of his youth and is all the while in a storm and endures onely because he is not knocked on the head by a drop of bigger rain or crushed by the pressure of a load of indigested meat or quenched by the disorder of an ill placed humor and to preserve a man alive in the midst of so many chances and hostilities is as great a miracle as to create him to preserve him from rushing into nothing and at first to draw him up from nothing were equally the issues of an Almighty power And therefore the wise men of the world have contended who shall best fit mans condition with words signifying his vanity and short abode Homer cals a man a leaf the smallest the weakest piece of a short liv'd unsteady plant Pindar calls him the dream of a shadow Another the dream of the shadow of smoak But S. Iames spake by a more excellent Spirit saying Our life is but a vapor viz. drawn from the earth by a coelestial influence made of smoak or the lighter parts of water tossed with every winde moved by the motion of a superiour body without vertue in it self lifted up on high or left below according as it pleases the Sun its Foster-father But it is lighter yet It is but appearing A phantastic vapor an apparition nothing real it is not so much as a mist not the matter of a shower nor substantial enough to make a cloud but it is like Cassiopeia's chair or Pelops shoulder or the circles of Heaven 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 for which you cannot have a word that can signify a veryer nothing And yet the expression is one degree more made diminutive A vapor and phantastical or a meer appearance and this but for a little while neither the very dream the phantasm disappears in a small time like the shadow that departeth or like a tale that is told or as a dream when one awaketh A man is so vain so unfixed so perishing a creature that he cannot long last in the scene of fancy a man goes off and is forgotten like the dream of a distracted person The summe of all is this That thou art a man then whom there is not in the world any greater instance of heights and declensions of lights and shadows of misery and folly of laughter and tears of groans and death And because this consideration is of great usefulnesse and great necessity to many purposes of wisdom and the Spirit all the succession of time all the changes in nature all the varieties of light and darknesse the thousand thousands of accidents in the world and every contingency to every man and to every creature does preach our funeral sermon and calls us to look and see how the old Sexton Time throws up the earth and digs a Grave where we must lay our sins or our sorrows and sowe our bodies till they rise again in a fair or in an intolerable eternity Every revolution which the sun makes about the world divides between life and death and death possesses both those portions by the next morrow and we are dead to all those moneths which we have already lived and we shall never live them over again and still God makes little periods of our age First we change our world when we come from the womb to feel the warmth of the sun Then we sleep and enter into the image of death in which state we are unconcerned in all the changes of the world and if our Mothers or our Nurses die or a wilde boar destroy our
speak and because in it all our certainty does consist We must take our waters as out of a torrent and sudden shower which will quickly cease dropping from above and quickly cease running in our chanels here below This instant will never return again and yet it may be this instant will declare or secure the fortune of a whole eternity The old Greeks and Romans taught us the prudence of this rule but Christianity teaches us the Religion of it They so seized upon the present that they would lose nothing of the dayes pleasure Let us eat and drink for to morrow we shall die that was their philosophy and at their solemn feasts they would talk of death to heighten the present drinking and that they might warm their veins with a fuller chalice as knowing the drink that was poured upon their graves would be cold and without relish Break the beds drink your wine crown your heads with roses and besinear your curled locks with Nard for God bids you to remember death so the Epigrammatist speaks the sence of their drunken principles Something towards this signification is that of Solomon There is nothing better for a man then that he should eat and drink and that he should make his soul enjoy good in his labour for that is his portion for who shall bring him to see that which shall be after him But although he concludes all this to be vanity yet because it was the best thing that was then commonly known that they should seize upon the present with a temperate use of permited pleasures had reason to say that Christianity taught us to turn this into religion For he that by a present and a constant holiness secures the present and makes it useful to his noblest purposes he turns his condition into his best advantage by making his unavoidable fate become his necessary religion To the purpose of this rule is that collect of Tuscan hieroglyphics which we have from Gabriel Simeon Our life is very short beauty is a cosenage money is false and fugitive Empire is odious and hated by them that have it not and uneasy to them that have victory is alwayes uncertain and peace most commonly is but a fraudulent bargain old age is miserable death is the period and is a happy one if it be not sowred by the sins of our life but nothing continues but the effects of that wisdom which imployes the present time in the acts of a holy religion and a peaceable conscience for they make us to live even beyond our funerals embalmed in the spices and odours of a good name and entombed in the grave of the Holy Jesus where we shall be dressed for a blessed resurrection to the state of Angels and beatified Spirits 5. Since we stay not here being people but of a dayes abode and our age is like that of a flie and contemporary with a gourd we must look some where else for an abiding city a place in another countrey to fix our house in whose walls and foundation is God where we must finde rest or else be restlesse for ever For whatsoever ease we can have or fancy here is shortly to be changed into sadnesse or tediousnesse it goes away too soon like the periods of our life or stayes too long like the sorrows of a sinner it s own wearinesse or a contrary disturbance is its load or it is eased by its revolution into vanity forgetfulness and where either there is sorrow or an end of joy there can be no true felicity which because it must be had by some instrument and in some period of our duration we must carry up our affections to the mansions prepared for us above where eternity is the measure felicity is their state Angels are the Company the Lamb is the light and God is the portion and inheritance SECT III. Rules and Spiritual arts of lengthening our dayes and to take off the objection of a short life IN the accounts of a mans life we do not reckon that portion of dayes in which we are shut up in the prison of the womb we tell our years from the day of our birth and the same reason that makes our reckning to stay so long sayes also that then it begins too soon For then we are beholding to others to make the account for us for we know not of a long time whether we be alive or no having but some little approaches and symptoms of a life To feed and sleep and move a little and imperfectly is the state of an unborn childe and when it is born he does no more for a good while and what is it that shall make him to be esteemed to live the life of a man and when shall that account begin For we should be loath to have the accounts of our age taken by the measures of a beast and fools and distracted persons are reckoned as civilly dead they are no parts of the Common-wealth not subject to laws but secured by them in Charity and kept from violence as a man keeps his Ox and a third part of our life is spent before we enter into a higher order into the state of a man 2. Neither must we think that the life of a Man begins when he can feed himself or walk alone when he can fight or beget his like for so he is contemporary with a camel or a cow but he is first a man when he comes to a certain steddy use of reason according to his proportion and when that is all the world of men cannot tell precisely Some are called at age at fourteen some at one and twenty some never but all men late enough for the life of a man comes upon him slowly and insensibly But as when the Sun approaches towards the gates of the morning he first opens a little eye of Heaven and sends away the spirits of darknesse and gives light to a cock and calls up the lark to Mattins and by and by gilds the fringes of a cloud and peeps over the Eastern hills thrusting out his golden horns like those which decked the browes of Moses when he was forced to wear a vail because himself had seen the face of God and still while a man tells the story the sun gets up higher till he showes a fair face and a full light and then he shines one whole day under a cloud often and sometimes weeping great and little showers and sets quickly so is a mans reason and his life He first begins to perceive himself to see or taste making little reflections upon his actions of sense and can discourse of flies and dogs shells and play horses and liberty but when he is strong enough to enter into arts and little institutions he is at first entertained with trifles and impertinent things not because he needs them but because his understanding is no bigger and little images of things are laid before him like a cock-boat to a whale
much holinesse mortified sin with so great a labour purchased vertue at such a rate and so rare an industry It must needs be that such a man must dye when he ought to die and be like ripe and pleasant fruit falling from a fair tree and gathered into baskeâ—s for the planters use He that hath done â—ll his businesse and is begotten to a glorious hope by the seed of an immortal Spirit can never die too soon nor live too long Xerxes wept sadly when he saw his army of 2300000 men because he considered that within a hundred years all the youth of that army should be dust and ashes and yet as Seneca well observes of him he was the man that should bring them to their graves and he consumed all that army in two years for whom he feared and wept the death after an hundred Just so we do all We complain that within thirty or fourty years a little more or a great deal lesse we shall descend again into the bowels of our Mother and that our life is too short for any great imployment and yet we throw away five and â—hirty yeers of our fourty and the remaining five we divide between art and nature civility and customs necessity and convenience prudent counsels and religion but the portion of the last is little and contemptible and yet that little is all that we can prudently account of our lives We bring that fate and that death neer us of whose approach we are so sadly apprehensive 4. In taking the accounts of your life do not reckon by great distances and by the periods of pleasure or the satisfaction of your hopes or the stating your desires but let every intermedial day and hour passe with observation He that reckons he hath lived but so many harvests thinks they come not often enough and that they go away too soon Some lose the day with longing for the night and the night in waiting for the day Hope and phantastic expectations spend much of our lives and while with passion we look for a coronation or the death of an enemy or a day of joy passing from fancy to possession without any intermedial notices we throw away a precious year and use it but as the burden of our time fit to be pared off and thrown away that we may come at those little pleasures which first steal our hearts and then steal our life 5. A strict course of piety is the way to prolong our lives in the natural sense and to adde good portions to the number of our years and sin is sometimes by natural causality very often by the anger of God and the Divine judgement a cause of sudden and untimely death Concerning which I shall adde nothing to what I have some where else said of this article but onely the observation of Epiphanius that for 3332 years even to the twentieth age there was not one example of a son that died before his Father but the course of Nature was kept that he who was first born in the descending line did first die I speak of natural death and therefore Abel cannot be opposed to this observation till that Terah the Father of Abraham taught the people a new religion to make images of clay and worship them and concerning him it was first remarked that Haran died before his Father Terah in the land of his Nativity God by an unheard of judgement and a rare accident punishing his newly invented crime by the untimely death of his son 6. But if I shall describe a living man a man that hath that life that distinguishes him from a fool or a bird that which gives him a capacity next to Angels we shall finde that even a good man lives not long because it is long before he is born to this life and longer yet before he hath a mans growth He that can look upon death and see its face with the same countenance with which he hears its story that can endure all the labours of his life with his soul supporting his body that can equally despise riches when he hath them and when he hath them not that is not sadder if they lye in his Neighbours trunks nor more brag if they shine round about his own walls he that is neither moved with good fortune coming to him nor going from him that can look upon another mans lands evenly and pleasedly as if they were his own and yet look upon his own and use them too just as if they were another mans that neither spends his goods prodigally and like a fool nor yet keeps them avaritiously and like a wretch that weighs not benefits by weight and number but by the mind circumstances of him that gives them that never thinks his charity expensive if a worthy person be the receiver he that does nothing for opinion sake but every thing for conscience being as curious of his thoughts as of his actings in markets and Theaters and is as much in awe of himself as of a whole assembly he that knowes God looks on and contrives his secret affairs as in the presence of God and his holy Angels that eats and drinks because he needs it not that he may serve a lust or load his belly he that is bountifull and cheerfull to his friends and charitable and apt to forgive his enemies that loves his countrey and obeyes his Prince and desires and endeavours nothing more then that he may do honour to God this person may reckon his life to be the life of a man and compute his moneths not by the course of the sun but the Zodiac and circle of his vertues because these are such things which fools and children and birds and beasts cannot have These are therefore the actions of life because they are the feeds of immortality That day in which we have done some excellent thing we may as truly reckon to be added to our life as were the fifteen years to the dayes of Hezekiah SECT IV. Consideration of the miseries of Mans life AS our life is very short so it is very miserable and therefore it is well it is short God in pity to mankinde lest his burden should be insupportable and his nature an intolerable load hath reduced our state of misery to an abbreviature and the greateâ— our misery is the lesse while it is like to last the sorrows of a mans spirit being like ponderous weights which by the greatnesse of their burden make a swifter motion and descend into the grave to rest and ease our wearied limbs for then onely we shall sleep quietly when those fetters are knocked off which not onely bound our souls in prison but also eat the flesh till the very bones open'd the secret garments of their cartilages discovering their nakednesse and sorrow 1. Here is no place to sit down in but you must rise as soon as you are set for we have gnats in our chambers and worms in
is a portion in the inheritance of Jesus of which he now talks no more as a thing at distance but is entring into the possession When the veil is rent and the prison doors are open at the presence of Gods Angel the soul goes forth full of hope sometimes with evidence but alwayes with certainty in the thing and instantly it passes into the throngs of Spirits where Angles meet it singing and the Devils flock with malitious and vile purposes desiring to lead it away with them into their houses of sorrow there they see things which they never saw and hear voices which they never heard There the Devils charge them with many sins And the Angels remember that themselves rejoyced when they were repented of Then the Devils aggravate and describe all the circumstances of the sin and adde calumnies and the Angels bear the soul forward still because their Lord doth answer for them Then the Devils rage and gnash their teeth they see the soul chast and pure and they are ashamed they see it penitent and they despair they perceive that the tongue was restrained and sanctified and then hold their peace Then the soul passes forth and rejoyces passing by the Devils in scorn and triumph being securely carried into the bosome of the Lord where they shall rest till their crowns are finished and their mansions are prepared and then they shall feast and sing rejoyce and worship for ever and ever Fearful and formidable to unholy persons is the first meeting with spirits in their separation But the victory which holy souls receive by the mercies of Jesus Christ and the conduct of Angels is a joy that we must not understand till we feel it and yet such which by an early and a persevering piety we may secure but let us enquire after it no further because it is secret CHAP. III. Of the state of sicknesse and the temptations incident to it with their proper remedies SECT I. Of the state of sicknesse ADams sin brought death into the world and man did die the same day in which he sinned according as God had threatned He did not die as death is taken for a separation of soul and body that is not death properly but the ending of the last act of death just as a man is said to be born when he ceases any longer to be born in his mothers womb But whereas to man was intended a life long and happy without sicknesse sorrow or infelicity and this life should be lived here or in a better place and the passage from one to the other should have been easy safe and pleasant now that man sinned he fell from that state to a contrary If Adam had stood he should not alwayes have lived in this world for this world was not a place capable of giving a dwelling to all those myriads of men and women which should have been born in all the generations of infinite and eternal ages for so it must have been if man had not dyed at all nor yet have removed hence at all Neither is it likely that mans innocence should have lost to him all possibility of going thither where the duration is better measured by a better time subject to fewer changes and which is now the reward of a returning vertue which in all natural senses is lesse then innocence save that it is heightned by Christ to an equality of acceptation with the state of innocence But so it must have been that his innocence should have been punished with an eternal confinement to this state which in all reason is the lesse perfect the state of a traveller not of one possessed of his inheritance It is therefore certain Man should have changed his abode for so did Enoch and so did Elias and so shall all the world that shall be alive at the day of judgement They shall not die but they shall change their place and their abode their duration and their state and all this without death That death therefore which God threatned to Adam and which passed upon his posterity is not the going out of this world but the manner of going If he had staid in innocence he should have gone from hence placidly and fairly without vexatious and afflictive circumstances he should not have dyed by sickness misfortune defect or unwillingnesse but when he fell then he began to die the same day so said God and that must needs be true and therefore it must mean that upon that very day he fell into an evil and dangerous condition a state of change and affliction then death began that is the man began to die by a natural diminution and aptnesse to disease and misery His first state was and should have been so long as it lasted a happy duration His second was a daily and miserable change and this was the dying properly This appears in the great instance of damnation which in the stile of Scripture is called eternal death not because it kills or ends the duration it hath not so much good in it but because it is a perpetual infelicity Change or separation of soul and body is but accidental to death Death may be with or without either but the formality the curse and the sting of death that is misery sorrow fear diminution defect anguish dishonour and whatsoever is miserable and afflictive in nature that is death death is not an action but a whole state and condition and this was first brought in upon us by the offence of one man But this went no further then thus to subject us to temporal infelicity If it had proceeded so as was supposed Man had been much more miserable for man had more then one original sin in this sence and though this death entred first upon us by Adams fault yet it came neerer unto us and increased upon us by the sins of more of our forefathers For Adams sin left us in strength enough to contend with humane calamities for almost a thousand years together But the sins of his children our forefathers took off from us half the strength about the time of the flood and then from 500. to 250. and from thence to 120. and from thence to threescore and ten so halfing it till it is almost come to nothing But by the sins of men in the several generations of the world death that is misery and disease is hastned so upon us that we are of a contemptible age and because we are to die by suffering evils and by the daily lessening of our strength and health this death is so long a doing that it makes so great a part of our short life uselesse and unserviceable that we have not time enough to get the perfection of a single manufacture but ten or twelve generations of the world must go to the making up of one wise man or one excellent Art and in the succession of those ages there happens so many changes and interruptions so many
little shreds of time and if we do but take care of the present minute it cannot seem a great charge or a great burden but that care will secure our duty if we still will but secure the present minute 3. If we consider how much men can suffer if they list and how much they do suffer for great and little causes and that no causes are greater then the proper causes of patience in sicknesse that is necessity and religion we cannot without huge shame to our nature to our persons and to our manners complain of this tax and impost of nature This experience added something to the old Philosophy When the Gladiators were exposed naked to each others short swords and were to cut each others souls away in portions of flesh as if their forms had been as divisible as the life of worms they did not sigh or groan it was a shame to decline the blow but according to the just measures art The women that saw the wounds shrike out and he that receives it holds his peace They did not only stand bravely but would also fall so and when he was down scorn'd to shrink his head when the insolent conquerer came to lift it from his shoulders and yet this man in his first designe onely aimed at liberty and the reputation of a good fencer and when he sunk down he saw he could onely receive the honour of a bold man the noise of which he shall never hear when his ashes were crammed in his narrow Urne And what can we complain of the weaknesse of our strengths or the pressures of diseases when we see a poor souldier stand in a breach almost starved with cold and hunger and his cold apt to be relieved onely by the heats of Anger a Feaver of a fired musket and his hunger slacked by a greater pain and a huge fear this man shall stand in his arms and wounds patiens liminis atque solis pale and faint weary and watchful and at night shall have a bullet pulled out of his flesh and shivers from his bones and endure his mouth to be sewed up from a violent rent to its own dimension and all this for a man whom he never saw or if he did was not noted by him but one that shall condemn him to the gallows if he runs from all this misery It is seldome that God sends such calamities upon men as men bring upon themselves and suffer willingly But that which is most considerable is that any passion and violence upon the spirit of man makes him able to suffer huge calamities with a certain constancy and an unwearied patience Scipio Africanus was wont to commend that saying in Xenophon that the same labours of warfare were easier far to a General then to a common souldier because he was supported by the huge appetites of honour which made his hard marches nothing but steppings forward and reaching at a triumph Did not the Lady of Sabinus for others interest bear twins privately and without groaning Are not the labours and cares the spare diet and the waking nights of covetous and adulterous of ambitious and revengful persons greater sorrowes and of more smart then a Feaver or the short pains of childebirth what will not render women suffer to hide their shame And if vice and passion lust and inferiour appetites can supply to the tenderest persons strengths more then enough for the sufferance of the greatest natural violences can we suppose that honesty and religion and the grace of God are more nice tender and effeminate 4. Sicknesse is the more tolerable because it cures very many evils and takes away the sense of all the crosse fortunes which amaze the spirits of some men and transport them certainly beyond all the limits of patience Here all losses and disgraces domestick cares and publick evils the apprehensions of pity and a sociable calamity the fears of want and the troubles of ambition lie down and rest upon the sick mans pillow One fit of the stone takes away from the fancies of men all relations to the world and secular interests at least they are made dull and flat without sharpnesse and an edge And he that shall observe the infinite variety of troubles which afflicts some busie persons almost all men in very busie times will think it not much amisse that those huge numbers were reduced to certainty to method and an order and there is no better compendium for this then that they be reduced to one And a sick man seems so unconcerned in the things of the world that although this separation be done with violence yet it is no otherwise then all noble contentions are and all honours are purchased and all vertues are acquired and all vices mortified and all appetites chastised and all rewards obtained there is infallibly to all these a difficulty and a sharpnesse annexed without which there could be no proportion between a work and a reward To this adde that sicknesse does not take off the sense of secular troubles and worldly cares from us by imploying all the perceptions and apprehensions of men by filling all faculties with sorrow and leaving no room for the lesser instances of troubles as little rivers are swallowed up in the Sea But sicknesse is a messenger of God sent with purposes of abstraction and separation with a secret power and a proper efficacie to draw us off from unprofitable and uselesse sorrows and this is effected partly by reason that it represents the uselessnesse of the things of this world and that there is a portion of this life in which honours and things of the world cannot serve us to many purposes partly by preparing us to death and telling us that a man shall descend thither whence this world cannot redeem us where the goods of this world cannot serve us 5. And yet after all this sicknesse leaves in us appetites so strong and apprehensions so sensible and delights so many and good things in so great a degree that a healthlesse body and a sad disease do seldome make men weary of this world but still they would fain find an excuse to live The gout the stone and the toothach the sciatica sore eyes and an aking head are evils indeed But such which rather then die most men are willing to suffer and Mecenas added also a wish rather to be crucified then to die and though his wish was low timerous and base yet we find the same desires in most men dressed up with better circumstances It was a cruell mercy in Tamerlan who commanded all the leprous persons to be put to death as we knock some beasts quickly on their head to put them out of pain and lest they should live miserably The poor men would rather have endured another leprosie and have more willingly taken two diseases then one death therefore Caesar wondred that the old crazed souldier that begged leave he might kill himself and asked him Doest
dipped in tears and all the daughters of Musick be brought low Let God commence a quarrell against him and be bitter in the accents of his anger or his discipline then God tries your faith Can you then trust his goodnesse beleeve him to be a Father when you groan under his rod Can you rely upon all the strange propositions of Scripture and be content to perish if they be not true Câ—n you receive comfort in the discourses of death and heaven of immortality and the resurrection of the death of Christ and conforming to his sufferings Truth is There are but two great periods in which faith demonstrates it self to be a powerfull and mighty grace and they â—re persecution and the approaches of death for the passive part and a temptation for the active In the dayes of pleasure and the night of pain faith is to fight her agonisticon to contend for mastery and faith overcomes all alluring and fond temptations to sin and faith overcomes all our weaknesses and faintings in our troubles By the faith of the promises we learn to despise the world choosing those objects which faith discovers and by expectation of the same promises we are comforted in all our sorrowes and enabled to look thorow and see beyond the cloud but the vigor of it is pressed and called forth when all our fine discourses come to be reduced to practice For in our health and clearer dayes it is easy to talk of putting trust in God we readily trust him for life when we are in health for provisions when we have fair revenues and for deliverance when we are newly escaped but let us come to fit upon the margent of our grave and let a Tyrant lean hard upon our fortunes and dwell upon our wrong let the storm arise and the keels tosse till the cordage crack or that all our hopes bulge under us and descend into the hollownesse of sad misfortunes then can you believe when you neither hear nor see nor feel any thing but objections This is the proper work of sicknesse faith is then brought into the theatre and so exercised that if it abides but to the end of the contention we may see that work of faith which God will hugely crown The same I say of hope and of charity or the love of God and of patience which is a grace produced from the mixtures of all these they are vertues which are greedy of danger And no man was ever honoured by any wise or discerning person for dining upon Persian Carpets nor rewarded with a crown for being at ease It was the fire that did honour to Mutius Scevola poverty made Fabritius famous Rutilius was made excellent by banishment Regulus by torments Socrates by prison Cato by his death and God hath crowned the memory of Iob with a wreath of glory because he sate upon his dunghil wisely and temperatly and his potsheard and his groans mingled with praises and justifications of God pleased him like an Anthem sung by Angels in the morning of the resurrection God could not choose but be pleased with the delicious accents of Martyrs when in their tortures they cryed out nothing but Holy Iesus and blessed be God and they also themselves who with a hearty resignation to the Divine pleasure can delight in Gods severe dispensation will have the transportations of Cherubins when they enter into the joyes of God If God be delicious to his servants when he smites them he will be nothing but ravishments and extasies to their spirits when he refreshes them with overflowings of joy in the day of recompences No man is more miserable then he that hath no adversity that man is not tryed whether he be good or bad and God never crowns those vertues which are onely faculties and dispositions but every act of vertue is an ingredient into reward And we see many children fâ—irly planted whose parts of nature were never dressed by art nor called from the furrowes of their first possibilities by discipline and institution and they dwell for ever in ignorance and converse with beasts and yet if they had been dressed and exercised might have stood at the chairs of Princes or spoken parables amongst the rulers of cities Our vertues are but in the seed when the grace of God comes upon us first but this grace must be thrown into broken furrowes and must twice feel the cold and twice feel the heat and be softned with storms and showers and then it will arise into fruitfulnesse and harvests And what is there in the world to distinguish vertues from dishonours or the valour of Caesar from the softnesse of the Egyptian Eunuchs or that can make any thing rewardable but the labour and the danger the pain and the difficulty Vertue could not be any thing but sensuality if it were the entertainment of our senses and fond desires and Apicius had been the noblest of all the Romans if seeding a great appetite and despising the severities of temperance had been the work and proper imployment of a wise man But otherwise do fathers and otherwise do mothers handle their children These soften them with kisses and imperfect noises with the pap and breast milk of soft endearments they rescue them from Tutors and snatch them from discipline they desire to keep them fat and warm and their feet dry and their bellies full and then the children govern and cry and prove fools and troublesome so long as the feminine republike does endure But fathers because they designe to have their children wise and valiant apt for counsel or for arms send them to severe governments and tye them to study to hard labour and aâ—â—lictive contingencies They rejoyce when the bold boy strikes a lyon with his hunting spear and shrinks not when the beast comes to affright his early courage Softnesse is for slaves and beasts for minstrels and uselesse persons for such who cannot ascend higher then the state of a fair ox or a servant entertained for vainer offices But the man that designes his son for noble imployments to honours and to triumphs to consular dignities and presidences of counsels loves to see him pale with study or panting with labour hardned with sufferance or eminent by dangers and so God dresses us for heaven He loves to see us strugling with a disease and resisting the Devil and contesting against the weaknesses of nature and against hope to believe in hope resigning our selves to Gods will praying him to choose for us and dying in all things but faith and its blessed consequents ut ad officium cum periculo simus prompti and the danger and the resistance shall endeare the office For so have I known the boysterous north-winde passe thorough the yielding aire which opened its bosome and appeased its violence by entertaining it with easie compliance in all the regions of its reception But when the same breath of Heaven hath been
our passions turned into fear and the whole state into suffering God in complyance and mans infirmity hath also turned our religion into such a duty which a sick man can do most passionately and a sad man and a timorous can perform effectually and a dying man can do to many purposes of pardon and mercy and that is prayer For although a sick man is bound to do many acts of vertue of several kindes yet the most of them are to be done in the way of prayer Prayer is not onely the religion that is proper to a sick mans condition but it is the manner of doing other graces which is then left and in his power For thus the sick man is to do his repentance and his mortifications his temperance and his chastity by a fiction of imagination bringing the offers of the vertue to the spirit making an action of election and so our prayers are a direct act of chastity when they are made in the matter of that grace just as repentance for our cruelty is an act of the grace of mercie and repentance for uncleannesse is an act of chastity is a means of its purchase an act in order to the habit and though such acts of vertue which are onely in the way of prayer are ineffective to the intire purchase and of themselves cannot change the vice into vertue yet they are good renewings of the grace and proper exercise of a habit already gotten The purpose of this discourse is to represent the excellency of prayer and its proper advantages which it hath in the time of sicknesse For besides that it moves God to pity piercing the clouds making the Heavens like a pricked eye to weep over us and refresh us with showers of pity it also doth the work of the soul and expresses the vertue of his whole life in effigie in pictures and lively representments so preparing it for a never ceasing crown by renewing the actions in the continuation of a never ceasing a never hindred affection Prayer speaks to God when the tongue is stiffned with the approachings of death prayer can dwell in the heart and be signified by the hand or eye by a thought or a groan prayer of all the actions of religion is the last alive and it serves God without circumstances and exercises material graces by abstraction from matter and separation and makes them to be spiritual and therefore best dresses our bodies for funeral or recovery for the mercies of restitution or the mercies of the grave 5. In every sicknesse whether it will or will not be so in nature and in the event yet in thy spirit and preparations resolve upon it and treat thy self accordingly as if it were a sicknesse unto death For many men support their unequall courages by flattery and false hopes and because sicker men have recovered beleeve that they shall do so but therefore they neglect to adorn their souls or set their house in order besides the temporall inconveniences that often happen by such perswasions and putting off the evil day such as are dying Intestate leaving estates intangled and some Relatives unprovided for they suffer infinitely in the interest and affairs of their soul they die carelesly and surprized their burdens on and their scruples unremoved and their cases of conscience not determined and like a sheep without any care taken concerning their precious souls Some men will never beleeve that a villain will betray them though they receive often advices from suspicious persons and likely accidents till they are entered into the snare and then they beleeve it when they feel it and when they cannot return but so the treason entred and the man was betrayed by his own folly placing the snare in the regions and advantages of opportunity This evil looks like boldnesse and a confident spirit but it is the greatest timerousnesse and cowardize in the world They are so fearfull to die that they dare not look upon it as possible and think that the making of a Will is a mortall signe and sending for a spirituall man an irrecoverable disease and they are so afraid lest they should think and beleeve now they must die that they will not take care that it may not be evil in case they should So did the Eastern slaves drink wine and wrapt their heads in a vail that they might die without sense or sorrow and wink hard that they might sleep the easier In pursuance of this rule let a man consider that whatsoever must be done in sicknesse ought to be done in health onely let him observe that his sicknesse as a good monitor chastises his neglect of duty and forces him to live as he alwayes should and then all these solemnities and dressings for death are nothing else but the part of a religious life which he ought to have exercised all his dayes and if those circumstances can affright him let him please his fancy by this truth that then he does but begin to live But it will be a huge folly if he shall think that confession of his sins will kill him or receiving the holy Sacrament will hasten his agony or the Priest shall undo all the hopefull language and promises of his Physitian Assure thy self thou canst not die the sooner But by such addresses thou mayest die much the better 6. Let the sick person be infinitely carefull that he do not fall into a state of death upon a new account that is at no hand commit a deliberate sin or retain any affection to the old for in both cases he falls into the evils of a surprize and the horrors of a sudden death For a sudden death is but a sudden joy if it takes a man in the state and exercises of vertue and it is onely then an evil when it finds a man unready They were sad departures when Tegillinus Cornelius Gallus the Praetor Lewis the son of Gonzaga Duke of Mantua Ladislaus king of Naples Speusippus Giachettus of Geneva and one of the Popes died in the forbidden embraces of abused women or if Iob had cursed God and so died or when a man sits down in despair and in the accusation and calumny of the Divine mercy they make their night sad and stormy and eternall When Herod began to sink with the shamefull torment of his bowels and felt the grave open under him he imprisoned the Nobles of his Kingdom and commanded his Sister that they should be a sacrifice to his departing ghost This was an egresse fit onely for such persons who meant to dwell with Devils to eternall ages and that man is hugely in love with sin who cannot forbear in the week of the Assizes and when himself stood at the barre of scrutiny and prepared for his finall never to be reversed sentence He dies suddenly to the worst sense and event of sudden death who so manages his sicknesse that even that state shall not be innocent but that he is surprized in the
he is to do is to secure his hold which he can do no way but by prayer and by his interest And by this Argument or instrument it was that Socrates refreshed the evil of his condition when he was to drink his aconite If the soul be immortall and perpetuall rewards be laid up for wise souls then I lose nothing by my death but if there be not then I lose nothing by my opinion for it supports my spirit in my passage and the evil of being deceived cannot overtake me when I have no being So it is with all that are tempted in their faith If those Articles be not true then the men are nothing if they be true then they are happy and if the Article fails there can be no punishment for beleeving but if they be true my not beleeving destroyes all my portion in them and possibility to receive the excellent things which they contain By faith we quench the fiery darts of the Devil but if our faith be quenched wherewithall shall we be able to endure the assault therefore seiz upon the Article and secure the great object and the great instrument that is the hopes of pardon and eternall life through Iesus Christ and do this by all means and by any instrument artificiall or inartificiall by argument or by stratagem by perfect resolution or by discourse by the hand and ears of premisses or the foot of the conclusion by right or by wrong because we understand it or because we love it super totam materiam because I will and because I ought because it is safe to do so and because it is not safe to do otherwise because if I do I may receive a good and because if I do not I am miserable either for that I shall have a portion of sorrows or that I can have no portion of good things SECT IV. Acts of faith by way of prayer and ejaculation to be said by sick men in the dayes of their temptation LOrd whither shall I go thou hast the words of eternall life I beleeve in God the Father Almighty and in Jesus Christ his onely Son our Lord c. And I beleeve in the Holy Ghost c. Lord I beleeve help thou mine unbelief I know and am perswaded by the Lord Jesus that none of us liveth to himself and no man dieth to himself For whether we live we live unto the Lord and whether we die we die unto the Lord whether we live therefore or die we are the Lords If God be for us who can be against us He that spared not his own Son but delivered him up for us all how shall he not with him give us all things Who shall lay any thing to the charge of Gods elect It is God that justifieth who is he that condemneth It is Christ that died yea rather that is risen again who is even at the right hand of God who also maketh intercession for us If any man sin we have an Advocate with the Father Jesus Christ the righteous and he is the propitiation for our sins This is a faithfull saying and worthy of all acceptation that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners O grant that I may obtain mercy that in me Jesus Christ may shew forth all long-suffering that I may beleeve in him to life everlasting I am bound to give thanks unto God alway because God hath from the beginning chosen me to salvation through sanctification of the Spirit and belief of the truth whereunto he called me by the Gospel to the obtaining of the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ. Now our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God even our Father which hath loved us and hath given us everlasting consolation and good hope through grace Comfort my heart and stablish me in every good word and work The Lord direct my heart into the love of God and into the patient waiting for Christ. O that our God would count me worthy of this calling and fulfill all the good pleasure of his goodnesse and the work of faith with power That the Name of our Lord Jesus Christ may be glorified in me and I in him according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ. Let us who are of the day be sober putting on the brest-plate of faith and love and for an helmet the hope of salvation For God hath not appointed us to wrath but to obtain salvation by our Lord Jesus Christ who died for us that whether we wake or sleep we should live together with him Wherefore comfort your selves together and edifie one another There is no name under heaven whereby we can be saved but onely the Name of the Lord Jesus And every soul which will not hear that Prophet shall be destroyed from among the people God forbid that I should glory save in the Crosse of Jesus Christ. I desire to know nothing but Jesus Christ and him crucified For to me to live is Christ and to die is gain Cease ye from man whose breath is in his nostrils for wherein is he to be accounted of But the just shall live by faith Lord I beleeve that thou art the Christ the Son of God the Saviour of the world the resurrection and the life and he that beleeveth in thee though he were dead yet shall he live Jesus said unto her Said I not to thee that if thou wouldest beleeve thou shouldst see the glory of God O death where is thy sting O grave where is thy victory the sting of death is sin and the strength of sin is the Law But thanks be to God which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Lord make me stedfast and unmoveable alwayes abounding in the work of the Lord For I know that my labour is not in vain in the Lord. The Prayer for the grace and strengths of faith O Holy and eternall Jesus who didst die for me and for all mankind abolishing our sin reconciling us to God adopting us into the portion of thine heritage and establishing with us a covenant of faith and obedience making our souls to rely upon spirituall strengths by the supports of a holy belief and the expectation of rare promises and the infallible truths of God O let me for ever dwell upon the rock leaning upon thy arm beleeving thy word trusting in thy promises waiting for thy mercies and doing thy commandements that the Devil may not prevail upon me and my own weaknesses may not abuse or unsettle my perswasions nor my sins discompose my just confidence in thee and thy eternall mercies Let me alwayes be thy servant and thy disciple and die in the communion of thy Church of all faithfull people Lord I renounce whatsoever is against thy truth and if secretly I have or do beleeve any false proposition I do it in the simplicity of my heart and great weaknesse and if I could
discover it would dash it in pieces by a solemn disclaiming it for thou art the Way the Truth and the Life and I know that whatsoever thou hast declared that is the truth of God and I do firmly adhere to the religion thou hast taught and glory in nothing so much as that I am a Christian that thy name is called upon me O my God though I die yet will I put my trust in thee In thee O Lord have I trusted let me never be confounded Amen SECT V. Of the practise of the Grace of Repentance in time of the Sicknesse MEn generally do very much dread sudden death and pray against it passionately and certainly it hath in it great inconveniences accidentally to mens estates to the settlement of families to the culture and trimming of souls and it robs a man of the blessings which may be consequent to sickness and to the passive graces and holy contentions of a Christian while he descends to his grave without an adversary or a tryal and a good man may be taken at such a disadvantage that a sudden death would be a great evil even to the most excellent person if it strikes him in an unlucky circumstance But these considerations are not the onely ingredients into those mens discourse who pray violently against sudden deaths for possibly if this were all there may be in the condition of sudden death something to make recompence for the evils of the over-hasty accident For certainly it is a lesse temporal evil to fall by the rudenesse of a sword then the violences of a Feaver and the axe is much a lesse affliction then a strangury and though a sicknesse tries our vertues yet a sudden death is free from temptation a sicknesse may be more glorious and a sudden death more safe the deadest deaths are best the shortest and least premeditate so Caesar said and Pliny called a short death the greatest fortune of a mans life For even good men have been forced to an undecencie of deportment by the violences of pain and Cicero observes concerning Hercules that he was broken in pieces with pain even then when he sought for immortality by his death being tortured with a plague knit up in the lappet of his shirt And therefore as a sudden death certainly loses the rewards of a holy sicknesse so it makes that a man shall not so much hazard and lose the rewards of a holy life But the secret of this affair is a worse matter men live at that rate either of an habitual wickednesse or else a frequent repetition of single acts of killing and deadly sins that a sudden death is the ruine of all their hopes and a perfect consignation to an eternal sorrow But in this case also so is a lingring sicknesse for our last sicknesse may change us from life to health from health to strength from strength to the firmnesse and confirmation of habitual graces but it cannot change a man from death to life and begin and finish that processe which sits not down but in the bosom of blessednesse He that washes in the morning when his bath is seasonable and healthful is not onely made clean but sprightly and the blood is brisk and coloured like the first springing of the morning but they that wash their dead cleanse the skin and leave palenesse upon the cheek and stiffnesse in all the joynts A repentance upon our death-bed bed is like washing the coarse it is cleanly and civil but makes no change deeper then the skin But God knowes it is a custom so to wash them that are going to dwell with dust and to be buried in the lap of their kinred earth but all their lives time wallow in pollutions without any washing at all or if they do it is like that of the Dardani who washed but thrice in all their life time when they are born and when they marry and when they die when they are baptized or against a solemnity or for the day of their funeral but these are but ceremonious washings and never purifie the soul if it be stained and hath sullied the whitenesse of its baptismal robes * God intended we should live a holy life * he contracted with us in Jesus Christ for a holy life * he made no abatements of the strictest sense of it but such as did necessarily comply with humane infirmities or possibilities that is he understood it in the sense of repentance which stil is so to renew our duty that it may be a holy life in the second sense that is some great portion of our life to be spent in living as Christians should * a resolving to repent upon our death-bed is the greatest mockery of God in the world and the most perfect contradictory to all his excellent designes of mercy and holinesse for therefore he threatned us with hell if we did not and he promised heaven if we did live a holy life and a late repentance promises heaven to us upon other conditions even when we have lived wickedly * It renders a man uselesse and intolerable to the world taking off the great curb of religion of fear and hope and permitting all impiety with the greatest impunity and incouragement in the world * by this means we see so many 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 as Philo calls them or as the prophets pueros centum annorum children of almost an hundred years old upon whose grave we may write the inscriptions which was upon the tomb of Similis in Xiphilin Here he lies who was so many years but lived but seven * and the course of nature runs counter to the perfect designes of piety and * God who gave us a life to live to him is only served at our death when we die to all the world * and we undervalue the great promises made by the Holy Jesus for which the piety the strictest unerring piety of ten thousand ages is not a proportionable exchange yet we think it a hard bargain to get heaven if we be forced to part with one lust or live soberly twenty years But like Demetrius Afer who having lived a slave all his life time yet desired to descend to his grave in freedom begged manumission of his Lord we lived in the bondage of our sin all our dayes and hope to dye the Lords freed man * but above all this course of a delayed repentance must of necessity therefore be ineffective and certainly mortal because it is an intire destruction of the very formality and essential constituent reason of religion which I thus demonstrate When God made man and propounded to him an immortal and a blessed state as the end of his hopes and the perfection of his condition he did not give it him for nothing but upon certain conditions which although they could add nothing to God yet they were such things which man could value and they were his best and
sudden refreshment and so also iâ— was in the Cave at Ephesus for by this time the souldier began to think it was fit he should return to his watch and observe the dead bodies he had in charge but when he ascended from his mourning bridal chamber he found that one of the bodies was stolne by the friends of the dead and that he was fallen into an evil condition because by the laws of Ephesus his body was to be fixed in the place of it The poor man returns to his woman cryes out bitterly and in her presence resolves to dye to prevent his death and in secret to prevent his shame but now the womans love was raging like her former sadnesse and grew witty and she comforted her souldier and perswaded him to live lest by losing him who had brought her from death and a more grievous sorrow she should return to her old solemnities of dying and lose her honour for a dream or the reputation of her constancy without the change and satisfaction of an enjoyed love The man would fain have lived if it had been possible and she found out this way for him that he should take the body of her first husband whose funeral she had so strangely mourned and put it upon the gallows in the place of the stolne thief he did so and escaped the present danger to possesse a love which might change as violently as her grief had done But so have I seen a croud of disordered people rush violently and in heaps till their utmost border was restrained by a wall or had spent the fury of the first fluctuation and watry progress and by by it returned to the contrary with the same earnestness only because it was violent ungoverned a raging passion is this croud which when it is not under discipline and the conduct of reason and the proportions of temperate humanity runs passionatly the way it happens and by and by as greedily to another side being swayed by its own weight and driven any whither by chance in all its pursuits having no rule but to do all it can and spend it self in haste and expire with some shame and much undecency When thou hast wept a while compose the body to burial which that it be done gravely decently and charitably we have the example of all nations to engage us and of all ages of the world to warrant so that it is against common honesty and publike fame and reputation not to do this office It is good that the body be kept vailed and secret and not exposed to curious eyes or the dishonours wrought by the changes of death discerned and stared upon by impertinent persons When Cyrus was dying he called his sons and friends to take their leave to touch his hand to see him the last time and gave in charge that when he had put his veil over his face no man should uncover it and Epiphanius his body was rescued from inquisitive eyes by a miracle Let it be interred after the manner of the countrey and the laws of the place and the dignity of the person For so Iacob was buried with great solemnitie and Iosephs bones were carried into Canaan after they had been embalmed and kept four hundred years and devout men carried S. Stephen to his burial making great lamentation over him And Aelian tells that those who were the most excellent persons were buried in purple and men of an ordinary courage and fortune had their Graves onely trimmed with branches of Olive and mourning flowers But when Marc. Anthony gave the body of Brutus to his freed man to be buried honestly he gave also his own mantle to be thrown into his funeral pile and the magnificence of the old funeral we may see largely described by Virgil in the obsequies of Misenus and by Homer in the funeral of Patroclus It was noted for piety in the men of Iabesh-Gilead that they shewed kindness to their Lord Saul and buried him and they did it honourably And our blessed Saviour who was temperate in his expence and grave in all the parts of his life and death as age and sobriety itself yet was pleased to admit the cost of Maries ointment upon his head and feet because she did it against his burial and though she little thought it had bin so nigh yet because he accepted it for that end he knew he had made her apologie sufficient by which he remarked it to be a great act of piety and honorable to inter our friends and relatives according to the proportions of their condition and so to give a testimony of our hopes of their resurrection So far is piety beyond it may be the ostentation and braging of a grief or a designe to serve worse ends such was that of Herod when he made too studied and elaborate a funeral for Aristobulus whom he had murdered and of Regulus for his boy at whose pile he killed dogs nightingales parrots and little horses and such also was the expence of some of the Romans who hating their left wealth gave order by their Testament to have huge portions of it thrown into their fires bathing their locks which were presently to passe thorough the fire with Arabian and Egyptian liquors and balsam of Judea In this as in every thing else as our piety must not passe into superstition or vain expence so neither must the excesse be turned into parcimony and chastised by negligence and impiety to the memory of their dead But nothing of this concerns the dead in real and effective purposes nor is it with care to be provided for by themselves But it is the duty of the living For to them it is all one whether they be carried forth upon a chariot or a woodden bier whether they rot in the air or in the earth whether they be devoured by fishes or by worms by birds or by sepulchral dogs by water or by fire or by delay when Chriton ask'd Socrates how he would be buried he told him I think I shall escape from you and that you cannot catch me But so much of me as you can apprehend use it as you see cause for and bury it but however do it according to the laws There is nothing in this but opinion and the decency of fame to be served Where it is esteemed an honour and the manner of blessed people to descend into the graves of their Fathers there also it is reckoned as a curse to be buried in a strange land or that the birds of the air devour them Some Nations used to eat the bodies of their friends and esteemed that the most honoured sepulture but they were barbarous the Magi never buried any but such as were torn of beasts the Persians besmeared their dead with wax and the Aegyptians with gummes and with great art did condite the bodies and laid them in charnell houses But Cyrus the elder would none of all this
communication from an Angel or the sâ—ock of acquired notices here below it may the rather endear us to our charities or duties to them respectively since our vertues use not to live upon abstractions and Metaphysical perfections or inducements but then thrive when they have materiall arguments such which are not too far from sense However it be it is certain they are not dead and though we no more see the souls of our dead friends then we did when they were alive yet we have reason to beleeve them to know more things and better And if our sleep be an image of death we may also observe concerning it that it is a state of life so separate from communications with the body that it is one of the wayes of Oracle and prophecy by which the soul best declares her immortality and the noblenesse of her actions and powers if she could get free from the body as in the state of separation or a clear dominion over it as in the resurrection To which also this consideration may be added that men long time lived the life of sence before they use their reason and till they have sumished their head with experiments and notices of many things they cannot at all discourse of any thing but when they come to use their reason all their knowledge is nothing but remembrance and we know by proportions by similitudes and dissimilitudes by relations and oppositions by causes and effects by comparing things with things all which are nothing but operations of understanding upon the stock of former notices of something we knew before nothing but remembrances all the heads of Topicks which are the stock of all arguments and sciences in the world are a certain demonstration of this And he is the wisest man that remembers most and joyns those remembrances together to the best purposes of discourse From whence it may not be improbably gathered that in the state of separation if there be any act of understanding that is if the understanding be alive it must be relative to the notices it had in this world and therefore the acts of it must he discourses upon all the parts and persons of their conversation and relation excepting onely such new revelations which may be communicated to it concerning which we know nothing But if by seeing Sacrates I think upon Plato and by seeing a picture I remember a Man and by beholding two friends I remember my own and my friends need and he is wisest that drawes most lines from the same Centre and most discourses from the same Notices it cannot but be very probable to beleeve since the separate souls understand better if they understand at all that from the Notices they carried from hence and what they find there equall or unequall to those Notices they can better discover the things of their friends then we can here by our conjectures and craftiest imaginations and yet many men here can guesse shrewdly at the thoughts and designes of such men with whom they discourse or of whom they have heard or whose characters they prudently have perceived I have no other end in this discourse but that we may be ingaged to do our duty to our Dead lest peradventure they should perceive our neglect and be witnesses of our transient affections and forgetfulnesse Dead persons have religion passed upon them and a solemn reverence and if we think a Ghost beholds us it may be we may have upon us the impressions likely to be made by love and fear and religion However we are sure that God sees us and the world sees us and if it be matter of duty towards our Dead God will exact it if it be matter of kindnesse the world will and as Religion is the band of that so fame and reputation is the endearment of this It remains that we who are alive should so live and by the actions of Religion attend the coming of the day of the Lord that we neither be surprized nor leave our duties imperfect nor our sins uncanceld nor our persons unreconciled nor God unappeased but that when we descend to our graves we may rest in the bosome of the Lord till the mansions be prepared where we shall sing and feast eternally Amen Te Deum laudamus THE END BEsides this Rule of Holy Dying the Author hath in Print 1. The Rule of Holy Living 2. The Liberty of Prophesying 3. Episcopacie asserted 4 o 4. The History of the Life and Death of the ever blessed Iesus Christ. 4 o 5. An Apologie for Authorized and â—et forms of Lyturgie 4 o 6. A Sermon Preached at Oxon. on the Anniversary of the fifth of November 4 o 7. Together with 28. Sermons Preached at Golden grove fol. Lately published viz. SErmon 1.2 Of the Spirit of Grace Rom. 8. ver 9.10 Sermon 3.4 The descending and entailed curse cut off Exodus 20. part of the 5. verse Sermon 5.6 The invalidity of a late or death-bed repentance Ier. 13.6 Sermon 7.8 The deceitfulnesse of the heart Ierem. 17.9 Sermon 9.10.11 The faith and patience of the Saints Or the righteous cause oppressed 1 Pet. 4.17 Sermon 12.13 The mercy of the Divine judgements or Gods method in curing sinners Rom. 2.4 Sermon 14.15 Of groweth in grace with its proper instruments and signes 2 Pet. 3.18 Sermon 16.17 Of groweth in sin or the severall states and degrees of sinners with the manner how they are to be treated Iude Epist. ver 22 23. Sermon 18.19 The foolish exchange Matth. 16. ver 26. Sermon 20.21.22 The Serpent and the Dove or a Discourse of Christian Prudence Matth. 10. latter part of ver 16. Sermon 23.24 Of Christian simplicitie Matt. 10. latter part of ver 16. Sermon 25.26.27 The Miracles of the Divine Mercy Psal. 86.5 A Funerall Sermon Preached at the Obsequies of the right Honourable the Countesse of Carbery 2 Sam. 14.14 A Discourse of the Divine Institution necessity sacrednesse and separation of the Office Ministeriall Printed for Richard Royston at the Angel in Ivie-Lane * Vel quia nil rectum nisi quod placuit â—ibi ducunt Vel quia turpe putant parere minoâ—ibus quae Imberbes didicere senes perdenda fateri * Tenellis adhuc infantiae suae persuasionibus in senectute puerascunt Mamertus Concil Trid. hist lib 4. * Tertul de Monog S. Cyprian l. 1. ep 9 Sa. Athan q. 33. S. Cyril myst cat 5. Epiphan Haeres 75. Aug. de haeres c. 33. Concil Carth. 3. c. 29 * Dii majorum umbris tenuem sine pondere terram Spirantesque crocos in urna perpetuum yer Pers. Sat. 7. Otia das nobis sed qualia forat ulioâ— Meccenas Placco Virgilio que m◠〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 4 James 14. 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 Nihil sibi quisquam de futuro debet promittere Id quoque quod teâ—etur per 〈◊〉 anus exit