pasport in the article of his death and calls thâ—s the ancient and canonicall law of the Church and to minister it onely supposes the man in the communion of the Church not alwayes in the state but ever in the possibilities of sanctification They who in the article and danger of death were admitted to the communion and tied to penance if they recovered which was ever the custome of the ancient Church unlesse in very few cases were but in the threshold of repentance in the commencement and first introductions to a devout life and indeed then it is a fit ministery that it be given in all the periods of time in which the pardon of sins is working since it is the Sacrament of that great mystery the exhibition of that blood which is shed for the remission of sins 9. The Minister of religion ought not to give the Communion to a sick person if he retains the affection to any sin and refuses to disavow it or professe repentance of all sins whatsoever if he be required to do it The reason is because it is a certain death to him and an increase of his misery if he shall so prophane the body and blood of Christ as to take it into so unholy a breast where Sathan reignes and sin is principall and the Spirit is extinguished and Christ loves not to enter because he is not suffered to inhabite But when he professes repentance and does such acts of it as his present condition permits he is to be presumed to intend heartily what he professes solemnly and the Minister is onely the Judge of outward act and by that onely he is to take information concerning the inward But whether he be so or no or if he be whether that be timely and effectuall and sufficient toward the pardon of sins before God is another consideration of which we may conjecture here but we shall know it at doomsday The spirituall man is to do his ministery by the rules of Christ and as the customs of the Church appoint him and after the manner of men the event is in the hands of God and is to be expected not directly and wholly according to his ministery but to the former life or the timely internall repentance and amendment of which I have already given accounts These ministeries are acts of order and great assistances but the sum of affairs does not relie upon them And if any man puts his whole repentance upon this time or all his hopes upon these ministeries he will find them and himself to fail 10. It is the Ministers office to invite sick and dying persons to the Holy Sacrament such whose lives were fair and laudable and yet their sicknesse sad and violent making them list-lesse and of slow desires and flower apprehensions that such persons who are in the state of grace may lose no accidentall advantages of spirituall improvement but may receive into their dying bodies the symboles and great consignations of the resurrection and into their soules the pledges of immortality and may appear before God their Father in the union and with the impresses and likenesse of their elder Brother But if the persons be of ill report and have lived wickedly they are not to be invited because their case is hugely suspicious though they then repent and call for mercy but if they demand it they are not to be denied onely let the Minister in generall represent the evil consequents of an unworthy participation and if the penitent will judge himself unworthy let him stand candidate for pardon at the hands of God and stand or fall by that unerring and mercifull sentence to which his severity of condemning himself before men will make the easier and more hopefull addresse And the strictest among the Christians who denied to reconcile lapsed persons after baptisme yet acknowledged that there were hopes reserved in the court of heaven for them though not here since we who are easily deceived by the pretences of a reall return are tied to dispense Gods graces as he hath given us commission with fear and trembling and without too forward confidences and God hath mercies which we know not of and therefore because we know them not such persons were referred to Gods Tribunal where he would finde them if they were to be had at all 11. When the holy Sacrament is to be administred let the exhortation be made proper to the mystery but fitted to the man that is that it be used for the advantages of faith or love or contrition let all the circumstances and parts of the Divine love be represented all the mysterious advantages of the blessed Sacrament be declared * That it is the bread which came from heaven * That it is the representation of Christs death to all the purposes and capacities of faith * and the real exhibition of Christs body and blood to all the puposes of the Spirit * That it is the earnest of the resurrection * and the seed of a glorious immortality * That as by our cognation to the body of the first Adam we took in death so by our union with the body of the second Adam we shall have the inheritance of life for as by Adam came death so by Christ cometh the resurrection of the dead * That if we being worthy Communicants of these sacred pledges be presented to God with Christ within us our being accepted of God is certain even for the sake of his well beloved that dwells within us * That this is the Sacrament of the body which was broken for our sinnes of that blood which purifies our souls by which we are presented to God pure and holy in the beloved * That now we may ascertain our hopes and make our faith confident for he that hath given us his Son how should not he with him give us all things else Upon these or the like considerations the sick man may be assisted in his addresse and his faith strengthened and his hope confirmed and his charity be enlarged 12. The manner of the sick mans reception of the holy Sacrament hath in it nothing differing from the ordinary solemnities of the Sacrament save onely that abatement is to be made of such accidentall circumstances as by the lawes or customes of the Church healthfull persons are obliged to such as fasting kneeling c. though I remember that it was noted for great devotion in the Legate that died at Trent that he caused himself to be sustained upon his knees when he received the viaticum or the holy Sacrament before his death and it was greater in Hunniades that he caused himself to be carried to the Church that there he might receive his Lord in his Lords house and it was recorded for honour that William the pious Arch-Bishop of Bourges a small time before his last agony sprang out of his bed at the presence of the holy Sacrament and upon
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
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
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
arts of religion and mortification suppresse the trouble of that fancy till at last being told that she was dead and had been buried about fourteen dayes he went secretly to her Vault and with the skirt of his mantle wiped the moisture from the Carkasse and still at the return of his temptation laid it before him saying Behold this is the beauty of the woman thou didst so much desire and so the man found his cure And if we make death as present to us our own death dwelling and dressed in all its pomp of fancy and proper circumstances if any thing will quench the heats of lust or the desires of money or the greedy passionate affections of this world this must do it But withall the frequent use of this meditation by curing our present inordinations will make death safe and friendly and by its very custom will make that the King of terrours shall come to us without his affrighting dresses and that we shall sit down in the grave as we compose our selves to sleep and do the duties of nature and choice The old people that lived neer the Riphaean mountains were taught to converse with death and to handle it on all sides and to discourse of it as of a thing that will certainly come and ought so to do Thence their minds and resolutions became capable of death and they thought it a dishonourable thing with greedinesse to keep a life that must go from us to lay aside its thorns and to return again circled with a glory and a Diadem 2. He that would die well must all the dayes of his life lay up against the day of death not only by the general provisions of holinesse and a pious life indefinitely but provisions proper to the necessities of that great day of expence in which a man is to throw his last cast for an eternity of joyes or sorrows ever remembring that this alone well performed is not enough to passe us into Paradise but that alone done foolishly is enough to send us to hell and the want of either a holy life or death makes a man to fall short of the mighty price of our high calling In order to this rule we are to consider what special graces we shall then need to exercise and by the proper arts of the Spirit by a heap of proportioned arguments by prayers and a great treasure of devotion laid up in Heaven provide before hand a reserve of strength and mercy Men in the course of their lives walk lazily and incuriously as if they had both their feet in one shoe and when they are passively revolved to the time of their dissolution they have no mercies in store no patience no faith no charity to God or despite of the world being without gust or appetite for the land of their inheritance which Christ with so much pain and blood had purchased for them When we come to die indeed we shall be very much put to it to stand firm upon the two feet of a Christian faith and patience When we our selves are to use the articles to turn our former discourses into present practise and to feel what we never felt before we shall finde it to be quite another thing to be willing presently to quit this life and all our present possessions for the hopes of a thing which we were never suffered to see and such a thing of which we may sail so many wayes and of which if we fail any way we are miserable for ever Then we shall finde how much we have need to have secured the Spirit of God and the grace of saith by an habitual perfect unmovable resolution * The same also is the case of patience which will be assaulted with sharp pains disturbed fancies great fears want of a present minde natural weaknesses frauds of the Devil and a thousand accidents and imperfections It concerns us therfore highly in the whole course of our lives not onely to accustome our selves to a patient suffering of injuries and affronts of persecutions and losses of crosse accidents and unnecessary circumstances but also by representing death as present to us to consider with what arguments then to fortifie our patience and by assiduous and fervent prayer to God all our life long call upon God to give us patience and great assistances a strong faith and a confirmed hope the Spirit of God and his Holy Angels assistants at that time to resist and to subdue the devils temptations and assaults and so to fortifie our hearts that it break not into intolerable sorrows and impatience and end in wretchlessenesse and infidelity * But this is to be the work of our life and not to be done at once but as God gives us time by succession by parts and little periods For it is very remarkable that God who giveth plenteously to all creatures he hath scattered the firmament with stars as a man sowes corn in his fields in a multitude bigger then the capacities of humane order he hath made so much varietie of creatures and gives us great choice of meats and drinks although any one of both kindes would have served our needs and so in all instances of nature yet in the distribution of our time God seems to be strait-handed and gives it to us not as Nature gives us Rivers enough to drown us but drop by drop minute after minute so that we never can have two minutes together but he takes away one when he gives us another This should teach us to value our time since God so values it and by his so small distribution of it tells us it is the most precious thing we have Since therefore in the day of our death we can have but still the same little portion of this precious time let us in every minute of our life I mean in every discernable portion lay up such a stock of reason and good works that they may convey a value to the imperfect and shorter actions of our death-bed while God rewards the piety of our lives by his gracious acceptation and benediction upon the actions preparatory to our death-bed 3. He that desires to die well and happily above all things must be carefull that he do not live a soft a delicate and voluptuous life but a life severe holy and under the discipline of the crosse under the conduct of prudence and observation a life of warfare and sober counsels labour and watchfulnesse No man wants cause of tears and a daily sorrow Let every man consider what he feels and acknowledge his misery let him confesse his sin and chastise it let him bear his crosse patiently and his persecutions nobly and his repentances willingly and constantly let him pity the evils of all the world and bear his share of the calamities of his Brother let him long and sigh for the joyes of Heaven let him tremble and fear because he hath deserved the pains of hell let him commute his eternall
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
They that deny to worship God with lowly reverence of their bodies according as the Church expresses her reverence to God externally 4. They that invent or practise superstitious worshippings invented by man against Gods word or without reason or besides the publike customes or formes of worshipping either foolishly or ridiculously without the purpose of order decency proportion to a wise or a religious end in prosecution of some vertue or duty III. Comm. Thou shalt not take Gods Name in vain The duties of this Comm. are 1. To honour and revere the most holy Name of God 2. To invocate his Name directly or by consequence in all solemn and permitted adjurations or publike oaths 3. To use all things and persons upon whom his Name is called or any wayes imprinted with a regardfull and separate manner of usage different from common and far from contempt and scorn 4. To swear in truth and judgement They sin against this Commandment 1. Who swear vainly and customarily without just cause without competent authority 2. They that blasphem or curse God 3. They that speak of God without grave cause or solemn occasion 4. They that forswear themselves that is they that do not perform their vows to God or that swear or call God to witnesse to a lie 5. They that swear rashly or maliciously to commit a sin or an act of revenge 6. They that swear by any creature falsely or any way but as it relates to God and consequently invokes his testimony 7. All curious inquiries into the secrets and intruders into the mysteries and hidden things of God 8. They that curse God or curse a creature by God 9. They that prophane Churches holy Utensils holy persons holy customes holy Sacraments 10 They that provoke others to swear voluntarily and by designe or incuriously or negligently when they might avoid it 11 They that swear to things uncertain and unknown IV. Comm. Remember that thou keep holy the S. day The duties of this Comm. are 1. To set apart some portions of our time for the immediate offices of religion and glorification of God 2. This to be done according as God or his holy Church hath appointed 3. One day in seven is to be set apart 4. The Christian day is to be subrogated into the place of the Jewes day the resurrection of Christ and redemption of man was a greater blessing then then to create him 5. God on that day to be worshipped and acknowledged as our Creator and as our Saviour 6. The day to be spent in holy offices in hearing Divine service publike prayers frequenting the Congregations hearing the word of God read or expounded reading good books meditations alms reconciling enmities remission of burdens and of offences of debts and of work friendly offices neighbourhood and provoking one another to good-works and to this end all servile works must be omitted excepting necessary and charitable offices to men or beasts to our selves or others They sin against this Comm. 1. That do or compell or intice others to do servile works without the cases of necessity or charity to be estimated according to common and prudent accounts 2. They that refuse or neglect to come to the publike assemblies of the Church to hear and assist at the divine offices intirely 3. They that spend the day in idlenesse forbidden or vain recreations or the actions of sin and folly 4. They that buy and sell without the cases of permission 5. They that travell unnecessary journeys 6 They that act or assist in contenâ—ions or law-suites markets fairs c. 7. They that on that day omit their private devotion unlesse the whole day be spent in publike 8. They that by any crosse or contradictory actions against the customes of the Church do purposely desecrate or unhallow and make the day common as they that in despite and contempt fast upon the Lords day lest they may celebrate the festivall after the manner of the Christians V. Com. Honour thy father and thy mother The duties are 1. To do honour and reverence and to love our natural parents 2. To obey all their domestic commands for in them the scene of their authority lies 3. To give them maintenance and support in their needs 4. To obey Kings and all that are in authority 5. To pay tribute and honours custome and reverence 6. To do reverence to the aged and all our betters 7. To obey our Masters spiritual governours and Guides in those things which concern their several respective interest and authority They sin against this commandment 1. That despise their parents age or infirmity 2. That are ashamed of their poverty and extraction 3. That publish their vices errours and infirmities to shame them 4. That refuse and reject all or any of their lawful commands 5. Children that marry without or against their consent when it may be reasonably obtained 6. That curse them from whom they receive so many blessings 7 That grieve the souls of their parents by not complying in their desires and observing their circumstances 8. That hate their persons that mock them or use uncomely jestings 9. That discover their nakednesse voluntarily 10. That murmure against their injunctions and obey them involuntarily 11. All Rebels against their Kings or the supream power in which it is legally and justly invested 12. That refuse to pay tributes and impositions imposed legally 13. They that disobey their Masters murmure or repine against their commands abuse or deride their persons talk rudely c. 14. They that curse the king in their heart or speak evil of the ruler of their people 15. All that are uncivil and rude towards aged persons mockers and scorners of them VI. Com. Thou shalt do no murder The duties are 1. To preserve our own lives the lives of our relatives and all with whom we converse or who can need us and we assist by prudent reasonable and wary defences advocations discoveries of snares c. 2. To preserve our health and the integrity of our bodies and mindes and of others 3. To preserve and follow peace with all men They sin against this Commandment 1. That destroy the life of a man or woman himself or any other 2. That do violence or dismember or hurt any part of the body with evil intent 3. That fight duels or commence unjust wars 4. They that willingly hasten their own or others death 5. That by oppression or violence imbitter the spirits of any so as to make their life sad and their death hasty 6. They that conceal the dangers of their neighbor which they can safely discover 7. They that sow strife and contention among neighbours 8. They that refuse to rescue or preserve those whom they can and are obliged to preserve 9. They that procure abortion 10 They that threaten or keep men in fears or hate them VII Com. Thou shalt not commit adultery The duties are 1. To preserve our bodies in the chastity of a single life or
preserve thee in the faith and fear of his holy Name to thy lives end and bring thee to his everlasting Kingdom to live with him for ever and ever Amen Then let the sick man renounce all heresies and whatsoever is against the truth of God or the peace of the Church and pray for pardon for all his ignorances and errors known and unknown After which let him if all other circumstances be fitted be disposed to receive the Blessed Sacrament in which the Curate is to minister according to the form prescribed by the Church When the rites are finished let the sick man in the dayes of his sicknesse be imployed with the former offices and exercises before described and when the time drawes neer of his dissolution the Minister may assist by the following order of recommendation of the soul. I. O Holy and most Gracious Saviour Jesus we humbly recommend the soul of thy servant into thy hands thy most mercifull hands let thy Blessed Angels stand in ministery about thy servant and defend him from the violence and malice of all his ghosâ—ly enemies and drive far from hence all the spirits of darknesse Amen II. LOrd receive the soul of this thy servant Enter not into judgement with thy servaant spare him whom thou hast redeemed with thy most precious blood deliver him from all evil and mischief from the crafts and assaults of the Devil from the fear of death and from everlasting death Good Lord deliver him Amen III. IMpute not unto him the follies of his youth nor any of the errors and miscarriages of his life but strengthen him in his agony let not his faith waver nor his hope fail nor his charity be disordered Let none of his enemies imprint upon him any afflictive or evil phantasme let him die in peace and rest in hope and rise in glory Amen IIII. LOrd we know and beleeve assuredly that whatsoever is under thy custody cannot be taken out of thy hands nor by all the violences of hell robbed of thy protection preserve the work of thy hands rescue him from all evil for whose sake thou didst suffer all evil Take into the participation of thy glories him to whom thou hast given the seal of Adoption the earnest of the inheritance of the Saints Amen V. LEt his portion be with Abraham Isaac and Iacob with Iob and David with the Prophets and Apostles with Martyrs and all thy holy Saints in the arms of Christ in the bosome of felicity in the Kingdom of God to eternall ages Amen These following prayers are fit also to be added to the foregoing offices in case there be no communion or entercourse but prayer Let us Pray O Almighty and eternall God there is no number of thy dayes or of thy mercies thou hast sent us into this world to serve thee and to live according to thy lawes but we by our sins have provoked thee to wrath and we have planted thorns and sorrows round about our dwellings and our life is but a span long and yet very tedious because of the calamities that inclose us in on every side the dayes of our pilgrimage are few and evil we have frail and sickly bodies violent and distempered passions long designes and but a short stay weak understandings and strong enemies abused fancies perverse wils O Dear God look upon us in mercy and pity let not our weaknesses make us to sin against thee nor our fear cause us to betray our duty nor our former follies provoke thy eternall anger nor the calamities of this world vex us into tediousnesse of spirit and impatience but let thy Holy Spirit lead us thorow this vally of misery with safety and peace with holiness and religion with spirituall comforts and joy in the Holy Ghost that when we have served thee in our generations we may be gathered unto our Fathers having the testimony of a holy conscience in the communion of the Catholike Church in the confidence of a certain faith and the comforts of a reasonable religious and holy hope and perfect charity with thee our God and all the world that neither death nor life nor Angels nor principalities nor powers nor things present nor things to come nor height nor depth nor any other creature may be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen II. O Holy and most gracious Saviour Jesus in whose hands the souls of all faithfull people are laid up till the day of recompence have mercy upon the body and soul of this thy servant and upon all thy elect people who love the Lord Jesus and long for his coming Lord refresh the imperfection of their condition with the aids of the Spirit of grace and comfort and with the visitation and guard of Angels and supply to them all their necessities known onely unto thee let them dwell in peace and feel thy mercies pitying their infirmities and the follies of their flesh and speedily satisfying the desires of their spirits and when thou shalt bring us all forth in the day of Judgement O then shew thy self to be our Saviour Jesus our Advocate and our Judge Lord then remember that thou hast for so many ages prayed for the pardon of those sins which thou art then to sentence Let not the accusations of our consciences nor the calumnies and aggravation of Devils nor the effects of thy wrath presse those souls whâ—ch thou lovest which thou didst redeem which thou doest pray for but enable us all by the supporting hand of thy mercy to stand upright in judgement O Lord have mercy upon us have mercy upon us O Lord let thy mercy lighten upon us as our trust is in thee O Lord in thee have we trusted let us never be confounded Let us meet with joy and for ever dwell with thee feeling thy pardon supported with thy graciousnesse absolved by thy sentence saved by thy mercy that we may sing to the glory of thy Name eternall Allelujahs Amen Amen Amen Then may be added in the behalf of all that are present these ejaculations O spare us a little that we may recover our strength before we go hence and be no more seen Amen Cast us not away in the time of age O forsake us not when strength faileth Amen Grant that we may never sleep in sin or death eternall but that we may have our part of the first resurrection and that the second death may not prevail over us Amen Grant that our souls may be bound up in the bundle of life and in the day when thou bindest up thy Jewels remember thy servants for good and not for evil that our souls may be numbred amongst the righteous Amen Grant unto all sick and dying Christians mercy and aids from heaven and receive the souls returning unto thee whom thou hast redeemed with thy most precious blood Amen Grant unto thy servants to have faith in the Lord Jesus a daily meditation of death a contempt of
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
comfort or prevent an evil or cure the little mischiefs which are incident to tempted persons in their weaknesse this is the summe of the present designe as it relates to dying persons And therefore I have not inserted any advices proper to old age but such as are common to it and the state of sicknesse for I suppose very old age to be a longer sicknesse it is labour and sorrow when it goes beyond the common period of nature but if it be on this side that period and be healthfull in the same degree it is so I reckon it in the accounts of life and therefore it can have no distinct consideration But I do not think it is a station of advantage to begin the change of an evil life in It is a middle state between life and death-bed and therefore although it hath more of hopes then this and lesse then that yet as it partakes of either state so it is to be regulated by the advices of that state and judged by its sentences Onely this I desire that all old persons would sadly consider that their advantages in that state are very few but their inconveniences are not few Their bodies are without strength their prejudices long and mighty their vices if they have lived wickedly are habituall the occasions of their vertues not many the possibilities of some in the matter of which they stand very guilty are past and shall never return again such are chastity and many parts of self-deniall that they have some temptations proper to their age as peevishnesse and pride covetousnesse and talking wilfulnesse and unwillingnesse to learn and they think they are protected by age from learning anew or repenting the old and do not leave but change their vices And after all this either the day of their repentance is past as we see it true in very many or it is expiring and towards the Sun-set as it is in all and therefore although in these to recover is very possible yet we may also remember that in the matter of vertue and repentance possibility is a great way off from performance and how few do repent of whom it is onely possible that they may and that many things more are required to reduce their possibility to act a great grace an assiduous ministery an effective calling mighty assistances excellent counsell great industry a watchfull diligence a well disposed mind passionate desires deep apprehensions of danger quick perceptions of duty and time and Gods good blessing and effectuall impression and seconding all this that to will and to do may by him be wrought to great purposes and with great speed And therefore it will not be amisse but it is hugely necessary that these persons who have lost their time and their blessed opportunities should have the diligence of youth and the zeal of new converts and take account of every hour that is left them and pray perpetually and be advised prudently and study the interest of their souls carefully with diligence and with fear and their old age which in effect is nothing but a continuall death-bed dressed with some more order and advantages may be a state of hope and labour and acceptance through the infinite mercies of God in Jesus Christ. But concerning sinners really under the arrest of death God hath made no death-bed covenant the Scripture hath recorded no promises given no instructions and therefore I had none to give but onely the same which are to be given to all men that are alive because they are so and because it is uncertain when they shall be otherwise But then this advice I also am to insert That they are the smallest number of Christian men who can be divided by the characters of a certain holinesse or an open villany and between these there are many degrees of latitude and most are of a middle sort concerning which we are tied to make the judgements of charity and possibly God may do so too But however all they are such to whom the rules of holy dying are usefull and applicable and therefore no separation is to be made in this world but where the case is not evident men are to be permitted to the unerring judgement of God where it is evident we can rejoyce or mourn for them that die In the Church of Rome they reckon otherwise concerning sick and dying Christians then I have done For they make profession that from death to life from sin to grace a man may very certainly be changed though the operation begin not before his last hour and half this they do upon his death bed and the other half when he is in his grave and they take away the eternal punishment in an instant by a school distinction or the hand of the Priest and the temporal punishment shall stick longer even then when the man is no more measured with time having nothing to do with any thing of or under the sun but that they pretend to take away too when the man is dead and God knowes the poor man for all this payes them both in hell The distinction of temporal and eternal is a just measure of pains when it referres to this life and another but to dream of a punishment temporal when all his time is done and to think of repentance when the time of grace is past are great errours the one in Philosophy and both in Divinity and are a huge folly in their pretence and infinite danger if they are believed being a certain destruction of the necessity of holy living when men dare trust them and live at the rate of such doctrines The secret of these is soon discovered for by such means though a holy life be not necessary yet a priest is as if God did not appoint the Priest to minister to holy living but to excuse it so making the holy calling not onely to live upon the sins of the people but upon their ruine and the advantages of their function to spring from their eternal dangers It is an evil craft to serve a temporal end upon the death of souls that is an interest not to handled but with noblenesse and ingenuity fear and caution diligence and prudence with great skill and great honesty with reverence and trembling and severity a soul is worth all that and the need we have requires all that and therefore those doctrines that go lesse then all this are not friendly because they are not safe I know no other great difference in the visitation and treating of sick persons then what depends upon the article of late repentance for all Churches agree in the same essential propositions and assist the sick by the same internal ministeries as for external I mean unction used in the Church of Rome since it is used when the man is above half dead when he can exercise no act of understanding it must needs be nothing for no rational man can think that any ceremonie can make a spiritual
separation be full of caution their judgements not remisse their remissions not loose and dissolute and that all the whole ministration be made by persons of experience and charity for it is a sad thing to see our dead go forth of our hands they live incuriously and dye without regard and the last scene of their life which should be dressed with all spiritual advantages is abused by flattery and easie propositions and let go with carelesnesse and folly My Lord I have endeavoured to cure some part of the evil as well as I could being willing to relieve the needs of indigent people in such wayes as I can and therefore have described the duties which every sick man may do alone and such in which he can be assisted by the Minister and am the more confident that these my endeavours will be the better entertained because they are the first intire body of directions for sick and dying people that I remember to have been published in the Church of England In the Church of Rome there have been many but they are dressed with such Doctrines which are sometimes uselesse sometimes hurtfull and their whole designe of assistance which they commonly yeeld is at the best imperfect and the representment is too carelesse and loose for so severe an imployment So that in this affair I was almost forced to walk alone onely that I drew the rules and advices from the fountains of Scripture and the purest channels of the Primitive Church and was helped by some experience in the cure of souls I shall measure the successe of my labours not by popular noises or the sentences of curious persons but by the advantage which good people may receive my work here is not to please the speculative part of men but to minister to practise to preach to the weary to comfort the sick to assist the penitent to reprove the confident to strengthen weak hands and feeble knees having scarce any other possibilities left me of doing alms or exercising that charity by which we shall be judged at Doomsday It is enough for me to be an underbuilder in the House of God and I glory in the imployment I labour in the foundations and therefore the work needs no Apology for being plain so it be strong and well laid But My Lord as mean as it is I must give God thanks for the desires and the strength and next to him to you for that opportunity and little portion of leisure which I had to do it in for I must acknowledge it publikely and besides my prayers it is all the recompence I can make you my being quiet I owe to your Interest much of my support to your bounty and many other collaterall comforts I derive from your favour and noblenesse My Lord because I much honour you and because I would do honour to my self I have written your Name in the entrance of my Book I am sure you will entertain it because the designe related to your Dear Lady and because it may minister to your spirit in the day of visitation when God shall call for you to receive your reward for your charity and your noble piety by which you have not onely endeared very many persons but in great degrees have obliged me to be My Noblest Lord Your Lordships most thankfull and most humble servant TAYLOR THE TABLE CHAP. I. A General preparation towards a holy and blessed death by way of consideration 1. § I. Consideration of the vanity and shortnesse of mans life ibid. § II. The consideration reduced to practise 10. § III. Rules and spiritual arts of lengthening our dayes and to take off the objection of a short life 21. § IV. Consideration of the miseries of mans life 35. § V. The consideration reduced to practise 43. CHAP. II. A general preparation towards a holy and blessed death by way of exercise 48. § I. Three precepts preparatory to a holy death to be practised in our whole life ibid. § II. Of daily examination of our actions in the whole course of our health preparatory to our death bed 55. Reasons for a daily examination ibid. The benefits of this exercise 59 § III. Of exercising charity during our whole life 67. § IV. General considerations to inforce the former practises 71. The circumstances of a dying mans sorrow and danger 72. CHAP. III. Of the temptations incident to the state of sicknesse with their proper remedies 77. § I. Of the state of sicknesse ibid. § II. Of Impatience 81. § III. Constituent or integral parts of patience 84. § IV. Remedies against impatience by way of consideration 87. § V. Remedies against impatience by way of exercise 98. § VI. Advantages of sicknesse 104. Three appendant considerations 1â—0 121 122. § VII Remedies against fear of death by way of consideration 127 § VIII Remedies against fear of death by way of exercise 134. § IX General Rules and Exercises whereby our sicknesse may become safe and sanctified 143. CHAP. IV. Of the practise of the graces proper to the state of sicknesse which a sick man may practise alone 156. § I. Of the practise of patience by way of Rule 156 157. § II. Acts of patience by way of prayer and ejaculation 167. A prayer to be said in the beginning of a sicknesse 173. An act of resignation to be said in all the evil accidents of his sickness 174. A prayer for the grace of patience 175. A prayer to be said at the taking Physic 177. § III. Of the practise of the grace of faith in time of sicknesse 178. § IV. Acts of faith by way of prayer and ejaculation to be said by sick men in the dayes of their temptation 184. The prayer for the grace strengths of faith 186. § V. Of repentance in the time of sicknesse 188. § VI. Rules for the practise of repentance in sicknesse 195. Means of exciting contrition c. 200 § VII Acts of repentance by way of prayer and ejaculation 208. The prayer for the grace and perfection of repentance 210. A prayer for pardon of sins to be said frequently in time of sicknesse 212. An act of holy resolution of amendment of life in case of recovery 214. § VIII An analysis or resolution of the Decalogue enumerating the duties commanded and the sins forbidden in every Commandment for the helping the sick man in making his confession 216. The special precepts of the Gospel enumerated 69 227. § IX Of the sick mans practise of charity and justice by way of Rule 231. § X. Acts of charity by way of prayer and ejaculation which may also be used for thanksgiving in case of recovery 238. CHAP. V Of visitation of the sick or § I. The assistance that is to be done to dying persons by the ministery of their Clergy-Guides 242. § II. Rules for the manner of visitations of the sick 245. § III. Of ministring in the sick mans confession of sins and Repentance 250 Arguments and exhortations
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
of a cloud and the meeting of a vapor by the fall of a chariot and the stumbling at a stone by a full meal or an empty stomach by watching at the wine or by watching at prayers by the Sun or the Moon by a heat or a cold by sleeplesse nights or sleeping dayes by water frozen into the hardnesse and sharpnesse of a dagger or water thawd into the floods of a river by a hair or a raisin by violent motion or sitting still by severity or dissolution by Gods mercy or Gods anger by every thing in providence and every thing in manners by every thing in nature and every thing in chance Eripitur persona manet res we take pains to heap up things useful to our life and get our death in the purchase and the person is snatchâ—ed away and the goods remain and all this is the law and constitution of nature it is a punishment to our sins the unalterable event of providence and the decree of heaven The chains that confine us to this condition are strong as destiny and immutable as the eternal laws of God I have conversed with some men who rejoyced in the death or calamity upon others and accounted it as a judgement upon them for being on the other side and against them in the contention but within the revolution of a few moneths the same man met with a more uneasy and unhandsom death which when I saw I wept and was afraid for I knew that it must be so with all men for we also shall die and end our quarrels and contentions by passing to a final sentence SECT II. The Consideration reduced to practice IT will be very material to our best and noblest purposes if we represent this scene of change and sorrow a little more dressed up in Circumstances for so we shall be more apt to practice those Rules the doctrine of which is consequent to this consideration * It is a mighty change that is made by the death of every person and it is visible to us who are alive Reckon but from the spritefulnesse of youth and the fair cheeks and full eyes of childehood from the vigorousnesse and strong flexure of the joynts of five and twenty to the hollownesse and dead palenesse to the loathsomnesse and horrour of a three dayes burial and we shall perceive the distance to be very great and very strange But so have I seen a Rose newly springing from the clefts of its hood and at first it was fair as the Morning and full with the dew of Heaven as a Lambs fleece but when a ruder breath had forced open its virgin modesty and dismantled its too youthful and unripe retirements it began to put on darknesse and to decline to softnesse and the symptomes of a sickly age it bowed the head and broke its stalk and at night having lost some of its leaves and all its beauty it fell into the portion of weeds and out-worn faces The same is the portion of every man and every woman the heritage of worms and serpents rottennesse and cold dishonour and our beauty so changed that our acquaintance quickly knew us not and that change mingled with so much horrour or else meets so with our fears and weak discoursings that they who six hours ago tended upon us either with charitable or ambitious services cannot without some regret stay in the room alone where the body lies stripped of its life and Honour I have read of a fair young German Gentleman who living often refused to be pictured but put ofâ— the importunity of his friends desire by giving way that after a few dayes burial they might send a painter to his vault and if they saw cause for it draw the image of his death unto the life They did so and found his face half eaten and his midriffe and back bone full of serpents and so he stands pictured among his armed Ancestours So does the fairest beauty change and it will be as bad with you and me and then what servants shall we have to wait upon us in the grave what friends to visit us what officious people to cleanse away the moist and unwholsom cloud reflected upon our faces from the sides of the weeping vaults which are the longest weepers for our funeral This discourse will be useful if we consider and practise by the following Rules and Considerations respectivly 1. All the Rich and all the Covetous men in the world will perceive and all the world will perceive for them that it is but an ill recompence for all their cares that by this time all that shall be left will be this that the Neighbours shall say he died a rich man and yet his wealth will not profit him in the grave but hugely swell the sad accounts of Doomsday And he that kills the Lords people with unjust or ambitious wars for an unrewarding interest shall have this character that he threw away all the dayes of his life that one year might be reckoned with his Name and computed by his reign or consulship and many men by great labors and affronts many indignities and crimes labour onely for a pompous Epitaph and a loud title upon their Marble whilest those into whose possessions their heirs or kinred are entred are forgotten and lye unregarded as their ashes and without concernment or relation as the turf upon the face of their grave A man may read a sermon the best and most passionate that ever men preached if he shall but enter into the sepulchres of Kings In the same Escurial where the Spanish Princes live in greatnesse and power and decree war or peace they have wisely placed a coemeterie where their ashes and their glories shall sleep till time shall be no more and where our Kings have been crowned their Ancestours lay interred and they must walk over their Grandsires head to take his crown There is an acre sown with royal seed the copy of the greatest change from rich to naked from ciâ—led roofs to arched coffins from living like Gods to dye like Men. There is enough to cool the flames of lust to abate the heights of pride to appease the itch of covetous desires to â—ully and dash out the dissembling colours of a lustful artificial and imaginary beauty There the warlike and the peaceful the fortunate and the miserable the beloved and the despised Princes mingle their dust and pay down their symbol of Mortality and tell all the world that when we die our ashes shall be equal to Kings and our accounts easier and our pains or our crowns shall be lesse * To my apprehension it is a sad record which is left by Athenaeus concerning Ninus the great Assyrian Monarch whose life and death is summed up in these words Ninus the Assyrian had an Ocean of gold and other riches more then the sand in the Caspian sea he never saw the stars and perhaps he never desired
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
our understandings they also would have the method of a Mans greatnesse and divide their little Mole-hils into Provinces and Exarchats and if they also grew as vitious and as miserable one of their princes would lead an army out and kill his neighbour Ants that he might reign over the next handfull of a Turse But then if we consider at what price and with what felicity all this is purchased the sâ—ing of the painted snake will quickly appear and the fairest of their fortunes will properly enter into this account of humane infelicities We may guesse at it by the constitution of Augustus fortune who strugled for his power first with the Roman Citizens then with Brutus and Cassius and all the fortune of the Republike then with his Collegue Marc. Anthony then with his kinred and neerest Relatives and after he was wearied with slaughter of the Romans before he could sit down and rest in his imperial chair he was forced to carry armies into Macedonia Galatia beyond Euphrates Rhyne and Danubius And when he dwelt at home in greatnesse and within the circles of a mighty power he hardly escaped the sword of the Egnatii of Lepidus Caepio and Muraena and after he had entirely reduced the felicity and Grandeur into his own family his Daughter his onely childe conspired with many of the young Nobility and being joyned with adulterous complications as with an impious sacrament they affrighted and destroyed the fortune of the old man and wrought him more sorrow then all the troubles that were hatched in the baths and beds of Egypt between Anthony and Cleopatra This was the greatest fortune that the world had then or ever since and therefore we cannot expect it to be better in a lesse prosperity 6. The prosperity of this world is so infinitely sowred with the overflowing of evils that he is counted the most happy who hath the fewest all conditions being evil and miserable they are onely distinguished by the Number of calamities The Collector of the Roman and forreign examples when he had reckoned two and twenty instances of great fortunes every one of which had been allayed with great variety of evils in all his reading or experience he could tell but of two who had been famed for an intire prosperity Quintus Metellus and Gyges the King of Lydia and yet concerning the one of them he tells that his felicity was so inconsiderable and yet it was the bigger of the two that the Oracle said that Aglaus Sophidius the poor Arcadian Shepherd was more happy then he that is he had fewer troubles for so indeed we are to reckon the pleasures of this life the limit of our joy is the absence of some degrees of sorrow and he that hath the least of this is the most prosperous person But then we must look for prosperity not in Palaces or Courts of Princes not in the tents of Conquerers or in the gaieties of fortunate and prevailing sinners but something rather in the Cottages of honest innocent and contented persons whose minde is no bigger then their fortune nor their vertue lesse then their security As for others whose fortune looks bigger and allures fools to follow it like the wandâ—ing fires of the night till they run into rivers or are broken upon rocks with staring and running after them they are all in the condition of Marius then whose condition nothing was more constant and nothing more mutable if we reckon them amongst the happy they are the most happy men if we reckon them amongst the miserable they are the most miserable For just as is a mans condition great or little so is the state of his misery All have their share but Kings and Princes great Generals and Consuls Rich men and Mighty as they have the biggest businesse and the biggest charge and are answerable to God for the greatest accounts so they have the biggest trouble that the uneasinesse of their appendage may divide the good and evil of the world making the poor mans fortune as eligible as the Greatest and also restraining the vanity of mans spirit which a great Fortune is apt to swell from a vapour to a bubble but God in mercy hath mingled wormwood with their wine and so restrained the drunkennesse and follies of prosperity 7. Man never hath one day to himself of entire peace from the things of this world but either somthing troubles him or nothing satisfies him or his very fulnesse swells him and makes him breath short upon his bed Mens joyes are troublesome and besides that the fear of losing them takes away the present pleasure and a man had need of another felicity to preserve this they are also wavering and full of trepidation not onely from their inconstant nature but from their weak foundation They arise from vanity and they dwell upon ice and they converse with the winde and they have the wings of a bird and are serious but as the resolutions of a childe commenced by chance and managed by folly and proceed by inadvertency and end in vanity and forgetfulnesse So that as Livius Drusus said of himself he never had any play dayes or dayes of quiet when he was a boy for he was troublesome and busie a restlesse and unquiet man the same may every man observe to be true of himself he is alwayes restlesse and uneasy he dwells upon the waters and leans upon thorns and layes his head upon a sharp stone SECT V. This Consideration reduced to practice 1. THe effect of this consideration is this That the sadnesses of this life help to sweeten the bitter cup of Death For let our life be never so long if our strength were great as that of oxen and camels if our sinews were strong as the cordage at the foot of an Oke if we were as fighting and prosperous people as Siccius Dentatus who was on the prevailing side in 120 battels who had 312 publike rewards assigned him by his Generals and Princes for his valour and conduct in sieges and short encounters and besides all this had his share in nine triumphs yet still the period shall be that all this shall end in death and the people shall talk of us a while good or bad according as we deserve or as they please and once it shall come to passe that concerning every one of us it shall be told in the Neighbourhood that we are dead This we are apt to think a sad story but therefore let us help it with a sadder For we therefore need not be much troubled that we shall die because we are not here in ease nor do we dwell in a fair condition But our dayes are full of sorrow and anguish dishonoured and made unhappy with many sins with a frail and a foolish spirit intangled with difficult cases of conscience insâ—ared with passions amazed with fears full of cares divided with curiosities and contradictory interests made aëry and impertinent with vanities abused with
ignorance and prodigious errours made ridiculous with a thousand weaknesses worne away with labours loaden with diseases daily vexed with dangers and temptations and in love with misery we are weakned with delights afflicted with want with the evils of my self and of all my family and with the sadnesses of all my friends and of all good men even of the whole Church and therefore me thinks we need not be troubled that God is pleased to put an end to all these troubles and to let them sit down in a natural period which if we please may be to us the beginning of a better life When the Prince of Persia wept because his army should all die in the revolution of an age Artabanus told him that they should all meet with evils so many and so great that every man of them should wish himself dead long before that Indeed it were a sad thing to be cut of the stone and we that are in health tremble to think of it but the man that is wearied with the disease looks upon that sharpnesse as upon his cure and remedie and as none need to have a tooth drawn so none could well endure it but he that hath felt the pain of it in his head so is our life so full of evils that therefore death is no evil to them that have felt the smart of this or hope for the joyes of a better 2. But as it helps to ease a certain sorrow as a fire drawes out fire and a nail drives forth a nail so it instructs us in a present duty that is that we should not be so fond of a perpetual storm nor doat upon the transient gaudes and gilded thorns of this world They are not worth a passion not worth a sigh or a groan not of the price of one nights watching and therefore they are mistaken and miserable persons who since Adam planted thorns round about Paradise are more in love with that hedge then all the fruits of the garden sottish admirers of things that hurt them of sweet poisons gilded daggers and silken halters Tell them they have lost a bounteous friend a rich purchase a fair farm a wealthy donative and you dissolve their patience it is an evil bigger then their spirit can bear it brings sicknesse and death they can neither eate nor sleep with such a sorrow But if you represent to them the evils of a vitious habit and the dangers of a state of sin if you tell them they have displeased God and interrupted their hopes of heaven it may be they will be so civil as to hear it patiently and to treat you kindly and first commend and then to forget your story because they prefer this world with all its sorrowes before the pure unmingled felicities of heaven But it is strange that any man should be so passionately in love with the thorns that grow on his own ground that he should wear them for armelets and knit them in his shirt and prefer them before a kingdom and immortality No man loves this world the better for his being poor but men that love it because they have great possessions love it because it is troublesome and chargeable full of noise and temptation because it is unsafe and ungoverned flattered and abused and he that considers the troubles of an overlong garment and of a crammed stomach a trailing gown and a loaden Table may justly understand that all that for which men are so passionate is their hurt and their objection that which a temperate man would avoid and a wise man cannot love He that is no fool but can consider wisely if he be in love with this world we need not despair but that a witty man might reconcile him with tortures and make him think charitably of the Rack and be brought to dwell with Vipers and Dragons and entertain his Guests with the shrikes of Mandrakes Cats and Scrich Owls with the filing of iron and the harshnesse of rending silk or to admire the harmony that is made by a herd of Evening wolves when they misse their draught of blood in their midnight Revels The groans of a man in a fit of the stone are worse then all these and the distractions of a troubled conscience are worse then those groans and yet a carelesse merry sinner is worse then all that But if we could from one of the battlements of Heaven espie how many men and women at this time lye fainting and dying for want of bread how many young men are hewen down by the sword of war how many poor Orphans are now weeping over the graves of their Father by whose life they were enabled to eat If we could but hear how many Mariners and Passengers are at this present in a storm and shrike out because their keel dashes against a Rock or bulges under them how many people there are that weep with want and are mad with oppression or are desperate by too quick a sense of a constant infelicity in all reason we should be glad to be out of the noise and participation of so many evils This is a place of sorrows and tears of great evils and a constant calamity let us remove from hence at least in affections and preparation of minde CHAP. II. A general preparation towards a holy and blessed Death by way of exercise SECT I. Three precepts preparatory to a holy death to be practised in our whole life 1. HE that would die well must alwayes loook for death every day knocking at the gates of the grave and then the gates of the grave shall never prevail upon him to do him mischief This was the advice of all the wise and good men of the world who especially in the dayes and periods of their joy and festival egressions chose to throw some ashes into their chalices some sober remembrances of their fatal period Such was the black shirt of Saladine the tomb-stone presented to the Emperour of Constantinople on his Coronation day the Bishop of Romes two reeds with flax and wax taper the Egyptian skeleton served up at feasts and Trimalcions banquet in Petronius in which was brought in the image of a dead mans bones of silver with spondiles exactly turning to every of the Guests and saying to every one that you and you must die and look not one upon another for every one is equally concerned in this sad representment These in phantastic semblances declare a severe counsel and useful meditation and it is not easy for a man to be gay in his imagination or to be drunk with joy or wine pride or revenge who considers sadly that he must ere long dwell in a house of darknesse and dishonour and his bodie must be the inheritance of worms and his soul must be what he pleases even as a man makes it here by his living good or bad I have read of a young Hermit who being passionately in love with a young Lady could not by all the
our actions and condemning the Criminal by being Assessors in Gods Tribunal at least we shall obtain the favour of the Court. As therefore every night we must make our bed the memoriall of our grave so let our Evening thoughts be an image of the day of judgement 5. This advice was so reasonable and proper instrument of vertue that it was taught even to the Scholers of Pythagoras by their Master Let not sleep seiz upon the Regions of your senses before you have three times recalled the conversation and accidents of the day Examine what you have committed against the Divine Law what you have omitted of your duty and in what you have made use of the Divine Grace to the purposes of vertue and religion joyning the Iudge reason to the legislative mind or conscience that God may reigne there as a Law-giver and a Judge Then Christs kingdom is set up in our hearts then we alwayes live in the Eye of our Judge and live by the measures of reason religion and sober counsels The benefits we shall receive by practising this advice in order to a blessed death will also adde to the account of reason and fair inducements The Benefits of this exercise 1. By a daily examination of our actions we shall the easier cure a great sin and prevent its arrival to become habitual For to examine we suppose to be a relative duty and instrumentall to something else We examine our selves that we may finde out our failings and cure them and therefore if we use our remedy when the wound is fresh and bleeding we shall finde the cure more certain and lesse painfull For so a Taper when its crown of flames is newly blown off retains a nature so symbolical to light that it will with greedinesse reenkindle and snatch a ray from the neighbour fire So is the soul of Man when it is newly fallen into sin although God be angry with it and the state of Gods favour and its own graciousnesse is interrupted yet the habit is not naturally changed and still God leaves some roots of vertue standing and the Man is modest or apt to be made ashamed and he is not grown a bold sinner but if he sleeps on it and returns again to the same sin and by degrees growes in love with it and gets the custome and the strangenesse of it is taken away then it is his Master and is sweld into a heap and is abetted by use and corroborated by newly entertained principles and is insinuated into his Nature and hath possessed his affections and tainted the will and the understanding and by this time a man is in the state of a decaying Merchant his accounts are so great and so intricate and so much in arrear that to examine it will be but to represent the particulars of his calamity therefore they think it better to pull the napkin before their eyes then to stare upon the circumstances of their death 2. A daily or frequent examination of the parts of our life will interrupt the proceeding and hinder the journey of little sins into a heap For many dayes do not passe the best persons in which they have not many idle words or vainer thoughts to sully the fair whitenesse of their souls Some indiscreet passions or trifling purposes some impertinent discontents or unhandsome usages of their own persons or their dearest Relatives And though God is not extreme to mark what is done amisse and therefore puts these upon the accounts of his Mercy and the title of the Crosse yet in two cases these little sins combine and cluster and we know that grapes were once in so great a bunch that one cluster was the load of two men that is 1. When either we are in love with small sins or 2. When they proceed from a carelesse and incurious spirit into frequency and continuance For so the smallest atomes that dance in all the little cels of the world are so trifling and immaterial that they cannot trouble an eye nor vex the tenderest part of a wound where a barbed arrow dwelt yet when by their infinite numbers as Melissa and Parmenides affirm they danced first into order then into little bodies at last they made the matter of the world So are the little indiscretions of our life they are alwayes inconsiderable if they be considered and contemptible if they be not despised and God does not regard them if we do We may easily keep them asunder by our daily or nightly thoughts and prayers and severe sentences But even the least sand can check the tumultuous pride and become a limit to the Sea when it is in a heap and in united multitudes but if the wind scatter and divide them the little drops and the vainer froth of the water begins to invade the Strand Our sighes can scatter such little offences but then be sure to breath such accents frequently least they knot and combine and grow big as the shoar and we perish in sand in trifling instances He that despiseth little things shall perish by little and little So said the son of Sirach 3. A frequent examination of our actions will intenerate and soften our consciences so that they shall be impatient of any rudenesse or heavier load And he that is used to shrink when he is pressed with a branch of twining Osier will not willingly stand in the ruines of a house when the beam dashes upon the pavement And provided that our nice and tender spirit be not vexed into scruple nor the scruple turn into unreasonable fears nor the fears into superstition he that by any arts can make his spirit tender and apt for religious impressions hath made the fairest seat for religion and the unaptest and uneasiest entertainment for sin and eternal death in the whole world 4. A frequent examination of the smallest parts of our lives is the best instrument to make our repentance particular and a fit remedy to all the members of the whole body of sin For our examination put off to our death-bed of necessity brings us into this condition that very many thousands of our sins must be or not be at al washed off with a general repentance which the more general and indefinite it is it is ever so much the worse And if he that repents the longest and the oftnest and upon the most instances is still during his whole life but an imperfect penitent and there are very many reserves left to be wiped off by Gods mercies and to be eased by collateral assistances or to be groaned for at the terrible day of judgement it will be but a sad story to consider that the sins of a whole life or of very great portions of it shall be put upon the remedy of one examination and the advices of one discourse and the activities of a decayed body and a weak and an amazed Spirit Let us do the best we can we shall finde that the meer sins of ignorance
checked with the stiffnesse of a tower or the united strength of a wood it grew mighty and dwelt there and made the highest branches stoop and make a smooth path for it on the top of all its glories So is sicknesse and so is the grace of God When sicknesse hath made the difficulty then Gods grace hath made a triumph and by doubling its power hath created new proportions of a reward and then shews its biggest glory when it hath the greatest difficulty to Master the greatest weaknesses to support the most busie temptations to contest with For so God loves that his strength should be seen in our weaknesse and our danger Happy is that state of life in which our services to God are the dearest and the most expensive 5. Sicknesse hath some degrees of eligibility at least by an after-choice because to all persons which are within the possibilities and state of pardon it becomes a great instrument of pardon of sins For as God seldom rewards here and hereafter too So it is not very often that he punishes in both states In great and finall sins he doth so but we finde it expressed onely in the case of the sin against the Holy Ghost which shall never be forgiven in this world nor in the world to come that is it shall be punished in both worlds and the infelicities of this world shall but usher in the intollerable calamities of the next But this is in a case of extremity and in sins of an unpardonable malice In those lesser stages of death which are deviations from the rule and not a destruction and perfect antinomy to the whole institution God very often smites with his rod of sicknesse that he may not for ever be slaying the soul with eternall death I will visit their offences with the rod and their sin with scourges Neverthelesse my loving kindenesse will I not utterly take from him nor suffer my truth to fail And there is in the New Testament a delivering over to Satan and a consequent buffeting for the mortification of the flesh indeed but that the soul may be saved in the day of the Lord. And to some persons the utmost processe of Gods anger reaches but to a sharp sicknesse or at most but to a temporall death and then the little momentany anger is spent and expires in rest and a quiet grave Origen S. Austin and Cassian say concerning Ananias and Sapphira that they were slain with a sudden death that by such a judgement their sin might be punished and their guilt expiated and their persons reserved for mercy in the day of judgement And God cuts off many of his children from the land of the living and yet when they are numbred amongst our dead he findes them in the book of life written amongst those that shall live to him for ever and thus it happened to many new Christians in the Church of Corinth for their little undecencies and disorders in the circumstances of receiving the holy Sacrament S. Paul sayes that many amongst them were sick may were weak and some were fallen asleep He expresses the divine anger against those persons in no louder accents which according to the stile of the New Testament where all the great transactions of duty and reproof are generally made upon the stock of Heaven and Hell is plainly a reserve and a period set to the declaration of Gods wrath For God knowes that the torments of hell are so horrid so insupportable a calamity that he is not easy and apt to cast those souls which he hath taken so much care and hath been at so much expence to save into the eternal never dying flames of Hell lightly for smaller sins or after a fairly begun repentance and in the midst of holy desires to finish it But God takes such penalties and exacts such fines of us which we may pay salvo contenemento saving the main stake of all even our precious souls And therefore S. Augustine prayed to God in his penitential sorrowes Here O Lord burn and cut my flesh that thou mayest spare me for ever For so said our blessed Saviour Every sacrifice must be seasoned with salt and every sacrifice must be burnt with fire that is we must abide in the state of grace and if we have committed sins we must expect to be put into the state of affliction and yet the sacrifice will send up a right and unâ—roubled cloud and a sweet smell to joyn with the incense of the Altar where the eternal Priest offers a never ceasing sacrifice And now I have said a thing against which there can be no exceptions and of which no just reason can make abatement For when sicknesse which is the condition of our nature is called for with purposes of redemption when we are sent to death to secure eternal life when God strikes us that he may spare us it shewes that we have done things which he essentially hates and therefore we must be smitten with the rod of God but in the midst of judgement God remembers mercy and makes the rod to be medicinal and like the rod of God in the hand of Aaron to shoot forth buds and leaves and Almonds hopes and mercies and eternal recompences in the day of restitution This is so great a good to us if it be well conducted in all the chanels of its intention and designe that if we had put off the objections of the flesh with abstractions contempts and separations so as we ought to do were as earnestly to be prayed for as any gay blessing that crowns our cups with joy and our heads with garlands and forgetfulnesse But this was it which I said that this may nay that it ought to be chosen at least by an after-election for so said S. Paul If we judge our selves we shall not be condemned of the Lord that is if we judge our selves worthy of the sicknesse if we acknowledge and confesse Gods justice in smiting us if we take the rod of God in our own hands and are willing to imprint it in the flesh we are workers together with God in the infliction and then the sickness beginning and being managed in the vertue of repentance and patience and resignation and charity will end in peace and pardon and justification and consignation to glory That I have spoken truth I have brought Gods Spirit speaking in Scripture for a witnesse But if this be true there are not many states of life that have advantages which can out-weigh this great instrument of security to our final condition Moses dyed at the mouth of the Lord said the story he died with the kisses of the Lords mouth so the Chaldee Paraphrase it was the greatest act of kindesse that God did to his servant Moses he kissed him and he died But I have some things to observe for the better finishing this consideration 1. All these advantages and lessenings of evil in the
state of sicknesse are onely upon the stock of vertue and religion There is nothing can make sicknesse in any sense eligible or in many senses tolerable but onely the grace of God that onely turns sicknesse into easinesse and felicity which also turnes it into vertue For whosoever goes about to comfort a vitious person when he lies sick upon his bed can onely discourse of the necessities of nature of the unavoidableness of the suffering of the accidental vexations and increase of torments by impatience of the fellowship of all the sons of Adam and such other little considerations which indeed if sadly reflected upon and found to stand alone teach him nothing but the degree of his calamity and the evil of his condition and teach him such a patience and minister to him such a comfort which can only make him to observ decent gestures in his sicknesse and to converse with his friends and standers by so as may do them comfort and ease their funeral and civil complaints but do him no true advantage For all that may be spoken to a beast when he is crowned with hairlaces and bound with fillets to the Altar to bleed to death to appease the anger of the Deity and to ease the burden of his Relatives And indeed what comfort can he receive whose sicknesse as it looks back is an effect of Gods indignation and fierce vengeance and if it goes forward and enters into the gates of the grave is a beginning of a sorrow that shall shall never have an ending But when the sicknesse is a messenger sent from a chastising Father when it first turns into degrees of innocence and then into vertues and thence into pardon this is no misery but such a method of the Divine oeconomy and dispensation as resolves to bring us to heaven without any new impositions but meerly upon the stock and charges of nature 2. Let it be observed that these advantages which spring from sicknesse are not in all instances of vertue nor to all persons Sicknesse is the proper scene for patience and resignation for all the passive graces of a Christian for faith and hope and for some single acts of the love of God But sicknesse is not a fit station for a penitent and it can serve the ends of the grace of repentance but accidentally Sicknesse may begin a repentance if God continues life and if we cooperate with the Divine grace or sicknesse may help to alleviate the wrath of God and to facilitate the pardon if all the other parts of this duty be performed in our healthfull state so that it may serve at the entrance in or at the going out But sicknesse at no hand is a good stage to represent all the substantiall parts of this duty 1. It invites to it 2. It makes it appear necessary 3. It takes off the fancies of vanity 4. It attempers the spirit 5. It cures hypocrisie 6. It tames the fumes of pride 7. It is the school of patience 8. And by taking us from off the brisker relishes of the world it makes us with more gust to taste the things of the Spirit and all this onely when God fits the circumstances of the sicknesse so as to consist with acts of reason consideration choice and a present and reflecting minde which then God sends when he means that the sickness of the body should be the cure of the soul. But let no man so rely upon it as by designe to trust the beginning the progresse and the consummation of our piety to such an estate which for ever leaves it unperfect and though to some persons it addes degrees and ministers opportunities and exercises single acts with great advantage in passive graces yet it is never an intire or sufficient instrument for the change of our condition from the state of death to the liberty and life of the sons of God 3. It were good if we would transact the affairs of our souls with noblenesse and ingenuity and that we would by an early and forward religion prevent the necessary arts of the Divine providence It is true that God cures some by incision by fire and torments but these are ever the more obstinate and more unrelenting natures Gods providence is not so afflictive and full of trouble as that it hath placed sicknesse and infirmity amongst things simply necessary and in most persons it is but a sickly and an effeminate vertue which is imprinted upon our spirits with fears and the sorrowes of a feaver or a peevâ—sh consumption It is but a miserable remedy to be beholding to a sicknesse for our health and though it be better to suffer the losse of a finger then that the arm and the whole body should putrifie yet even then also it is a trouble and an evil to lose a finger He that mends with sicknesse pares the nails of the beast when they have already torn off part of the flesh But he that would have a sicknesse become a clear and an entire blessing a thing indeed to be reckoned among the good things of God and the evil things of the world must lead an holy life and judge himself with an early sentence and so order the affairs of his soul that in the usuall method of Gods saving us there may be nothing left to be done but that such vertues should be exercised which God intends to crown and then as when the Athenians upon a day of battell with longing and uncertain souls sate in their Common-hall expecting what would be the sentence of the day at last received a messenger who onely had breath enough left him to say We are conquerours and so died So shall the sick person who hath fought a good fight and kept the faith and onely waitâ— for his dissolution and his sentence breaths forth his spirit with the accents of a conquerour and his sicknesse and his death shall onely make the mercy and the vertue more illustrious But for the sicknesse it self if all the calumnies were true concerning it with which it is aspersed yet it is far to be preferred before the most pleasant sin and before a great secular businesse and a temporall care and some men wake as much in the foldings of the softest beds as others on the crosse and sometimes the very weight of sorrow and the wearinesse of a sicknesse presses the spirit into slumbers and the images of rest when the intemperate or the lustfull person rolls upon his uneasie thorns and sleep is departed from his eyes Certainly it is some sicknesse is a blessing Indeed blindnesse were a most accursed thing if no man were ever blind but he whose eyes are pulled out with tortures or burning basins and if sickness were always a testimony of Gods anger and a violence to a mans whole condition then it were a huge calamity but because God sends it to his servants to his children to little infants to Apostles and Saints with designes
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
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
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
mortals with ignorant and foolish persons with Tyrants and enemies of learning to converse with Homer and Plato with Socrates and Cicero with Plutarch and Fabricius So the Heathens speculated but we consider higher The dead that die in the Lord shall converse with S. Paul and all the Colledge of the Apostles and all the Saints and Martyrs with all the good men whose memory we preserve in honour with excellent Kings and holy Bishops and with the great Shepherd and Bishop of our souls Iesus Christ and with God himself For Christ dyed for us that whether we wake or sleep we might live together with him Then we shall be free from lust and envy from fear and rage from covetousnesse and sorrow from tears and cowardice and these indeed properly are the onely evils that are contrary to felicity and wisdom Then we shall see strange things and know new propositions and all things in another manner and to higher purposes Cleombrotus was so taken with this speculation that having learned from Plato's Phaedon the souls abode he had not patience to stay natures dull leisure but leapt from a wall to his portion of immortality And when Pomponius Atticus resolved to die by famine to ease the great pains of his gout in the abstinence of two dayes found his foot at ease But when he began to feel the pleasures of an approaching death and the delicacies of that ease he was to inherit below he would not withdraw his foot but went on and finished his death and so did Cleanthes and every wise man will despise the little evils of that state which indeed is the daughter of fear but the mother of rest and peace and felicity 5. If God should say to us Cast thy self into the Sea as Christ did to S. Peter or as God concerning Ionas I have provided for thee a Dolphin or a Whale or a Port a safety or a deliverance security or a reward were we not incredulous and pusillanimous persons if we should tremble to put such a felicity into act and our selves into possession The very duty of resignation and the love of our own interest are good antidores against fear In fourty or fifty years we finde evils enough and arguments enough to make us weary of this life And to a good man there are very many more reasons to be afraid of life then death this having in it lesse of evil and more of advantage And it was a rare wish of that Roman that death might come onely to wise and excellent persons and not to fools and cowards that it might not be a sanctuary for the timerous but the reward of the vertuous and indeed they onely can make advantage of it 6. Make no excuses to make thy desires of life seem reasonable neither cover thy fear and pretences but suppresse it rather with arts of severity and ingenuity Some are not willing to submit to Gods sentence and arrest of death till they have finished such a designe or made an end of the last paragraph of their book or raised such portions for their children or preached so many sermons or built their house or planted their orchard or ordered their estate with such advantages It is well for the modesty of these men that the excuse is ready but if it were not it is certain they would search one out for an idle man is never ready to die and is glad of any excuse and a busied man hath alwayes something unfinished and he is ready for every thing but death and I remember that Petronius brings in Eumolpus composing verses in a desperate storm and being called upon to shift for himself when the ship dashed upon the rock cried out to let him alone till he had finished and trimmed his verse which was lame in the hinder leg the man either had too strong a desire to end his verse or too great a desire not to end his life But we must know Gods times are not to be measured by our circumstances and what I value God regards not or if it be valuable in the accounts of men yet God will supply it with other contingencies of his providence and if Epaphroditus had died when he had his great sicknesse S. Paul speaks of God would have secured the work of the Gospel without him and he could have spared Epaphroditus as well as S. Stephen and S. Peter as well as S. Iames Say no more but when God calls lay aside thy papers and first dresse thy soul and then dresse thy hearse Blindnesse is odious and widow-hood is sad and destitution is without comfort and persecution is full of trouble and famine is intolerable and tears are the sad ease of a sadder heart but these are evils of our life not of our death For the dead that die in the Lord are so farre from wanting the commodities of this life that they do not want life it self After all this I do not say it is a sin to be afraid of death we find the boldest spirit that discourses of it with confidence and dares undertake a danger as big as death yet doth shrink at the horror of it when it comes dressed in its proper circumstances And Brutus who was as bold a Roman to undertake a noble action as any was since they first reckoned by Consuls yet when Furius came to cut his throat after his defeat by Anthony he ran from it like a girl and being admonished to die constantly he swore by his life that he would shortly endure death But what do I speak of such imperfect persons Our B. Lord was pleased to legitimate fear to us by his agony and prayers in the garden It is not a sin to be afraid but it is a great felicity to be without fear which felicity our dearest Saviour refused to have because it was agreeable to his purposes to suffer any thing that was contrary to felicity every thing but sin But when men will by all means avoid death they are like those who at any hand resolve to be rich The case may happen in which they wil blaspheme and dishonor providence or do a base action or curse God and die But in all cases they die miserable and insnared and in no case do they die the lesse for it Nature hath left us the key of the Churchyard and custome hath brought Caemeteries and charnell houses into Cities and Churches places most frequented that we might not carry our selves strangely in so certain so expected so ordinary so unavoydable an accident All reluctancy or unwillingnesse to obey the Divine decree is but a snare to our selves and a load to our spirits and is either an intire cause or a great aggravation of the calamity Who did not scorn to look upon Xerxes when he caused 300. stripes to be given to the Sea and sent a chartell of defiance against the Mountain Atho Who did not scorn the proud vanity of Cyrus when he
took so goodly a revenge upon the river Cyndus for his hard passage over it or did not deride or pity the Thracians for shooting arrowes against heaven when it thunders To be angry with God to quarrell with the Divine providence by repining against an unalterable a naturall an easie sentence is an argument of a huge folly and the parent of a great trouble as man is base and foolish to no purpose he throwes away a vice to his own misery and to no advantages of ease and pleasure Fear keeps men in bondage all their life saith Saint Paul and patience makes him his own man and lord of his own interest and person Therefore possesse your selves in patience with reason and religion and you shall die with ease If all the parts of this discourse be true if they be better then dreams and unlesse vertue be nothing but words as a grove is a heap of trees if they be not the Phantasmes of hypochondriacall persons and designes upon the interest of men and their perswasions to evil purposes then there is no reason but that we should really desire death and account it among the good things of God and the sowre and laborious felicities of man S. Paul understood it well when he desired to be dissolved he well enough knew his own advantages and pursued them accordingly But it is certain that he that is afraid of death I mean with a violent and transporting fear with a fear apt to discompose his duty or his patience that man either loves this world too much or dares not trust God for the next SECT IX General rules and exercises whereby our sicknesse may become safe and sanctified 1. TAke care that the cause of thy sicknesse be such as may not sowre it in the principle and original causes of it It a sad calamity to passe into the house of mourning through the gates of intemperance by a drunken meeting or the surfets of a loathed and luxurious Table for then a man suffers the pain of his own â—olly and he is like a fool smarting under the whip which his own vitiousnesse twisted for his back then a man payes the price of his sin and hath a pure and an unmingled sorrow in his suffering and it cannot be alleviated by any circumstances for the whole affair is a meere processe of death and sorrow Sin is in the head sicknesse is in the body and death and an eternity of pains in the tail and nothing can make this condition intolerable unlesse the miracles of the Divine mercy will be pleased to exchange the eternal anger for the temporal True it is that in all sufferings the cause of it makes it noble or ignoble honour or shame tolerable or intolerable For when patience is assaulted by a ruder violence and by a blow from heaven or earth from a gracious God or an unjust man patience looks forth to the doors which way she may escape and if innocence or a cause of religion keep the first entrance then whether she escapes at the gates of life or death there is a good to be received greater then the evils of a sicknesse but if sin thrust in that sicknesse and that hell stands at the door then patience turns into fury and seeing it impossible to go forth with safety rouls up and down with a circular and infinite revolution making its motion not from but upon its own centre it doubles the pain and increases the sorrow till by its weight it breaks the spirit and bursts into the agonies of infinite and eternal ages If we had seen S. Policarp burning to death or S. Laurence rosted upon his gridiron or S. Ignatius exposed to lions or S. Sebastion pierced with arrowes or S. Attalus carried about the theatre with scorn unto his death for the cause of Jesus for religion for God and a holy conscience we should have been in love with flames and have thought the gridiron fairer then the spondae the ribs of a maritall bed and we should have chosen to converse with those beasts rather then those men that brought those beasts forth and estimated the arrows to be the rayes of light brighter then the moon and that disgrace and mistaken pageantry were a solemnity richer and more magficent then Mordecai's procession upon the Kings horse and in the robes of majesty for so did these holy men account them they kissed their stakes and hugged their deaths and ran violently to torments and counted whippings and secular disgraces to be the enamel of their persons and the ointment of their heads and the embalming their names and securing them for immortality But to see Sejanus torne in pieces by the people or Nero crying or creeping timorously to his death when he was condemned to dye more majorum to see Iudas pale and trembling full of anguish sorrow and despair to observe the groanings and intolerable agonies of Herod and Antiochus will tell and demonstrate the causes of patience and impatience to proceed from the causes of the suffering and it is sin onely that makes the cup bitter and deadly when men by vomiting measure up the drink they took in and sick and sad do again taste their meat turned into choler by intemperance the sin and its punishment are mingled so that shame covers the face and sorrow puts a veil of darknesse upon the heart and we scarce pity a vile person that is haled to execution for murder or for treason but we say he deserves it and that every man is concerned in it that he should dye If lust brought the sicknesse or the shame if we truly suffer the reward of our evil deeds we must thank our selves that is we are fallen into an evil condition and are the sacrifice of the Divine justice But if we live holy lives and if we enter well in we are sure to passe on safe and to goe forth with advantage if we list our selves 2. To this relates that we should not counterfeit sicknesse For he that is to be carefull of his passage into a sicknesse will think himself concerned that he fall not into it through a trap door for so it hath sometimes happened that such counterfeiting to light and evil purposes hath ended in a real sufferance Appian tells of a Roman Gentleman who to escape the proscription of the Triumvirate fled and to secure his privacy counterfeited himself blinde on one eye and wore a plaister upon it till beginning to be free from the malice of the three prevailing princes he opened his hood but could not open his eye but for ever lost the use of it and with his eye paid for his libertie and hypocrisie And Celius counterfeited the gout and all its circumstances and pains its dressings and arts of remedy and complaint till at last the gout really entred and spoiled the pageantry His arts of dissimulation were so witty that they put life and motion into the very
image of the disease he made the very picture to sigh and groan It is easie to tell upon the interest of what vertue such counterfeiting is to be reproved But it will be harder to snatch the politicks of the world from following that which they call a canonized and authentick precedentâ— and Davids counterfeiting himself mad before the King of Gath to save his life and liberty wil be sufficient to entice men to serve an end upon the stock charges of so small an irregularity not in the matter of manners but in the rules and decencies of natural or civil deportment I cannot certainly tell what degrees of excuse Davids action might put on This onely besides his present necessity the Laws whose coercitive or directive power David lived under had lesse of severity and more of liberty and towards enemies had so little of restraint and so great a power that what amongst them was a direct sin if used to their brethren the sons of Iacob was lawfull and permitted to be acted against enemies To which also I adde this general caution that the actions of holy persons in Scripture are not alwayes good precedents to us Christians who are to walk by a rule and a greater strictnesse with more simplicity and heartinesse of pursuit And amongst them sanctity and holy living did in very many of its instances increase in new particulars of duty and the prophets reproved many things which the law forbad not and taught many duties which Moses prescribed not and as the time of Christs approach came so the sermons and revelations too were more evangelical and like the patterns which were â—ully to be exhibited by the Son of God Amongst which it is certain that Christian simplicity and godly sincerity is to be accounted * and counterfeiting of sicknesse is a huge enemy to this * it is an upbraiding the Divine providence * a jesting with fire * a playing with a thunderbolt * a making the decrees of God to serve the vitious or secular ends of men * it is a tempting of a judgement * a falâ—e accusation of God * a forestalling and antidating his anger * it is a cousening of men by making a God party in the fraud and therefore if the cousenage returns upon the mans own head he enters like a fox into his sicknesse and perceives himself catched in a trap or earthed in the intolerable dangers of the grave 3. Although we must be infinitely careful to prevent it that sin does not thrust us into a sicknesse yet when we are in the house of sorrow we should do well to take Physick against sin and suppose that it is the cause of the evil if not by way of natural causality and proper effect yet by a moral influence and by a just demerit We can easily see when a man hath got a surfet intemperance is as plain as the hand writing upon the wall and easier to be read but covetousness may cause a Feaver as well as drunkennesse and pride can produce a falling sickness as well as long washings and dilutions of the brain and intemperate lust and we finde it recorded in Scripture that the contemptuous and unprepared manner of reception of the Holy Sacraments caused sicknesse and death and Sacriledge and Vow-breach in Ananias and Saphira made them to descend quick into their graves Therefore when sicknesse is upon us let us cast about and if we can let us finde out the cause of Gods displeasure that it being removed we may return into the health and securities of Gods loving kindnesse Thus in the three years famine David enquired of the Lord what was the matter and God answered it is for Saul and his bloody house and then David expiated the guilt and the people were full again of food and blessing and when Israel was smitten by the Amorites Ioshuah cast about and found out the accursed thing and cast it out and the people after that fought prosperously And what God in that case said to Ioshua he will also verifie to us I will not be with you any more unlesse you destroy the accursed thing from among you But in pursuance of this we are to observe that although in case of loud and clamorous sins the discovery is easy and the remedie not diâ—ficult yet because Christianity is a nice thing and religion is as pure as the sun and the soul of man is apt to be troubled from more principles then the inâ—ricate and curiosluy composed bodie in its innumâ—rable parts it will often happen that if we go to enquire into the particular we shall never finde it out and we may suspect drunkennesse when it may be also a morose delectation in unclean thoughts or covetousnesse or oppression or a crafty invasion of my neighbours rights or my want of charity or my judging unjustly in my own cause or my censuring my neighbours or a secret pride or a base hypocrisie or the pursuance of little ends with violence and passion that may have procured the present messenger of death Therefore ask no more after any one but heartily endeavour to reform all sin no more lest a worse thing happen for a single search or accusation may be the designe of an imperfect repentance but no man does heartily return to God but he that decrees against every irregularity and then onely we can be restored to health or life when we have taken away the causes of sicknesse and a cursed death 4. He that means to have his sicknesse turn into safety and life into health and vertue must make religion the imployment of his sicknesse and prayer the imployment of his religion For there are certain compendiums or abbreviatures and shortnings of religion fitted to several states They that first gave up their names to Christ and that turned from Paganism to Christianity had an abbreviature fitted for them they were to renounce their false worshippings and give up their belief and vow their obedience unto Christ and in the very profession of this they were forgiven in Baptism For God hastens to snatch them from the power of the Devil and therefore shortens the passage and secures the estate In the case of poverty God hath reduced this dutie of man to an abbreviature of those few graces which they can exercise such as are patience contentednesse truth and diligence and the rest he accepts in good will and the charities of the soul in prayers and the actions of a cheap religion And to most men charity is also an abbreviature And as the love of God shortens the way to the purchase of all vertues so the expression of this to the poor goes a huge way in the requisites and towards the consummation of an excellent religion and Martyrdom is another abbreviature and so is every act of an excellent and heroical vertue But when we are fallen into the state of sicknesse and that our understanding is weak and troubled our bodies sick and uselesse
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
horror of it then by the last dash on the pavement and he that tells his groans and numbers his sighs and reckons one for every gripe of his belly or throb of his distempered pulse will make an artificiall sicknesse greater then the naturall and if thou beest ashamed that a childe should bear an evil better then thou then take his instrument and allay thy spirit with it reflect not upon thy evil but contrive as much as you can for duty and in all the rest inconsideration will ease your pain 4. If thou fearest thou shalt need observe and draw together all such things as are apt to charm thy spirit and ease thy fancy in the sufferance It is the counsell of Socrates It is said he a great danger and you must by discourse and arts of reasoning inchant it into slumber and some rest It may be thou wert moved much to see a person of honour to die untimely or thou didst love the religion of that death bed and it was dressed up in circumstances fitted to thy needs and hit thee on that part where thou wert most sensible or some little saying in a Sermon or passage of a book was chosen and singled out by a peculiar apprehension and made consent lodge a while in thy spirit even then when thou didst place death in thy meditation and didst view it in all its dresse of fancy whatsoever that was which at any time did please thee in thy most passionate and fantastic part let not that go but bring it home at that time especially because then thou art in thy weaknesse such little things will easier move thee then a more severe discourse and a better reason For a sick man is like a scrupulous his case is gone beyond the cure of arguments and it is a trouble that can onely be helped by chance or a lucky saying and Ludovico Corbinelli was moved at the death of Henry the second more then if he had read the saddest Elegy of all the unfortunate Princes in Christendom or all the sad sayings of Scripture or the threnes of the funerall prophets I deny not but this course is most proper to weak persons but it is a state of weaknesse for which we are now providing remedies and instruction a strong man will not need it But when our sicknesse hath rendred us weak in all senses it is not good to refuse a remedy because it supposes us to be sick But then if to the Catalogue of weak persons we adde all those who are ruled by fancy we shall find that many persons in their health and more in their sicknesse are under the dominion of fancy and apt to be helped by those little things which themselves have found fitted to their apprehension and which no other man can minister to their needs unlesse by chance or in a heap of other things But therefore every man should remember by what instruments he was at any time much moved and try them upon his spirit in the day of his calamity 5. Do not choose the kind of thy sicknesse or the manner of thy death but let it be what God please so it be no greater then thy spirit or thy patience and for that you are to rely upon the promise of God and to secure thy self by prayer and industry but in all things else let God be thy chooser and let it be thy work to submit indifferently and attend thy duty It is lawfull to beg of God that thy sicknesse may not be sharp or noysome infectious or unusuall because these are circumstances of evil which are also proper instruments of temptation and though it may well concern the prudence of thy religion to fear thy self and keep thee from violent temptations who hast so often fallen in little ones yet even in these things be sure to keep some degrees of indifferency that is if God will not be intreated to ease thee or to change thy triall then be importunate that thy spirit and its interest be secured and let him do what seemeth good in his eyes but as in the degrees of sicknesse thou art to submit to God so in the kind of it supposing equall degrees thou art to be altogether incurious whether God call thee by a consumption or an asthma by a dropsey or a palsey by a feaver in thy humours or a feaver in thy spirits because all such nicety of choice is nothing but a colour to legitimate impatience and to make an excuse to murmure privately and for circumstances when in the summe of affairs we durst not owne impatience I have known some persons vehemently wish that they might die of a consumption and some of these had a plot upon heaven and hoped by that means to secure it after a carelesse life as thinking a lingring sicknesse would certainly infer a lingring and a protracted repentance and by that means they thought they should be safest others of them dreamed it would be an easier death and have found themselves deceived and their patience hath been tired with a weary spirit and a uselesse body by often conversing with healthfull persons and vigorous neighbours by uneasinesse of the flesh and the sharpnesse of his bones by want of spirits and a dying life and in conclusion have been directly debauched by peevishnesse and a fretfull sicknesse and these men had better have left it to the wisdom and goodnesse of God for they both are infinite 6. Be patient in the desires of religion and take care that the forwardnesse of exteriour actions do not discompose thy spirit while thou fearest that by lesse serving God in thy disability thou runnest backward in the accounts of pardon and the favour of God Be content that the time which was formerly spent in prayer be now spent in vomiting and carefulnesse and attendances since God hath pleased it should be so it does not become us to think hard thoughts concerning it Do not think that God is onely to be found in a great prayer or a solemn office he is moved by a sigh by a groan by an act of love and therefore when your pain is great and pungent lay all your strength upon it to bear it patiently when the evil is something more tolerable let your mind think some pious though short meditation let it not be very busie and full of attention for that will be but a new temptation to your patience and render your religion tedious and hatefull But record your desires and present your self to God by generall acts of will and understanding and by habituall remembrances of your former vigorousnesse and by verification of the same grace rather then proper exercises if you can do more do it but if you cannot let it not become a scruple to thee we must not think man is tyed to the forms of health or that he who swoons and faints is obliged to his usual forms and hours of prayer if we cannot labour yet let us love Nothing can hinder
religion we can do the works of a holy life but upon belief of the promises we can bear our sicknesse patiently and die cheerfully The sick man may practise it in the following instances 1. Let the sick man be careful that he do not admit of any doubt concerning that which he beleeved and received from common consent in his best health and dayes of election and religion For if the Devil can but prevail so far as to unfix and unrivet the resolution and confidence or fulnesse of assent it is easie for him so to unwinde the spirit that from why to whether or no from whether or no to scarcely not from scarcely not to absolutely not at all are steps of a descending and falling spirit and whatsoever a man is made to doubt of by the weaknesse of his understanding in a sicknesse it will be hard to get an instrument strong or subtle enough to reenforce and ensure For when the strengths are gone by which faith held and it does not stand firme by the weight of its own bulk and great constitution nor yet by the cordage of a tenacious root then it is prepared for a ruine which it cannot escape in the tempests of a sicknesse and the assaults of a Devil * Discourse and argument * the line of tradition and a never * failing experience * the Spirit of God and the * truth of miracles * the word of prophecie * and the blood of Martyrs * the excellencie of the doctrine and * the necessity of men * the riches of the promises * and the wisdom of the revelations * the reasonablenesse and * sublimity the * concordance and the * usefulnesse of the articles and * their complyance with all the needs of man * and the goverment of common wealths are like the strings and branches of the roots by which faith stands firm and unmoveable in the spirit and understanding of a man But in sicknesse the understanding is shaken and the ground is removed in which the root did grapple and support its trunk and therefore there is no way now but that it be left to stand upon the old confidences and by the firmament of its own weight it must be left to stand because it alwayes stood there before and as it stood all his life time in the ground of understanding so it must now be supported with will and a fixed resolution But disputation tempts it and shakes it with trying and overthrowes it with shaking Above all things in the world let the sick man fear a proposition which his sickness hath put into him contrary to the discourses of health and a sober untroubled reason 2. Let the sick man mingle the recital of his Creed together with his devotions and in that let him account his faith not in curiosity and factions in the confessions of parties and interests for some over froward zeals are so earnest to professe their little and uncertain articles and glory so to die in a particular and divided communion that in the profession of their faith they lose or discompose their charity let it be enough that we secure our interest of heaven though we do not go about to appropriate the mansions to our sect for every good man hopes to be saved as he is a Christian and not as he is a Lutheran or of another division However those articles upon which he can build the exercise of any vertue in his sicknesse or upon the stock of which he can improve his present condition are such as consist in the greatnesse and goodnesse the veracity and mercy of God thorough Jesus Christ nothing of which can be concerned in the fond disputations which faction and interest hath too long maintained in Christendom 3. Let the sick mans faith especially be active about the promises of grace and the excellent things of the gospel those which can comfort his sorrowes and enable his patience those upon the hopes of which he did the duties of his life and for which he is not unwilling to dye such as the intercession and advocation of Christ remission of sins the resurrection the mysterious arts and mercies of mans redemption Christs triumph over death and all the powers of hell the covenant of grace or the blessed issues of repentance and above all the article of eternal life upon the strength of which 11000 virgins went cheerfully together to their martyrdome and 20000 Christians were burned by Dioclesian on a Christmas day and whole armies of Asian Christians offered themselves to the Tribunals of Arius Anthonius and whole colledges of severe persons were instituted who lived upon religion whose dinner was the Eucharist whose supper was praise and their nights were watches and their dayes were labour for the hope of which then men counted it gain to lose their estates and gloried in their sufferings and rejoyced in their persecutions and were glad at their disgraces this is the article that hath made all the Martyrs of Christ confident and glorious and if it does not more then sufficiently strengthen our spirits to the present suffering it is because we understand it not but have the appetites of beasts and fools But if the sick man fixes his thoughts and lets his habitation to dwell here he swells his hope and masters his fears and eases his sorrows and overcomes his temptations 4. Let the sick man endeavour to turn his faith of the Articles into love of them and that will be an excellent instrument not onely to refresh his sorrows but to confirm his faith in defiance of all temptations For a sick man and a disturbed understanding are not competent and fit instruments to judge concerning the reasonablenesse of a proposition But therefore let him consider and love it because it is usefull and necessary profitable and gracious and when he is once in love with it and then also renews his love to it when he feels the need of it he is an interested person and for his own sake will never let it go and passe into the shadows of doubting or the utter-darknesse of infidelity An act of love will make him have a mind to it and we easily beleeve what we love but very uneasily part with our belief which we for so great an interest have chosen and entertained with a great affection 5. Let the sick person be infinitely carefull that his faith be not tempted by any man or any thing and when it is in any degree weakned let him lay fast hold upon the conclusion upon the Article it self and by earnest prayer beg of God to guide him in certainty and safety For let him consider that the Article is better then all its contrary or contradictory and he is concerned that it be true and concerned also that he do beleeve it but he can receive no good at all if Christ did not die if there be no resurrection if his Creed hath deceived him therefore all that
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
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
that the sick man make an universal confession or a renovation and repetition of all the particular confessions and accusations of his whole life that now at the foot of his account he may represent the summe totall to God and his conscience and make provisions for their remedie and pardon according to his present possibilities 5. Now is the time to make reflex acts of repentance that as by a general repentance we supply the want of the just extension of parts so by this we may supply the proper measures of the intension of degrees In our health we can consider concerning our own acts whether they be real or hypocritical essential or imaginary sincere or upon interest integrall or imperfect commensurate or defective and although it is a good caution of securities after all our care and diligence still to suspect our selves and our own deceptions and for ever to beg of God pardon and acceptance in the union of Christs passion and intercession yet in proper speaking reflex acts of repentance being a suppletory after the imperfection of the direct are then most fit to be used when we cannot proceed in and prosecute the direct actions To repent because we cannot repent and to grieve because we cannot grieve was a device invented to serve the turn of the mother of Peter Gratian but it was used by her and so advised to be in her sicknesse and last actions of repentance for in our perfect health and understanding if we doe not understand our first act we cannot discern our second and if we be not sorry for our sins we cannot be sorry for want of sorrows it is a contradiction to say we can because want of sorrow to which we are obliged is certainly a great sin and if we can grieve for that then also for the rest if not for all then not for this but in the dayes of weaknesse the case is otherwise for then our actions are imperfect our discourse weak our internall actions not discernable our fears great our work to be abbreviated and our defects to be supplied by spirituall arts and therefore it is proper and proportionate to our state and to our necessity to beg of God pardon for the imperfections of our repentance acceptance of our weaker sorrows supplies out of the treasures of grace and mercy and thus repenting of the evil and unhandsome adherencies of our repentance in the whole integrity of the duty it will become a repentance not to be repented of 6. Now is the time beyond which the sick man must at no hand defer to make restitution of all his unjust possessions or other mens rights and satisfactions for all injuries and violencies according to his obligation and possibilities for although many circumstances might impede the acting it in our lives-time and it was permitted to be deferred in many cases because by it justice was not hindred and oftentimes piety and equity were provided for yet because this is the last scene of our life he that does not act it so far as he can or put it into certain conditions and order of effecting can never do it again and therefore then to defer it is to omit it and leaves the repentance defective in an integrall and constituent part 7. Let the sick man be diligent and watchfull that the principle of his repentance be contrition or sorrow for sins commenced upon the love of God For although sorrow for sins upon any motive may lead us to God by many intermediall passages and is the threshold of returning sinners yet it is not good nor effective upon our death-bed because repentance is not then to begin but must then be finished and completed and it is to be a supply and reparation of all the imperfections of that duty and therefore it must by that time be arrived to contrition that is it must have grown from fear to love from the passions of a servant to the affections of a son The reason of which besides the precedent is this because when our repentance is in this state it supposes the man also in a state of grace a well grown Christian for to hate sin out of the love of God is not the felicity of a new convert or an infant grace or if it be that love also is in its infancy but it supposes a good progresse and the man habitually vertuous and tending to perfection and therefore contrition or repentance so qualified is usefull to great degrees of pardon because the man is a gracious person and that vertue is of good degree and consequently fit imployment for him that shall work no more but is to appear before his Judge to receive the hire of his day And if his repentance be contrition even before this state of sicknesse let it be increased by spirituall arts and the proper exercises of charity Means of exciting contrition or repentance of sins proceeding from the love of God TO which purpose the sick man may consider and is to be reminded if he does not that there are in God all the motives and causes of amability in the world that God is so infinitely good that there are some of the greatest and most excellent spirits of heaven whose work and whose felicity and whose perfections and whose nature it is to flame and burn in the brightest and most excellent love * that to love God is the greatest glory of Heaven that in him there are such excellencies that the smallest rayes of them communicated to our weaker understandings are yet sufficient to cause ravishments and transportations and satisfactions and joyes unspeakeable and full of glory * that all the wise Christians of the world know and feel such causes to love God that they all professe themselves ready to die for the love of God * and the Apostles and millions of the Martyrs did die for him * And although it be harder to live in his love then to die for it yet all the good people that ever gave their names to Christ did for his love endure the crucifying their lusts the mortification of their appetites the contradictions and death of their most passionate naturall desires * that Kings and Queens have quitted their Diadems and many married Saints have turned their mutuall vowes into the love of Jesus and married him onely keeping a virgin chastity in a married life that they may more tenderly expresse their love to God * that all the good we have derives from Gods love to us and all the good we can hope for is the effect of his love and can descend onely upon them that love him * that by his love it is that we receive the holy Jesus * and by his love we receive the Holy Spirit * and by his love we feel peace and joy within our spirits * and by his love we receive the mysterious Sacrament * And what can be greater then that from the goodnesse and love of God we receive Jesus Christ and
everlasting habitations He that gives with his own hand shall be sure to find it and the poor shall find it but he that trusts Executors with his charity the Oeconomy and issues of his vertue by which he must enter into his hopes of heaven pardon shall find but an ill account when his Man thee behoueth oft to have this in mind That thou giveth with thine hand that shalt thou find For widows be slofull and children beâ—h unkind Executors beth covetous keep all that they find If any body ask where the deâ—ds goods became â—hey answer So God me help Halidam he died a poor man Think on this executors complain he died poor Think on this To this purpose wise and pious was the counsell of Salvian Let a dying man who hath nothing else of which he may make an effective oblation offer up to God of his substance Let him offer it with compunction and tears with grief and mourning as knowing that all our oblations have their value not by the price but by the affection and it is our faith that commends the money since God receives the money by the hands of the poor but at the same time gives and does not take the blessing because he receives nothing but his own and man gives that which is none of his own that of which onely he is a steward and shall be accountable for every shilling Let it therefore be offered humbly as a Creditor payes his debts not magnifically as a Prince gives a donative and let him remember that such doles do not pay for the sin but they ease the punishment they are not proper instruments of redemption but instances of supplication and advantages of prayer and when we have done well remember that we have not payed our debt but showen our willingnesse to give a little of the vast sum we owe and he that gives plentifully according to the measure of his estate is still behind hand according to the measure of his sins let him pray to God that this late oblation may be accepted and so it will if it sails to him in a sea of poenitentiall tears or sorrows that it is so little and that it is so late 6. Let the sick mans charity be so ordered that it may not come onely to deck the funerall and make up the pomp charity waiting like one of the solemn mourners but let it be continued that beside the alms of health and sicknesse there may be a rejoycing in God for his charity long after his funeralls so as to become more beneficial and lesse publike that the poor may pray in private and give God thanks many dayes together This is matter of prudence and yet in this we are to observe the same regards which we had in the charity and alms of our lives with this onely difference that in the funerall alms also of rich and able persons the publike customes of the Church are to be observed and decencie and solemnity and the expectations of the poor and matter of publike opinion and the reputation of religion In all other cases let thy charity consult with humility and prudence that it never ministers at all to vanity but be as full of advantage and usefulnesse as it may 7. Every man will forgive a dying person and therefore let the sick man be ready and sure if he can to send to such persons whom he hath injured and beg their pardon and do them right For in his case he cannot stay for an opportunity of convenient and advantageous reconcilement he cannot then spin out a treaty nor beat down the price of composition nor lay a snare to be quit from the obligation and coërcion of lawes but he must ask forgivenesse down-right and make him amends as he can being greedy of making use of this opportunity of doing a duty that must be done but cannot any more if not now untill times return again and tels the minuts backward so that yesterday shall be reckoned in the portions of the future 8. In the intervalls of sharper pains when the sick man amâ—sses together all the arguments of comfort and testimonies of Gods love to him and care of him he must needs find infinite matter of thanksgiving and glorification of God and it is a proper act of charity and love to God and justice too that he do honour to God on his death-bed for all the blessings of his life not onely in generall communications but those by which he hath been separate and discerned from others or supported and blessed in his own person Such as are In all my life time I never broke a bone I never fell into the hands of robbers never into publike shame or into noysome diseases I have not begd my bread nor been tempted by great and unequall fortunes God gave me a good understanding good friends or delivered me in such a danger and heard my prayers in such particular pressures of my spirit This or the like enumeration and consequent acts of thanksgiving are apt to produce love to God and confidence in the day of triall for he that * gave me blessings in proportion to the state and capacities of my life I hope also will do so in proportion to the needs of my sicknesse and my death-bed This we find practised as a most reasonable piece of piety by the wisest of the Heathens So Antipater Tarsensis gave God thanks for his prosperous voyage into Greece and Cyrus made a handsom prayer upon the tops of the mountains when by a phantasme he was warned of his approaching death Receive O God my Father these holy rites by which I put an end to many and great affairs and I give thee thanks for thy celestiall signes and prophetic notices whereby thou hast signified to me what I ought to do and what I ought not I present also very great thanks that I have perceived and acknowledged your care of me and have never exalted my self above my condition for any prosperous accident And I pray that you will grant felicity to my wife my children and friends and to me a death such as my life hath been But that of Philagrius in Gregory Nazianzen is eucharisticall but it relates more especially to the blessings and advantages which are accidentally consequent to sicknesse I thank thee O Father and maker of all thy children that thou art pleased to blesse and to sanctifie us even against our wils and by the outward man purgest the inward and leadest us through crosse wayes to a blessed ending for reasons best known unto thee However when we go from our hospitall and place of little intermediall rest in our journey to heaven it is fit that we give thanks to the major domo for our entertainment When these parts of religion are finished according to each mans necessity there is nothing remaining of personall duty to be done alone but that the sick man act over these vertues by
can have it no where but in his own conscience and from the witnesses of his conversation Let this be done by prudent insinuation by arts of remembrance and secret notices and propounding occasions and instruments of recalling such things to his minde which either by publike fame he is accused of or by the temptations of his condition it is likely he might have contracted 5. If the person be truly penitent and forward to confesse all that are set before him or offered to his sight at a half face then he may be complyed withall in all his innocent circumstances and his conscience made placid and willing and he be drawn forward by good nature and civilitie that his repentance in all the parts of it and in every step of its progresse and emanation may be as voluntary and chosen as it can For by that means if the sick person can be invited to do the work of religion it enters by the door of his will and choice and will passe on toward consummation by the instrument of delight 6. If the sick man be backward and without apprehension of the good natur'd and civil way let the Minister take care that by some way or other the work of God be secured and if he will not understand when he is secretly prompted he must be hollowed to and asked in plain interrogatives concerning the crime of his life He must be told of the evil things that are spoken of him in markets and exchanges the proper temptations and accustomed evils of his calling and condition of the actions of scandal and in all those actions which were publike or of which any notice is come abroad let care be taken that the right side of the case of conscience be turned toward him and the errour truly represented to him by which he was abused as the injustice of his contracts his oppressive bargains his rapine violence and if he hath perswaded himself to think well of a scandalous action let him be instructed and advertised of his folly and his danger 7. And this advice concerns the Minister of religion to follow without partialitie or fear or interest in much simplicity and prudence and hearty sincerity having no other consideration but that the interest of the mans soul be preserved and no caution used but that the matter be represented with just circumstances and civilities fitted to the person with prefaces of honour and regard but so that nothing of the duty be diminished by it that the introduction do not spoil the sermon and both together ruine two souls of the speaker and the hearer For it may soon be considered if the sick man be a poor or an indifferent person in secular account yet his soul is equally dear to God and was redeemed with the same highest price and therfore to be highly regarded and there is no temptation but that the spirituall man may speak freely without the allayes of interest or fear or mistaken civilities but if the sick man be a Prince or a person of eminence or wealth let it be remembred it is an ill expression of reverence to his authority or of regard to his person to let him perish for the want of an honest and just and a free homily Let the sick man in the scrutiny of his conscience and confession of his sins be carefully reminded to consider those sins which are onely condemned in the court of conscience and no where else For there are certain secrecies and retirments places of darknesse and artificiall veils with which the Devil uses to hide our sins from us and to incorporate them into our affections by a constant uninterrupted practise before they be prejudiced or discovered 1. There are many sins which have reputation and are accounted honour as fighting a duel answering a blow with a blow carrying armies into a neighbour countrey robbing with a navy violently seizing upon a kingdom 2. Others are permitted by law as Vsury in all countreys and because every excesse of it is a certain sin the permission of so suspected a matter makes it ready for us and instructs the temptation 3. Some things are not forbidden by lawes as lying in ordinary discourse jeering scoffing intemperate eating ingratitude selling too dear circumventing another in contracts importunate intreaties and temptation of persons to many instances of sin pride and ambition 4. Some others do not reckon the sin against God if the lawes have seized upon the person and many that are imprisoned for debt think themselves disobliged from payment and when they pay the penalty think they owe nothing for the scandal and disobedience 5. Some sins are thought not considerable but go under the title of sins of infirmity or inseparable accidents of mortality such as idle thoughts foolish talking looser revellings impatience anger and all the events of evil company 6. Lastly many things are thought to be no sins such as mispending of their time whole dayes or moneths of uselesse and impertinent imployment long gaming winning mens money in greater portions censuring mens actions curiosity aecquivocating in the prices and secrets of buying and selling rudenesse speaking truths enviously doing good to evil purposes and the like Under the dark shadow of these unhappy and fruitlesse Yew-trees the enemy of mankind makes very many to lie hid from themselves sewing before their nakednesse the fig-leaves of popular and idol reputation and impunity publike permission a temporall penalty infirmity prejudice and direct errour in judgement and ignorance Now in all these cases the Ministers are to be inquisitive and observant lest the fallacy prevail upon the penitent to evil purposes of death or diminution of his good and that those things which in his life passed without observation may now be brought forth and passe under sawes and barrows that is the severity and censure of sorrow and condemnation 9. To which I adde for the likenesse of the thing that the matter of omission be considered for in them lies the bigger half of our failings and yet in many instances they are undiscerned because they very often sit down by the conscience but never upon it and they are usually looked upon as poor men do upon their not having coach and horses or as that knowledge is missed by boyes and hindes which they never had it will be hard to make them understand their ignorance it requires knowledge to perceive it and therefore he that can perceive it hath it not But by this pressing the conscience with omissions I do not mean recessions or distances from states of eminency or perfection for although they may be used by the Ministers as an instrument of humility and a chastiser of too big a confidence yet that which is to be confessed and repented of is omission of duty in direct instances and matters of commandement or collaterall and personall obligations and is especially to be considered by Kings and Prelates by Governours and rich persons by Guides of souls and Presidents of
in temporall instances for he ever gave me sufficient for my life and although he promised such supplies and grounded the confidences of them upon our first seeking the kingdom of heaven and its righteousnesse yet he hath verified it to me who have not sought it as I ought But therefore I hope he accepted my endeavour or will give his great gifts and our great expectation even to the weakest endeavour to the least so it be a hearty piety * And sometimes I have had some chearful visitations of Gods Spirit and my cup hath been crowned with comfort and the wine that made my heart glad danced in the chalice and I was glad that God would have me so and therefore I hope this cloud may passe for that which was then a real cause of comfort is so still if I could disâ—ern it and I shall discern it when the veil is taken from my eyes * and blessed be God I can still remember that there are temptations to despair and they could not be temptations if they were not apt to perswade and had seeming probability on their side and they that despair think they do it with greatest reason for if they were not confident of the reason but that it were such an argument as might be opposed or suspected then they could not despair despair assents as firmly and strongly as faith it self but because it is a temptation and despair is a horrid sin therefore it is certain those persons are unreasonably abused and they have no reason to despair for all their confidence and therefore although I have strong reasons to condemn my self yet I have more reason to condemn my despair which therefore is unreasonable because it is a sin and a dishonour to God and a ruine to my condition and verifies it self if I do not look to it for as the hypochondriac person that thought himself dead made his dream true when he starved himself because dead people eat not so do despairing sinners lose Gods mercies by refusing to use and to believe them * And I hope it is a disease of judgement not an intolerable condition that I am falling to because I have been told so concerning others who therefore have been afflicted because they see not their pardon sealed after the manner of this world and the affairs of the Spirit are transacted by immaterial notices by propositions and spiritual discourses by promises which are to be verified hereafter and here we must live in a cloud in darknesse under a veil in fear and uncertainties and our very living by faith and hope is a life of mystery and secresie the onely part of the manner of that life in which we shall live in the state of separation and when a distemper of body or an infirmity of minde happens in the instances of such secret and reserved affairs we may easily mistake the manner of our notices for the uncertainty of the thing and therefore it is but reason I should stay till the state and manner of my abode be changed before I despair there it can be no sin nor error here it may be both and if it be that it is also this and then a man may perish for being miserable and be undone for being a fool In conclusion my hope is in God and I will trust him with the event which I am sure will be just and I hope full of mercy * However now I will use all the spiritual arts of reason and religion to make me more and more to love God that if I miscarry Charity also shall fail and something that loves God shall perish and be damned which if it be impossible then I may do well These considerations may be useful to men of little hearts and of great piety or if they be persons who have lived without infamy or begun their repentance so late that it is very imperfect and yet so early that it was before the arrest of death But if the man be a vitious person and hath persevered in a vitious life till his death-bed these considerations are not proper Let him inquire in the words of the first Disciples after Pentecost Men and brethren what shall we do to be saved and if they can but entertain so much hope as to enable them to do so much of their dutie as they can for the present it is all that can be provided for them an inquirie in their case can have no other purposes of religion or prudence and the Minister must be infinitely careful that he do no not go about to comfort vitious persons with the comforts belonging to Gods elect lest he prostitute holy things and make them common and his sermons deceitful and vices be incouraged in others and the man himself finde that he was deceived when he descends into his house of sorrow But because very few men are tempted with too great fears of failing but very many are tempted by confidence and presumption the Ministers of religion had need be instructed with spiritual armour to resist this fiery dart of the Devil when it operates to evil purposes SECT VI. Considerations against Presumption I Have already enumerated many particulars to provoke a drowzy conscience to a scrutinie and to a suspicion of himself that by seeing cause to suspect his condition he might more freely accuse himself and attend to the necessities and duties of repentance but if either before or in his repentance he grow too big in in his spirit so as either he does some little violence to the modesties of humilitie or abate his care and zeal of his repentance the spiritual man must allay his frowardnesse by representing to him 1. That the growths in grace are long difficult uncertain hindred of many parts and great variety 2. That an infant grace is soon dash'd and discountenanced often running into an inconvenience and the evils of an imprudent conduct being zealous and forward and therefore confident but alwayes with the least reason and the greatest danger like children and young fellows whose confidence hath no other reason but that they understand not their danger and their follies 3. That he that puts on his armour ought not to boast as he that puts it off and the Apostle chides the Galatians for ending in the flesh after they had begun in the spirit 4. that a man cannot think too meanly of himself but very easily he may think too high 5 That a wise man will alwayes in a matter of great concernment think the worst and a good man will condemn himself with hearty sentence 6. That humility and modesty of judgement and of hope are very good instruments to procure a mercie and a fair reception at the day of our death but presumption or bold opinions serve no end of God or man and is alwayes imprudent ever fatal and of all things in the world is its own greatest enemy for the more any man presumes the greater reason he hath to fear 7. That a mans
the world a longing desire after heaven patience in our sorrows comfort in our sicknesses joy in God a holy life and a blessed death that our souls may rest in hope and my body may rise in glory and both may be beatified in the communion of Saints in the kingdom of God and the glories of the Lord Jesus Amen The blessing Now the God of peace that brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus that great shepherd of the sheep thorough the blood of the everlasting covenant make you perfect in every good work to do his will working in you that which is pleasing in his sight to whom be glory for ever and ever Amen The doxology To the blessed and onely Potentate the King of kings and the Lord of Lords who only hath immortality dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto whom no man hath seen nor can see be honour and power everlasting Amen After the sick man is departed the Minister if he be present or the Major dome or any other fit person may use the following prayers in behalf of themselves I. ALmighty God with whom do live the spirits of them that depart hence in the Lord we adore thy Majesty and submit to thy providence and revere thy justice and magnifie thy mercies thy infinite mercies that it hath pleased thee to deliver this our brother out of the miseries of this sinful world Thy counsels are secret and thy wisdom is infinite with the same hand thou hast crowned him and smitten us thou hast taken him into regions of felicity and placed him among Saints and Angels and left us to mourn for our sins and thy displeasure which thou hast signified to us by removing him from us to a better a far better place Lord turn thy anger into mercie thy chastisements into vertues thy rod into comforts and do thou give to all his neerest relatives comforts from heaven and a restitution of blessings equall to those which thou hast taken from them And we humbly beseech thee of thy gracious goodnesse shortly to satisfie the longing desires of those Holy souls who pray and wait and long for thy second coming Accomplish thou the number of thine elect and fill up the Mansions in heaven which are prepared for all them that love the coming of the Lord Jesus that we with this our Brother and all other departed this life in the obedience and faith of the Lord Jesus may have our perfect consummation and blisse in thy eternall glory which never shall have ending Grant this for Jesus Christ his sake our Lord and onely Saviour Amen II. O Mercifull God Father of our Lord Jesus who is the first fruits of the resurrection and by entring into glory hath opened the kingdom of heaven to all the beleevers we humbly beseech thee to raise us from the death of sin to the life of righteousnesse that being partakers of the death of Christ and followers of his Holy life we may be partakers of his Spirit and of his promises that when we shall depart this life we may rest in his arms and lie in his bosom as our hope is this our brother doth O suffer us not for any temptation of the world or any snares of the Devil or any pains of death to fall from thee Lord let thy H. Spirit enable us with his grace to fight a good fight with perseverance to finish our course with holiness and to keep the faith with constancie unto the end that at the day of judgement we may stand at the right hand of the throne of God and hear the blessed sentence of Come ye blessed children of my Father receive the kingdom prepared for you from the beginning of the world O blessed Jesus thou art our Judge and thou art our Advocate even because thou art good and gracious never suffer us to fall into the intolerable pains of hell never to lye down in sin and never to have our portion in the everlasting burning Mercy sweet Jesu Mercy Amen A prayer to be said in the case of a sudden surprise by death as by a mortal wound or evil accidents in childebirth when the forms and solemnities of preparation cannot be used O Most gracious Father Lord of heaven and earth Judge of the living and the dead behold thy servants running to thee for pity and mercy in behalf of our selves and this thy servant whom thou hast smitten with thy hasty rod and a swift Angel if it be thy will preserve his life that there may be place for his repentance and restitution O spare him a little that he may recover his strength before he go hence and be no more seen but if thou hast otherwise decreed let the miracles of thy compassion and thy wonderfull mercy supply to him the want of the usual measures of time and the periods of repentance and the trimming of his lamp and let the greatnesse of the calamity be accepted by thee as an instrument to procure pardon for those defects and degrees of unreadiness which may have caused this accident upon thy servant Lord stirre up in him a great and effectual contrition that the greatnesse of the sorrow and hatred against sin and the zeal of his love to thee may in a short time do the work of many dayes and thou who regardest the heart and the measures of the minde more then the delay and the measures of time let it be thy pleasure to rescue the soul of thy servant from all the evils he hath deserved and all the evils that he fears that in the glorifications of eternity and the songs which to eternal ages thy Saints and holy Angels shall sing to the honour of thy mighty Name and invaluable mercies it may be reckoned among thy glories that thou hast redeemed this soul from the dangers of an eternall death and made him partaker of the gift of God eternall life through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen If there be time the prayers in the foregoing offices may be added according as they can be fitted to the present circumstances SECT VIII A peroration concerning the contingencies and treatings of our departed friends after death in order to their buriall c. WHen we have received the last breath of our friend and closed his eyes and composed his body for the grave then seasonable is the counsell of the son of Syrach Weep bitterly and make great moan and use lamentation as he is worthy and that a day or two lest thou be evil spoken of and then comfort thy self for thy heavinesse But take no grief to heart for there is no turning again thou shalâ— not do him good but hurt tâ—y self Solemn and appointed mournings are good expressions of our dearnesse to the departed soul and of his worth and our value of him and it hath its praise in nature and in manners and publike customs but the praise of it is not in the Gospel that is it hath
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