Selected quad for the lemma: death_n
Text snippets containing the quad
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A34359
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A consolatory letter upon the death of a daughter written after a philosophical manner by a gentleman of the university to his friend in the country.
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Gentleman of the university.
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1698
(1698)
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Wing C5930; ESTC R27913
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16,502
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26
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the Foetus in the Womb 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 and Death to be the Birth to Life truly so called to a Life of Peace and Quietness in the happy Receptacles and Mansions of Spirits where the bright Day is never intercepted by Clouds and Darkness but an eternal Serenity overspreads the whole Face of Heaven Nay the barbarous Thracians and Scythians were not altogether estranged from this piece of Ancient Wisdom Valerius Maximus reporting of them that L. 1. c. â— 12. they used Feastings and publick Rejoicings at the Funerals of their Friends because they believed that when they died their Souls were released from the troublesome Circumstances of a calamitous Life and passed into more happy and blessed Regions You see then my Friend what little Cause you have to bewail the Death and Abreption of your dear Placidia from you who is not lost but taken into a higher Place and Degree in the City of the Great King The Bird of Paradise is uncag'd that she may take her flight to her Native Land She is gone to all her Friends Relations and Acquaintance that went hence in the Fear of God and the Exercise of a good Conscience who no doubt but met her with Joy and Triumph and after the unspeakable way that separate Souls discourse congratulated her safe Arrival to the Society of blessed Spirits which is thus set forth by the Oracle when consulted touching the Soul of Plotinus and its passage to the Happy State Ad Caetum jam venis almum Heroum blandis spirantem leniter auris Hâ—ic ubi amicitia est ubi molli fronte Cupido Laetitiâ replens liquidâ pariterque repletus Semper ab Ambrosiis foecundo è Numine rivis Vnde serena quies castorum dulcis amorum Illecebra ac placidi suavissima flamina Venti Which I find thus Englished And now you 're come to th' Happy Quire Of Heroes where their blessed Souls retire Where softest Winds do as soft Joys inspire Here dwells chast Friendship with so pure a Flame That Love knows no Satiety or Shame But gives and takes new Joys and yet is still the same Th' Ambrosian Fountains with fresh Pleasures spring And gentle Zephyrus does new Odours bring These Gifts for inoffensive Ease are lent And both conspire to make Love innocent If it were a mighty Pleasure to Socrates to think that when he left the Body he should go to Aeacus and Minos to Orpheus and Musaeus and all those Holy Souls that fill and make up the Chorus of Immortal Love What enravishing Joy What pleasing Emotions of Spirit should it beget in you to be assured that Placidia is gone to Abraham Isaac and Jacob to the Holy Prophets and Apostles and to all that have done good in their Generations but above all to Jesus who loved and redeemed her with his own Blood I know it is a common Argument and frequently made use of upon such Occasions as this to tell you that she is removed from all those Evils a Terrestrial Body is obnoxious to yet hath it great Truth and Weight in the Consideration of it For though the Days of Man upon Earth be few and his Life contracted into a narrower space than in the first Ages of the World when Nature was in her youthful Gaiety yet they are full of Misery and Calamity and every Act of Life is divided into many Scenes of Sorrow We begin our Days with weeping and the first Tribute we pay to the Light of the Sun is to present him with a Tear and watry Eyes as a sure Presage of our future Misery And if we out-live the Chances of Childhood and arrive to the Exercise of our discriminative Faculties and make our choice of that variety of Instances the World presents unto us we go from a less to a greater degree of Affliction For whereas before we could only grieve and sigh under a present Pain now our Grief is redoubled by reflecting on it and we are the more miserable by knowing that we are so Those very Diseases that carry a little Infant with quietness to its Grave force us into effeminate Ejulations and Impatience and all because our Apprehensions and Reflexive Acts are greater than a Childs Should we view Man in his declining State when his Sun is setting and leaving the Horizon of Time and we shall find old Age like a teeming Womb full of Miseries and Sorrows a rough and uneven Path wherein Death becomes a welcome Respite and breathing Place to recover our Spirits wearied with the Troubles of this Life and inables us to resume our progress to Immortality In a word corroding Cares disappointments of our Hopes and Expectations Crosses and doleful Circumstances Sicknesses and Diseases make up the summ of Humane Life Besides this when a good Person reflects upon the Depravity and Wickedness of the World the stench whereof is ready to choak him he is sensibly pained and cannot but testifie his inward Grief by his Tears But now Death removes him from all the Objects of his Dislike and Aversation and the Grave puts an end to all Humane Miseries There the wicked cease from troubling and there the weary be at rest There the Prisoners rest together they Job 3. 17 18. hear not the Voice of the Oppressor And as for Moral Evils there is an end to them likewise For holy Souls are out of the reach of the sly Tempter nor can the crooked Serpent wind himself again into the Celestial Paradise But after all it is not my Meaning nor Design to persuade you to an 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 or putting off natural Affection nor by a Stoical Stubbornness of Mind to become insensible of your Affliction For the better any Man is the more passive is his Constitution either for Joy or Grief and the more subject to these harmless Passions 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 the best and most Heroical Persons are the readiest upon a sad Accident to overflow with Tears Thus the Son of God show'd the tenderness of his Spirit at the Grave of Lazarus and could not withhold his Tears Jesus wept Nor would I have you to forget Placidia and cast her Image quite out of you Mind as the manner of too many is who when they have interr'd the Bodies of their Friends and the Solemnity is over think themselves no more concerned in them than if they had never been For both Nature and Religion allow us to remember them with all that Esteem and Honour that is due to superior Beings whom the Lord of the Universe has grac'd with signal Marks of his Favour in the Regions of Paradise Whenever therefore you admit her into your Thoughts let it not be as she was in her earthly Tabernacle with all those Disadvantages and Alterations that Death made in it when he was pulling it down but rather represent her to your self in those bright Robes in which she converses with blessed Spirits where the external Shape faithfully answers the inward Pulchritude
betrayed chusing rather a becoming Neatness than affected Curiosity in her Dress and spending that Time in her Closet and the secret Retirements between God and her own Soul which others would more vainly consume inter pectinem speculum Nor ought you to wonder to see your Placidia in such a Philosophical Garb while she endeavoured after that which you and I labour for and which is not only the Top and Summity of Platonism but of Christian Philosophy it self For what else is this dying to the Animal and Corporeal Life in Platonism but only the Christian Mortisication of all our Earthly Lusts and Passions Or what other is the raising of the Soul to behold and unite with that First and Original Pulchritude but in the Christian Dialect a Participation of the Divine Nature And can you now over-lament that Death hath perfected that 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 or 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 Separation or Sejunction of the Soul from the Body which Placidia herself had so happily begun Especially when you consider that by this practical Meditation she daily made Death familiar to her and by dressing up afore-hand her Soul for Immortality verified what in the constant course of her Sickness she would frequently say that she was not afraid to die nor disturbed at the Name or Thoughts of that King of Terrors having already become dead to all the Blandishments and Inescations of Sense and by an early Piety shown her self only alive to God and Vertue For doubtless nothing more fatally threatens the utter Extinction of the Diviner Powers of the Soul and takes away all Care of a Future State than the luxuriant growth of the Animal Life And therefore those that addict themselves wholly to Sensuality they do as Cicero De Consalat speaks stertere potius quà m ullo pacto vivere snort rather than any way live or more fully according to the Apostle they are dead while they live that State only being worthy to be 1 Tim. 5 6. called Life when the Soul is united to and made one with the Divine Nature Moreover if you look upon Death in a Physical Sence you shall find it only the Consopition or laying asleep of some Faculties that others may awake and act in their stead And when the Terrestrial Congruity is either naturally unwound or violently broken asunder another and more large Capacity and Degree of Life immediately awakes For questionless the Soul of Man was made by the eternal Wisdom with a Capacity of being united with some other Matter beside Flesh and Blood as not only the Heavenly Body promised us at the Resurrection but the Place of our Habitation and Abode do evidently declare And that between Death and the Resurrection she should be utterly stript and unbared of all Matter is hard to conceive especially when both the Nature of the Thing it self and the Stories of Apparitions in all Ages so fairly invite us to think that an Aereal or Aethereal Body will naturally fall to her share so soon as she hath quitted the Terrestrial So that there is no fear of any ones being lost or that all Life is extinguished upon the Death of the Body but a higher Power which has indeed been laid asleep in this Earthly Body takes its turn and the Soul is so much the more happy by how much larger that Sphere of Life is into which she is awakened by her Disunion from the Terrestrial Body To go out of this Body is for the Soul to ascend to go forward to dispread herself and to have larger Faculties but to descend is to go backward and to pinion herself and fall into the most inert and sluggish Life of all Hence the learned Origen doubted not to say 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 that our Terrestrial Nativity is really the beginning of Death Because when we come into these Bodies our nobler Faculties are then contracted and laid asleep and we sink down from a better and freer to a worse and narrower State of Life This was it which made that Royal Prophet bemoan himself Wo is me that I sojourn in Meseâ—â— Psal 120. 5. which the Septuagint thus renders 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 that my Pilgrimage is prolonged intimating that in this Earthly Body he was in a foreign Country and at a vast distance from his Native home And it was the weight and pressure of this cadaverous Body that made St. Paul cry out O wretched Man that I am who shall deliver Rom. 7. 24. me 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 from this Body of Death And lest we should think that this was spoken out of a sudden Fit of Discontent upon the Labours and Troubles he had and did daily undergo he positively affirms that we that are in this Tabernacle do groan being burdened namely 2 Cor. 5. 4. with the weight of our Earthly Bodies Here it is that the Soul is denied the sight of that Eternal Pulchritude which she once saw with open Face but now converses with it as it were in a Dream and the Obscurity of a Nocturnal Vision beholding but a glimpse of it through the Cranies of Mortality partly because the Place of her Abode and the Condition of her Life mix'd with the various Inquinations of Earth distract her Attention from that lovely Spectacle For that uniform Beauty descending from above must needs appear less and change its Nature when fallen among the foul Embraces and Twinings of Terrestrial Joys Like a River emptying its Channel into the brackish Sea retains a while its sweet Waters but when the rude Winds and Waves assault their weaker Force they are soon swallowed up and lose both their Name and Nature in the Bosom of their more potent Adversary Thus it is with us in our Earthly Bodies but when we are set at liberty and delivered from these Jails we enter upon a State of a more enlarged Life and new Scenes of Things present themselves to our View and our Souls begin to find their Wings to grow again whereby they soar aloft in the undisturbed Mansions of Blessedness where their Faces are never turned from that Intellectual Sun that shines with uninterrupted Beams upon them Think with your self now Sir that if departed Souls know any thing that is done here below and it were permitted to Placidia to give you a Visit whether she would not meekly and with a Filial Affection desire you to put a stop to your Sorrow and let you know that the blessed Genii have other Apprehensions of Things than we poor Mortals have and call them by other Names What we call Death they term Life and when we say we celebrate the Funerals of our Friends the Inhabitants of the upper World call it their Natalitia or birth-Birth-days and therefore that you would not take her departure from you so heavily since it was the joyfullest Day that ever she saw before Thus the Indian Brachmans philosophized affirming the Life of Man to be like the State of