higher form of life are scarce among Solomons living who lay things to heart that is Altâ mente reponunt they deeply and devoutly seriously and solemnly rationally and religiously consider resolve and ponder in intimis animi recessibus the inward recesses of their soules or consciences the whole purport of such occasions what they mean in all their aspects They make as it were a speculative Anatomy and intellectual dissection of the dead yea and of death it self in all its forms and fashions in its causes and effects its antecedents concomitants and consequences They look upon the face of it which is neer at hand and the long train or extent of it which reacheth to Eternity This is the Lecture that the living read upon the dead and many lessons they learn from them because they are men that have an heart which is wise and understanding duely weighing in the scale of true reason and divine wisdom every occurrence and event of providence which hath any remark or signal character upon it as the death of any man or woman young or old infant or decrepit hath to such as have an heart able to apply it notwithstanding this frequency of such spectacles which with many men and women takes away the sense and regard of them though such persons need every day a memento mori some spectacle or remembrancer as King Philip had daily to put them in mind that they are but men Philippe memento te esse mortalem How necessary is it for them to remember their latter end to consider in what a vain shadow they live or rather die in their life because they are without an heart as silly birds not aware of the snares of sin the pits of death and hell over which they carelesly and confidently passe every moment Frequencie of Funerals doth not lessen the right use and influence of them to such living as know how to lay them to heart They doe not as women and children or country clowns only start amain when some sudden and unexpected death befals any as if it were the discharging of a great cannon near them which they never dreamed of but as valiant Commanders who finding that an hot battery and frequent shot slayes men round about them wisely consider that they may be the next mark whom death will hit which thought is so far from discouraging or appalling a man of a good heart that is pious and generous that it onely summons him to muster up all the fortitude and strength of his soul that whether he live or die he may do neither like a fool or a coward or a beast but like a valiant man and a good Christian who being engaged in a good Canse having a good God and a good conscience doubts not to make a good end when God shall call him out of this life to a better The Living that is the wise and considerable sort of mankind are the only persons who have hearts to consider all things as they ought to reflect upon their own hearts to commune with them to try and examine their state and tempers their defects and disorders their extravagancies and necessities The Living are they that duely consider the true interests and eternal concernments of their hearts and spirits their soules and consciences far beyond those of their bodies senses or fortunes The Living doe upon such occasions of mortality in se descendere make sober retreats home looking to themselves and searching into the penetralia animae their hearts above all Which they know to be as the rudder or steerage of the soule and of the whole man of all thoughts words and actions the card or compass by which our momentary and eternal course is shaped They know the infinite importance of a well or ill constituted and managed heart They find that verified which our Saviour tells us That out of the heart of man proceed evil thoughts murders Matth. 15.18 adulteries fornications thefts false witness blasphemies c. That God chiefly requires and regards this as the Gemme of the man most precious in it self most proper and proportionate for God That all beauty strength wit estate honour offered to God without the Heart is but the sacrifice nay the sacriledge and affront of fools and hypocrites Therefore it is frequently inculcated from Heaven and in the Scripture Prov. 23.26 to all sorts of men under all dispensations of Religion to Jew and Gentile Give me thy heart an honest and good heart Psal 51. a pure and peaceable heart an humble and contrite heart God will not despise yea in this he delights all things else are loss and dung in comparison Nothing else in man is worthy of God and yet nothing less worthy of him that is Gen. 6.5 naturally less fit and prepared for him What God complained long ago is verified in every mans experience That every imagination of the thoughts of mans heart was evil and that continually The 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 distempers diseases yea and deaths of the heart of man are as many as dangerous and as desperate as those of the body yea infinitely more For the bodies diseases doe but kill us as to mans society and to a moments life on earth but the diseases of the heart kill us as to the life of God and an eternal happiness of conservation in Heaven The living God who delights not in the death of a sinner nor yet in a dead heart which is the first death of a sinner as a gracious Father and compassionate Physitian hath discovered to us the many plagues which are in our hearts the sicknesses to which they are subject by the surfets they take of the world and their senses Sometimes the Heart swels with the tumor of intolerable pride sometimes it burns withcholerick inflammations sometimes it is scorched with passionate calentures of inordinate lusts sometimes it is almost drowned like hydropick and overgrown bodies with its sensual luxuries and fulness even to abominable fedities sometimes it hath such a gout as it is in great pain at any the least motion for God or any good motion from him sometime it pines away in a Consumption amidst all its sensible pleasures plenty and honours not finding any satisfactory solid and durable good in them all Sometimes the heart is shaken with paralytick tremblings and terrors like Earthquakes which seem to arise from the dark and pestilent vapors in it self sometimes it hath not only fits of the stone refractory tempers but a petrified habitude of a hard and stony heart which nothing doth soften neither mercy nor judgment love nor wrath bounty nor patience of God Sometimes the heart falls into Lethargick and Apoplectick stupors like Nabals and Achitophels it growes remorseless benummed stupid senselesse dull and dead within men past fear or feeling of any thing either sharp and pungent in the Law or spiritful and reviving in the Gospel Solomon who was a great King of hearts and had a
not be forced no man taking his life from him yet he yielded to doe the lowest homage to death as a man not without great horror of that cup yea humbling himself even to the death of the crosse and to the prison of the grave for a short time that by dying he might overcome death in its own fort 1 Cor. 15. By grapling with this Dragon he pulled out his sting and made him cast forth his poyson so far as to be innoxious now and not very terrible to those that fly to this Jesus for protection and life John 11.25 who is the resurrection and the life to believers and holy livers who maketh light to grow up to the righteous out of their darkness and life out of his death To others indeed that are either Infidel Heathens or unchristian Christians which have but forms and no power of godliness on whose hearts the death of Christ hath not yet wrought as a corrasive against sin and a cordial against death to these Death still appears as a direful Comet or blazing star in his full magnitude truculent threatning formidable inevitable infinitely to be dreaded because he threatens them with a total and entire death not onely to their estates and honours pleasures power friends and bodies but as to their soules as to that after and eternal life If death prevailed so far upon the Son of God how far will its vastations reach upon those that are the children of the flesh only that is of the Devil and properly 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 sons of death If the living Lion thus died what must become of those that are but as dead dogs A gracious Christian as Jonathan did Sauls javelin avoids the stroak of death as to the main it may graze on his body but it toucheth not his soul Col. 3.3 when his life is hidden with Christ in God A natural man though while he lived he blessed himself yet dies wholly Death like the flood prevaileth over his highest tops and mountains it gnaweth upon them as sheep Nothing is left him for ever of which it may be said In this he lives as in the houses of the Egyptians there was none in which there was not one dead yea the first born For his children they shal follow the generation of their fathers and never see light if they follow their evil steps His lands which he called after his name in a few years they are alienated his lamp quite extinct and his memorial perisheth For his fair and costly Monument Et habent sua fata Sepulchra These in revolutions of time Psal 49.19 either by the rough hand of war overturning all things or by the gentle and leisurely thawings of peace melt and moulder away till they bury themselves in their own dust which were designed as repositories and conservatories of their Masters As for their souls they never lived the life of God nor can they hope to live in light with him so that eternal death feedeth for ever upon the whole man devouring every-limb of body and faculty of soul as the Lions did the accusers of Daniel before ever they come to the ground O how sad how mad is that security among Christians which sleeps on the top of a mast in so dangerous a sea that dares to live in known and presumptuous sins amidst these infinite and hourly adventures of death playing over the head of that mine where he knows is daily sapping under him and within him nor doth a man know in what moment it may be sprung to his utter dissipation We know not at what hour of the day Mat. 24.42 43. or watch of the night this notable Thief will come to break up our house of clay and spoil us of all our goods together with our lives and he is but the Vancourrier of our Judge whose counsel is holy and wholsome advising all his disciples to watch and pray lest we be surprised at unawares by the arrests of Death and Judgment Nothing concerns a wise man or evidenceth a good man more then to be never so imployed as he shall not dare to die that like an honest and able debtor he may confidently walk at all hours of the day in every street of the City where he dwells and where he owes a debt which he is able and willing to pay whereas the lewdnesse and riot of impenitent sinners makes them like bankrupt debtors shift and shark hide and skulk up and down in by-wayes and at twilight for fear of those Creditors whom they are neither able nor willing to satisfie and yet they cannot long escape the Bayliffs and Jaylors hand nor by any artifices avoid that prison out of which is no redemption till a man hath paid the uttermost farthing that is never unlesse while we are in the way we agree with our merciful Creditor Mat. 5.29 who is ready upon our humble request to forgive us all that we owe him like that gracious and generous Master in the Gospel Mat. 18.27 6. Lay to heart what little cause any mothers child of us hath to presume to sin and to procrastinate our repentance since we have no cause to presume of life till to morrow to neglect agreeing with our adversary while we are yet in the way that is under the meanes offer and capacity of reconciliation and happy accord to adventure so precious and momentary an opportunity upon which depends our everlasting fate in weal or woe Ex hoc momento pendet aeternitas never stirring up any Sympathies in our souls toward our Saviours death nor any compassions to our selves as to our own mortality never to return any holy Ecchoes or humble Amens either to the precepts or promises terrors or comforts of Gods word but as if stark deaf and quite dead so we are utterly dumb and unmoved as to all that is thundred and lightned from heaven 2 Cor. 5.20 2 Cor. 6.1 to all that Gods Embassadors those Boanerges and Barnabasses sonnes of thunder or of consolation daily cry unto us with infinite counsels and reproofs Sermons and prayers inviting and beseeching men to pity themselves to flee from the wrath that is to come to disarm Death and defeat the Devil of his expected prey There is no rock that Ministers should more avoid thenthis of giving people any encouragement to delay their repentance which no man may upon good grounds do e that hath not any assurance of his life nor any insurance against death Nor doth any thing usually more contribute to this vulgar presumption and dilatories then the courting and complementing with the dead and living too in Funeral Sermons making them rather Panegyricks and Harangues of commendation to the dead then serious summons and alarms to the living when neither the life nor the death of the interred gave any pregnant evidences of such grace and comfort as deserves either the commendation or imitation of the living No Funeral Sermons as I
then parasitick preachers or mealy-mouthed Ministers He that speaketh or writeth which is a silent preaching a speech without noise or words without a voice in Christs name and authority to sinful and secure mortals had need be in very good earnest fervent in spirit unflattering in speech charitably serious yea kindly severe with all meekness of wisedom For Preachers of the Gospel are ordained of God to be Antiparasites purposely to crosse and encounter that pleasing but pernitious humor in mankind which loves to deceive and flatter even to the death both themselves and others the itching sores which others love to scratch we must wound that we may heal them and if ever we the so despised Ministers of Christ dare to own our selves in our authority and commission which is divine or none it should be at Funerals when standinng as it were upon the Tombs and urns of the dead we have more then ordinarily the higher ground above the the living all whose pleasures profits pride power and pomp should be then like the Moon under our feet when as Gods Heraulds or lesser Angels we summon all that hear or read us to Death and Judgement the due and timely preparing for which is the great lesson Ministers have to preach and people to practise For which purpose I have used such pathetick freedom of expressing my self as may by Gods blessing be useful and so acceptable to many but justly offensive to none that either are truly wise or would be good and happy in Gods way and method which is grace and holiness The ensuing discourse is now as your Honour easily perceives much inlarged beyond the Horary limits of a Sermon exceeding in length wosi of the ancient Orations I wish it might equal them in usefulness weight and worth For in recollecting and ruminating my meditations they easily multiplied and in transcribing my notes as I had prepared them I added with Baruch Jer. 36.32 many like words to what I had preached and had penned but omitted being necessarily and so excusably contracted in the Pulpit but now more dilated in the Press according to my own design and the desire of others who have a great empire over me What then was in my preaching more massive and rough hewen than I intended I have now malleated and polished not only to an ampler but I hope to a more august proportion That it may be somewhat answerable to those great respects of love and honour which I have not only to this noble Gentleman but to his honorable Relations and particularly to his most virtuous Mother The few years of whose mortal life as he oft foretold in my hearing he should not exceed so he did not attain to equal them God verifying his presages by his immature death being so far distant from his excellent Mother that she might be said to die in her April but he her only child in the February of his age as many years sooner as a month hath weeks Due regard to both their memories also to Your Ladiships honour who had neerest relation to him and so greatest affection for him These next my highest and more religious designs may I hope not only excuse the gravity and prolixity of this Epistle to so young a Lady but also patronise my thus publishing my self Madame Your HONOURS most humble Servant J. GAUDEN March 15. 1657. The ERRATA thus to be mended PAge 3. line 23. read stone for sin p. 4. l. 14. r. millenary of wives and concubines p. 15. l. 20. r. revolve for resolve p. 23. l. 27. r. wasting for washing p. 52. l. 36. r. convictions for corrections p. 58. l. 25. r. immoderate for moderate p 105. l. 28. r. O my for to my l 34. hlot out the experience p. 120. l. 6. r. parcreatis l. 16. r. Inter. l. 17. r. scrophulosae Books published by Dr. Gauden A Defence of the Ministry of England Of Tythes Three Sermons upon publike occasions FUNERALS MADE CORDIALS ECCLES 7.1 It is better to goe to the house of mourning then to the house of feasting for that is the end of all men And the living will lay it to his heart YOu have hitherto right Honorable and Christian Auditors either added to the Solemnity of this Funeral by the honour of your presence and attendance or enjoyed the pomp and ceremony of it as civil spectators You have all contributed what you can to cloath this Sceleton with a robe of State and to hold up the long train of death till it hath carried its prey to the grave which is its den and Throne where after a most savage and Cyclopick manner it doth at once triumph over us and gnaw upon us till it hath quite devoured not only our flesh but our very bones yea our names and memories if they be only written in the dust and not registred in heaven if our record be only among men here below and not with the most high God above as holy Job speaketh Job 16.19 You have indeed made a very ample and stately Commentary as to your civil respects upon this Corps and that Text Eccl. 12.5 Man goeth to his long home and the mourners goe about the streets It now remains to see what improvement may be made of so sad an occasion to your own interests the inward religious spiritual and eternal advantages of your soules Hitherto you have acted as men according to the rules of honour and methods of secular Heraldry but you now seem as Christians by your earnest and patient attention further to expect something from Me as an Herald of Diviner Honour as a Minister of Christ and his Church whereby to advance this Solemnity to Sanctity this pageantry to piety this ceremony or shadow which follows the dead to some substance and reality of benefit as to the living That it may not be fulfilled in you what was spoken by Christ Mat. 8.22 not without a sharp and just reproach to the young man Let the dead bury their dead while we are more solicitous and pleased to follow a dead friend and relation to the grave then to follow Christ who will set us beyond the confines of death and mortality in a state of grace and glory of honour and immortality Your humane and civil respects to the remains of the dead are worthy of you both as men and Christians Religion being no enemy to the sense and expression of what honour is decent and due both to the living and dead whose very dust as Christians is sacred and their carcasses so far consecrate as they have been Temples of the holy Ghost 1 Cor. 6.19 and are yet in Gods special care and custody as precious reliques 1 Cor. 15.42 never to be lost but reparable to a state of incorruption candidates of heaven and expectants in a silent but assured hope of eternal glory with their blessed Saviour whose once dead but now risen and glorified body sitting at Gods right hand that is in the
ad infernum deprimit both as to the living and the dead Many are raised up to Heaven by the magnificence of the Burnings or Buryings whose souls are sunk down to Hell by the ponderous weight of their unrepented and unreformed sins When sorrow affects too much state and wraps up the sharpness of death in soft paradoes mixing too much sensual sweet with the wormwood and bitterness of that cup which is offered to all mens lips the good effects of Funerals are much defeated as to the living the house of mourning is so far from being better in such an equipage that it is worse then the sober house of feasting for it flatters the dead and living too making men deaf to Gods warning-pieces which are shot off at their ears and levelled at their hearts They are like wool-sacks or mounds of earth 1 John 2.16 which disarm the great cannon-shot which should batter down the 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 the strong holds of sin the lust of the eyes the lust of the flesh the pride of life Empty and adulatory pomp set up as it were by the higher ground of mens stately Funerals and Tombs what God intends to pull down namely those high and exalted imaginations with which poor sinful mortals are pestered and poysoned who are then best when they see themselves and others at the worst and then nearest to grace and glory too when they see themselves as in their graves reduced to their dust and ashes and in their very best estate Psal 39.5 as the Psalmist speaks to be but altogether vanity 2. Which is the great lesson that the great God intends to teach men by such pregnant instances of their mortality which the living will learn i. e. such as live not only to sense but to true reason and not only to reason but to true religion not only to a moment but eternity The aym of these severe Lectures is to bring sinful man down to the dust within sight of the grave and prospect of judgment and hell it self that so he may be a meet object for Gods grace and mercy It is a shrewd sign of a heart dead in sins and trespasses stupid in sensual security buried in worldly lusts and vain pleasures dead as the Apostle sayes of some widows even while they live 1 Tim. 5.6 not to lay to heart the departures of those who are snatcht out of the land of the living to a state and place whence they shall not return to a terra incognita a land which is far off a black Abyssus covered with profound darkness of which no discovery hath ever been made by any that went thither so as to give Survivers any Geographical map or account of it Which terrible summons like the decimating of souldiers to die one after another cannot but infinitely affect the sober and serious living to whose benefit only the death and Funerals the solemnities and obsequies civil and religious prayers and Sermons too may and ought to be duely improved For to the Dead they reach not nor can they turn to any account further then such civil honour and respect as is due to their place name and merit yet surviving or to their corps which rest in hope of a refurrection and so deserve an handsome and Christian interment But as to any advantage to be made for the benefit of their soules for redeeming them from Purgatory for abating their purgative paines for shortning or supplying their Pennance or obtaining remission for any sin or punishment in which they are engaged being once dead this must be let alone for ever There is no ground of hope to relieve them in any kind no Scripture no Catholick doctrine no precept no promise that gives any footing for Prayers or Sacrifices Masses or Dirges Oblations or Emptions Remissions or Redemptions by which to benefit the dead they are vain solaces to the living and none at all to the dead arising first from the suggestions of the impotent grief and passion in survivors next from an unwarranted charity and benevolence to the dead At last policy and covetousness grew so cunning in the darkness and superstition of times as to make no small advantages by the vulgar easiness and prodigality sliding by insensible degrees from those memorials of benediction for their piety and constancy in religion from the gratulations for their happy and hopeful delivery out of a dangerous and naufragous Sea and for their hoped arrival at a safe and happy heaven together with a Catholick comprecation for the consummation and plenary bliss at the resurrection of them and all Saints departed in the true faith of Christ See the excellent Primate of Arm. of praying to and for the dead in his Jesuites Challenge From these commendable customes I say of pious Antiquity of which Epiphanius and others give us an account degenerous posterity warped not onely to praying both for and to the dead but indeed to make a notable mystery and trade of preying upon the devotion and simplicity of the living uses and ends which we find neither Solomon nor any Prophet Apostle or Evangelist nor Christ himself any where teaching nor in the least kind intimating to the living either in order to give such honour or help to the dead neither of which either our blessed Saviours love of his compleater Saints or his charity to the more defective dead who had not fully done their pennance here and so stood in need of some grains of allowance from the charity of such as survived them or his Apostles care would have failed to have taught the Primitive Church by word or Epistle or example if such prayers had been available to the living or for the dead No they may be profitable fancies to the Romanists and plausible enough to their bigot and bountiful disciples but they are not justifiable in true religion by Old or New Testament nor by any practise in the first and best Centuries No known advantages can redound to the dead from the living nor other advantages to the living from the dead but only the laying their death seriously and devoutly to heart the use that wise Solomon and the wiser God here commends to us all 3. And this upon very great and pregnant reasons if we consider 1. The state of the living in respect of their hearts 2. The proper vertues which are derivable from the dead and fit to be applied to the hearts of the living 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 Et vivens dabit ad cor suum The wise and considerate living will upon such occasions not only gape at the ceremony glory in the pomp talk of the person discourse of the disease and manner of death after a vulgar and easie fashion much less will they rejoyce in anothers death though an enemy or triumph in the advantages which accrew to them thereby after a malicious and covetous rate Such as lie under the power of these depraved distempers of soul and are of no
very large soveraign knowledge of them Eccl. 8.11 beyond any meer man tells us that the hearts of the sons of men are not onely full of folly 1 Kings 8.38 Eccl. 9.3 and set upon evill and sick of several sorts of plagues but frenzy fury and madness are in their hearts while they live which is a distemper not easily if ever perfectly cured But if any thing as to humane applications be likely to work any good upon the worst mens hearts Job 41.7 if any dart or weapon can reach and pierce these Leviathans whose natural proneness and customary habits in sin are so closely fixed and hardened to all manner of sin without any remorse it is such as Death brings with it not as it is pictured to scare children but as it is really it self and perceived among all sorts of men good or bad sparing none surprising any one even in the pride hardness deadness and damnableness of his heart Nothing in life is a more consummated fear then that which death carries with it It is called the King of terrors Job 18.14 Isa 14.9 11 12. Ezek. 32.27 Rex longimanus whose Scepter or sword reacheth all even Kings themselves such as were most impatient not to have all men living stoop down to their Scepter and Empire even these mighty Cedars and Colosses of Monarchs hath death subdued in a short time with a little labour and brought them down to the pit and bound them in chaines of darkness in the prison and dungeon of the grave triumphing over these Triumphers with an ironick Epinicion as the Prophet expresseth How art thou faln Art thou also become weak as we who wert a terror in the land of the living with thy sword lying in vain under thy head while thine iniquities are upon thy bones This representation of death to the living should be laid to Heart by all men and will be so by all such as truly live and not only breath There is a great difference between vixit and fuit being and living he lives that liveth wisely and worthily As bene valere is vivere health is the life of life so much more bene vivere est vita vitalis to live well is the welfare of life For as every disease of the body is a partial death to such a degree of health and life as is wanting so every sinful distemper of the rational heart of man is so far a deadness as it is a disorder upon it Which God seeks to cure and conquer by setting before us frequent spectacles of mortality which not to lay to heart and to entertain meerly with a specious formality with a childish historick or histrionick indifferency is the way firmare morbum corroborare mortem to increase the diseases and confirm that death which is upon mens hearts who are yet living in a vain shadow or shew of life only which is to these filly inconsiderate and sinful fooles not only mortalis and moriens but mortua yea mortifera vita a mortal and dayly dying but a dead yea a deadly and killing life while they live onely to beasts to men to their bodies and to a moment but are dead to soules to their own hearts to Gods Spirit and to Eternity as to their present impenitent state and posture of heart God by the Prophet complaines That the righteous perish and no man laid it to heart Yea when he sent many messengers and promiscuous executioners of death among the Jewes Isa 57.1 Aezek 14.21 his four sore judgments yet they laid not those terrors to heart nor considered their latter end that they might fear before God and live no more presumptuously Our blessed Lord at once reproacheth and threatneth those that had not so laid to heart the death of those on whom the tower of Siloa fell and whose blood Pilate mingled with their sacrifices Luke 13.4 that except they repent they should likewise perish Deaths must be so laid to heart that by the sadness of the countenance the heart may be made better Eccl. 7.3 as Solomon speaks The house of laughter may afford the heart of a fool more seeming pleasure for a season but the house of mourning affords a wise mans heart more solid and durable profit Luke 17.37 who like the Eagle will chuse to be there where the body not 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 but 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 yea the dead corps is as our Saviour speaks in an higher sense where the Eagle-eye of a believer quick and clear seeing afar off eagerly hastens firmly seizeth pertinaciously holdeth and greedily feedeth upon Christs blessed body and blood which is given to die for us as the only food of our soules in its infinite merits As we must not take the name of God in vain by profane swearing blaspheming or jesting nor may we receive his grace in vain as to the meanes the monitions and motions of his Spirit within us or without us So neither may we passe by the dead as the Priest and Levite did by the wounded and half-dead traveller without much regard as if we were unconcerned Gods dispenpensations in this kind must not be in vain to us though we cannot doe the dead any good yet we may get good from them and by them yea account must be given as of other things so of this Thou must not only reddere rationem vitae tuae but alienae give an account of thy own life but of anothers too who may sin at the charge of thy soule while as Eli thou neglectest to hinder or reprove or give them good example or it may be soothest and encouragest them in sin or whose pious life is set before thee as an excellent pattern but ill followed by thee yea further we must reddere rationem mortis alienae give account to God of anothers death not only whom we unjustly slay Gen. 9.5 or neglect to save deliver asmuch as is justly in our power God will require the blood of these both for man and beast but further we must give account of anothers death which we see or hear of and doe not consider which we celebrate onely but lay it not to heart in piety when we are not warned or moved at all when custome as of sinning so of seeing the dead takes away all due sense when being touched with so sharp a spur as that of anothers death should be to thee thou art like a dull jade or tired hackney not at all affected or moved to mend thy pace not one sinners sigh or Christians tear no sad reflection or penitent remorse no quickened endeavours or confirmed resolutions in order to prepare more intentively for death for judgment and eternity only thou joggest on after the wonted rate and carriers pace of a formal and cold-hearted Christian Which evil defects arguments of a dead and unaffected heart either totally or gradually are the lesse excusable in men because the uses or advantages to be
unreasonable irreligious and divelish A carrionly carkass of a man is aromatick a very perfume in comparison of a dead and rotting soul The body becomes dead and so dissolves by the souls parting from it but the soul by Gods being separated from it first out of its own choise next by Gods penal deserting of it The soul is the salt the light and life of the body so is God of the soul Anima animae the very soul of our souls I mean his grace love and spiritual communion separation from this is the souls death here and hereafter For from the power wrath and vengeance of God the damned are not separated who are dead not to their being but to their well being or happiness to the union at and fruition of God in love The soul apart from God in grace or glory is not only an orphan or a widow condemned to eternal sorrow and desolation for nothing can maintain or entertain wooe wed or indow the soul to the least degree of happines or to any allay of misery when once God hath quite forsaken it But it is emortua conclamata in heaven earth and hell proclaimed as starke dead in Law and Gospel Matth. 13.42 to justice and mercy so represented in Scripture as the horridest expression or the blackest colour to set forth its misery and horror its regret and torpor its weeping and wailing its gnashing and despair Doth then such a thick cloud of horror hang over the face and state of a dead body which is senseless of its own death and deformity of its noysome grave and dark dungeon Sapiens ignis subtilis vermis carpit nutrit urit reficit Chrysol O what a world of horror must lie upon a dead soul when deservedly cast out of God's blessed presence when it feels its death and lives only to die when it feels it is plunged in a dead Sea which is boundless and bottomlesse where the worm dies not and the fire goeth not out because it is as Crysologus calls it a subtil fire and ingenious worm which burns but consumes not devours but destroyes not Who can dwell with everlasting burnings saith the Prophet in an extasie of holy horrour Isa 33.14 Who can live in everlasting dyings Who can abide his own everlasting rottings Is it a gradual and lingring death to want food raiment light liberty fit company Is it a total death to the body to want the little spark of the soul which is the breath and spirit of life to the body What is it then to the soul to want that God who is the breather of that breath of life and Inspirer of that spirit We want a word beyond death to expresse that state Lay it then to heart Phil. 3.11 and consider what cause we have to be humble to tremble and fear exceedingly to escape most solicitously and diligently that second and eternal death if by any means we may attain the resurrection of the dead to life eternal 3. Lay to heart upon the sight of a dead body and the meditation of a dead soul whence it is that these fears and faintings sicknesses and sorrows deaths and darknesses sordidnesse and desolation corruption and condemnation have thus mightily prevailed over the highest mountains as the flood over the most noble beautiful and excellent of all Gods works under heaven even over mankind good and bad great and small Eccles 2.16 wise and foolish upon which nature the great and only God had set such characters of special glory enduing it with a diviner spirit so making man as Moses saith a living spirit or a spirit of life And this after counsel and deliberation Faciamus hominem Sanctius his animal mentisâ— capaâ—ius aliâ—e Gen. 2.7 As in re magni momenti a matter of greater concern and weight then heaven and earth and all the host of them They were made ex tempore as it were Nudo verbo Let there be and there was But man was made ex consilio after Gods own Image full of beauty health honour riches wisedome the Spirit of the living God given him in an extraordinary beam Whence is this lapse to earth to dust to a sad and wretched a decaying and dying condition both temporal and eternal Sure not from the impotencie or envy of the blessed Creator whose omnipotent goodnesse is inconsistent with such infirmities nor yet from the frailty and inconsistency of the subject matter which he raised to so goodly a fabrick little lower then the Angels Psal 49.12 as man was made who should have been as long immortal as Angels had he continued a man that is Rom. 6.23 rational and religious enjoying the Image of God on him which forbids and excludes as all shadow of sin and defection so of all death or mutation to worse No. The Psalmist tells us after the history of Genesis Man being in honour did not so abide but is become like to the beasts that perish by the frailty of his will which fell from adherence to God as the durable and supreme Good Sin hath levelled us to beasts to death to devils to hell This death in all sizes and degrees from the least ache and dolour to the compleatnesse of damnation is the wages of fin So the Apostle oft tells us Rom. 5.17 by one mans offence death entred and reigned over all The soul that sins that shall die Ezek. 18. Sin is the source of all our sorrows the lethalis arundo poysoned arrow whose infection drinks up the spirits and eats up the health flesh bodies and soules of mankind No wonder we die since we sin at such a rate the wonder is that we live any one of us one moment How much more is the miracle of Gods love and mercy that hath by Christs death and merits brought forth to light eternal life and offered it to all penitent and believing sinners as purchased and prepared for them Because sin once lived in us we must once die and till sin be dead or mortified in us we cannot hope for life eternal Through death then thou wilt best see the face of thy sin What Poet what Painter what Orator whose colours are most lively can expresse the amazement horrour and astonishment that seized on the looks and hearts of Adam and Eve Rom. 27. 2 Tim. 1.10 when they had the dreadful prospect of their first great sin and curse written with the blood and pourtrayed on the face of their dead son Abel who in that primitive paucity of mankind was barbarously slain by his brother Cain Who can expresse or conceive the woful lamentation they made over their dead son in whom they first beheld the beauties of life swallowed up by the deformities of death Is death then so dreadful so dismal so deformed so putid O think what that sin is which thou so embracest and huggest The fountain of bitternesse is more bitter then the stream Our madness and misery is
hold them in many cases very fit and of excellent use so they ought to be serious severe and wholly circumcised as to all danger of sowing pillows under the elbows of the living or of dawbing with any untempered mortar and no lesse from whiting the Sepulchres of the dead as if there were no rottenness in their bones Preachers should in no point of their Embassy be more rigid exact precise and punctual Matth. 3.2 Matth. 4.17 then in urging that which was Christs and his forerunners first Text and Sermon Repent for the Kingdome of God is at hand As the Roman Legate or Consul Marcus Popilius circumscribed with a wand he had in his hand the person and answer of the proud King Antiochus Valerius Max. in M. Popilio when he desiring time to resolve of war or peace which was offered him was confined to give his definitive answer before he stirred a step out of that litle circle So concise and peremptory are Gods commands and so must be our conjureings and requirings of all men every where to repent and turn to the Lord Acts 17.30 Acts 3.26 Gen. 27.2 Heb. 3.11 young as well as old even daily exhorting them while it is called to day because as Isaac said they know not the day of their deaths nor we of ours and if they die in their sins unwarned God wil require their blood at our hands Ezek. 33.6 A dreadful account as Chrys cals it Can you blame us Ministers O Christian people if we be quick and importune in calling upon you if we seem religiously rude and piously uncivil with you even pulling and snatching and haling you while you are lingring as the Angels did Lot out of Sodom or as fire-brands out of the fire Our deferring to call upon you and your delayings to repent these run the hazard of your and our souls You must therefore forgive those kind and charitable injuries we sometimes seem to doe you by our Christian importunities Currat poenitentia nè praecurrat poena Amb. which are but the effects of our fidelity to you to our own souls and to God St. Ambrose's counsel is excellent Let repentance make haste lest vengeance overtake thee True repentance only can bring thee to the City of refuge Christ Jesus where thou mayst be safe against the pursuits of death and wrath Seneca in his concise and witty way can tell us how necessary it is to be as passengers on the shore that expect a fair wind and passage by Sea alwayes in readiness to have our packs and truncks packed up that we may answer the first summons of the Master or Pilot who when he calls to be gone will stay for no mans occasions If Heathens had such principles of prudence who saw but one side of death and that but darkly in a very distant narrow view as to Eternity O how should Christians who have so great discoveries take the alarm of every night and sleep which is a shadow of death of every morn renewing which is the dawning of Eternity the gallicinium cock-crowing of the resurrection of every infirmity in their own feeling of every other Funeral and death they see or hear of of every history they read which alwayes closeth with the worke of death drawing this black vail of burial and oblivion over all the pomp and glory strength and victory pleasures and passions of the world and those great men in it who in their greatest glistering are but gloeworms shining a while in this night of mortality and then extinct for ever yea every hour which men live is a monitor of death being no sooner lived out but they are so much dead so is every meal they eat which is but a daily subsidy given to the body to relieve its daily expences and decays which are the secret depredations and essayes of death We should take yea and make many occasions to reflect soberly upon this meditation and lay death to heart that the defensative of repentance may the better work upon our souls before death hath taken the suburbs of our bodies by age and sickness which are not the constant procedures of death nor may any man rationally expect it will deal with him upon such termes of Treaty or Parly No 't is oft upon the snap and sudden with us and may be so to the ablest and youngest He or She. Sometimes indeed death plays with smaller shot upon us and hews us down with many little chops But 't is frequent that he batters us all in pieces with one great and sudden Cannon and blows us up at once by a storm either of inward Apoplectick stroaks or outward violences as the wind overthrew the house on Jobs children against which there is no foresight no warning or defence Death doth not alwayes so befriend either Physicians gaines or their patients designs as to vouchsafe them the benefit of a lingring sickness or a leisurely death How infinitely then doth it concern us to be alwayes in procinctu in our harnesse never to wake or sleep but with the compleat armour of our soules upon us or rather within us Gen. 6. Sure it was pitiful padling work to be building of boats or hewing down trees to make ships and vessels of then when the flood began to be poured down upon the Old world of ungodly men who so long neglected their temporal and eternal safety by delaying their repentance when they had Gods warning by Noahs preaching for an hundred years 1 Pet. 3.19 2 Pet. 2.5 that of so many millions of mankind which in that generative and vivacious age had peopled and overstock'd the earth there should be but eight persons found fit to be preserved alive in the Ark which afforded room for birds beasts and serpents but not for wicked and impenitent men who had refused the voice of God calling them so long so oft to repentance as he now doth every where by that Tuba Evangelii Trumpet of the Gospel which is but the Praecentor first peal and noise of the last Trumpet The one calls us so to prepare for Death that we may stand with comfort in the day of Judgment the other will call us out of a state of death to the eternal doom of that last day of Judgment The state and tenour of a Christians life should be a continued course of repentances well begun and daily renewed never intermitted because of daily failings All the parenthesis of businesse as to secular affairs should not interrupt the series nor confound the care of a Christians Repentance and daily proficiency Blessed God! What pity 't is that men women can find time for every thing else under the Sun and none for their repentance which is the work of works 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 Opus operosissimum the first rough-hewing and foundation of the great building of our eternal salvation Hast thou time to dresse undresse thy body to eat and drink and sleep to
buy and sell to sport and play to fight and kill others yea to gratifie thy senses in all sorts of pleasures and to attend nature in the most sordid necessities and yet canst find no time to repent no nor to admit one serious thought of repentance to lodge in thy soul one day one hour no not one minute Yea canst thou find time to sin all manner of sins over and over that thou thinkest safe from the vengeance of man and yet no time to repent of thy sins against God No time in youth to repent of the sins of childhood or puerice which St. Austin now an aged yet tender-hearted penitent did reflect upon and repent of with tears St. Austin's confession Tantillus puer tantus peccator No time in riper years to repent of the inordinate hears of youth to quench the flames of extravagant lusts which God and nature reason and Religion command to be confined as fire to their proper hearths and chimneys the order of modesty and chastity but they are not allowed to set fire on the house-top to the fighting against and endangering both soul and body Canst thou find no time in the high noon and Solstice of thy life no nor yet in the decline and evening when gray hairs are here and there when thy eyes grow dim and the shadowes long to repent of thy former misdemeanors thy neglects and slightings of God thy despising his mercies thy uncharitableness sacriledge Psal 50.21 cruelty oppressions hypocrisie lying swearing murthers blasphemies insolencies hardness and impenitency carried on against thy God and thy Saviour thy Mediator and thy own soul with so high an hand so long a time Sure thou either believest there is no God or that he is such an one as thy self neither wise nor good not holy nor just that he hath revealed no Word or Will Law nor Gospel to mankind that he is indifferent what we do or impotent to reward or revenge that he hath neither heaven nor hel crowns nor flames for either good or bad that they who feare God and they that feare him not shall be all blended by death in an eternal Chaos medly or confusion without any distinction of reward or punishment according to their works upon these perswasions only thou canst be hitherto impenitent But if any one of those sharp arrows of divine truth which are shot from heaven which thou hast heard of Atheus est qui non tam credit quam cupit non esse Deum seen and received into thy brest which thou canst with no colour of reason deny or repel and which with much adoe thou bafflest and shufflest off to a kind of cavilling unbelief I say if but one of them had well fixed it selfe upon thy heart and conscience it would move thee to the speedy thoughts and essays of repentance at least to pare off the superfluity of thy sins and that excess of riot 1 Pet. 4.4 which argue more a monster then a man and a Divel then a Christian who loves darkness more then light and in the midst of that glorious Gospel which hath shined from Patriarchs Prophets Apostles Martyrs Confessors John 3.19 all good Christians in all ages and places yea from Christ himself confirmed to be the light life the Redeemer and Saviour of the world by many infallible signs and wonders In this blight Temple thou affectest the dungeon and vault of thy rotten and nasty lusts chusing death and refusing life digging deeper into hell then when thou mightest make an ascent to heaven by those gracious means as the ladders of heaven which are offer'd thee in precepts promises terrors comforts holy patterns and great examples set before thee in all grace and virtue which whoso seeth not must needs be blind whoso sees and doth not praise yea admire must needs be unthankful whoso is not proportionably affected to their truth and worth Divinae veritatis majestatem benignitatis gloriam gratiarum nitorem virtutum pulcherimam suavitatem qui non videt caecus est qui videt non laudat ingratus est qui videns laudansque parili affectu non movetur aut mortuus est aut insanus Eccles 12.6 must needs be either mad or dead as St. Austin speaks Surely if thou couldst once meet thy self that is thy conscience in the cool of the day apart from the heats of thy passions and the rapid torrent of thy foolish and hurtful lusts thou wouldst bethink thy selfe at length before thou diest of the necessary work of Repentance and not only before thou diest but before thou declinest and droopest It is indeed a sad uncertain and uncomfortable work to begin when a man is drawing to his end then to tune thy soul for God when thy body is most out of tune and thy mind too then to begin to wind up the strings of an Instrument when the very ribs of it are flying in pieces Who of a thousand can hope to draw waters out of the deep wells of salvation when the golden bowl and silver cord of life as Solomon speaks are almost broken and loosed It must needs be an hudling and most confused work then to set thy house in order I mean that interiorem animae domum inward withdrawing room of thy soul thy heart which ought to be as a Temple always fitted for God purged from sin adorned with all gracious habits then when the Tabernacle or out-house of thy body in which thy soul dwels is wholly out of order either burning with feavorish flames or tottering with consumptionary weakness or burdened and falling with unnatural loads and painful obstructions Thou couldst never have chosen a worse or unfitter time to repent then when the pains of sickness the inquietudes of body the impertinent visits of friends the cryes of relations the want of sleep all extremities the terrors of death and the stupors of soul are before thee or pressing upon thee Repentance is a work to be begun seriously in the most sedate temper of soul and calmest state of life when we enjoy the greatest serenity of body and mind when we have most leisure fewest interruptions and least diversions strongest temptations potentest oppositions and the greatest abilities of soul to resist them Once well begun it must at the same rate be carried on every day For this like oft pumping in a ship that hath but little leaks will keep her afloat but it is desperate plying the pump when a vessel hath now so many foot water in hold that it begins to sink The early repentings in our health are the best Antidotes and Cordials in our sickness like Summer provisions seasonably laid in against an hard Winter nor is there any bitter potion which a sick man is less able or disposed to take then that of Repentance when he is weak languishing sunk dispirited almost despairing in his sickness which is like a mans setting himself to cleave logs and therewith to make himself
thou 'T is hard for us to give a just reason and Christian account for most of our weepings and least of those that are most excessive we weep more for any loss of a momentary toy then for the absence of our Lord the loss of Gods love the loss of a good conscience the Churches wastes Jerusalems ruines and the sins of our own souls or of others which call us to mourning As our blessed Lord said to the women weeping when they saw him led to be crucified so may every dead friend or other object of our weeping say to us Weep not for me but weep for your selves Luke 23.28 who many times have most cause to sorrow then when you sorrow least some tears are to be wept for again Tears cannot profit the dead but they may the living yea I recant they may profit even dead souls who are dead as St. 1 Tim. 5.6 Prov. 8.36 John 11.35 Paul speaks even while they live who love death tears and prayers may be a means by Gods grace to revive these as Jesus his tears were to bring to life Lazarus Tears are the distillations of love resolved into drops by the coolings of some ambient sorrow We cannot love any thing in our selves or others so justifiably as our and their souls In reference to these all our passions and affections should be rightly disciplined and ranged duly and exercised and improved as most needing and deserving our cares and counsels our prayers and tears Nor can I here omit to lay to your hearts what this Noble Gentleman suggested to me when being sent for I came to him the morning before he died He told me he was very sorry that it was so late with him yea he feared very late he had been long fed with some hopes of life but now he believed his time was short which he could wish he had more improved to his souls comfort while his strength of body had been somewhat better I know men and women too have a feminine and foolish fear to dispirit or deject any patient or decumbent with the serious thoughts or speech of their dying for fear their sad physick and nauseous prescriptions should not operate well on the ill humors of their bodies But the care of removing any burthens or obstructions upon their souls and consciences this must be deferred and neglected till there is such a decline of life and spirits as hangs out the black flag of death and despair then ubi desinit Medicus incipit Theologus when Physitians have in vain done their best the Divine must God knows too oft in vain do his best also for alas he hath little time in the agonies of death and the precipitations of life to search and apply the necessary remedies or comforts of a languishing soul which is as if a man should begin to read a long letter of great and present concernment when his candle was at the last twinkling A method certainly not more preposterous then dangerous to sick bodies and diseased souls If our Physitians were meer disciples of Galen and Hippocrates I should not wonder at their dilatory indifferencies as to mens souls and intensiveness only to their bodies but being many of them very learned men and some of them very good Christians I humbly conceive it would no way misbecome them nor any way impede the success of their arts and applications if they did upon the first perception of a dubious and dangerous state of any sick body with Christian wisedom and charity advise them yea and intreat them not to neglect the care of preparing their souls for God that as they will do their best with Gods help to cure their bodily distempers so it will no way hinder their skill or cure to carry on the concurrent welfare of their souls so as becomes good Christians because the event of all sickness is uncertain diseases oft flatter where they destroy therefore Physitians and Friends should be with all speed faithful to their Patients souls as well as bodies It bears no proportion for a sick patient to be visited twice or thrice in a day by Physitians in order to the bodies health and by a Divine once in a week it may be and this not till the last exigent and gasp of life as if this would abundantly serve the turn When men begin more to value their pretious and immortal souls they will more prize the help of true Divines whose prayers connsels and spiritual assistance being Gods indulgence and ordinance in his Church is usually followed with most gracious and comfortable successes toward sick persons that desire their help and send timely for them as St. James 5.14 James adviseth yea commandeth to do when Christians are cast down in bodily or spiritual dejections and when they are desirous to have the comfort of forgiveness of sins further sealed to them yea who is there so able so knowing so self-confident so comfortable in health that may not and usually doth not finde great damps dulness and difficulties of soul in sickness these are prone to be dispirited as well as the bodies of the best Christians and may well bear with nay most earnestly desire to have their weak hands supported and feeble knees strengthned by the counsel prayers and comforts of true Ministers Yea in the most desperate cases when dissolute livers are catched in Gods net or toile and now begin to make their addresses to God and preparations for eternity even in these cases the diligent and frequent assistance of discreet Ministers helping poor creatures to search and try their hearts to see their sins to look to God in Christ to turn to him and lay hold upon him doth many times work miraculous effects both to sanctifie sickness and to save souls so much doth God blesse the means he hath appointed when duly used which supinely neglected the end must needs fail I know many men and women too are now turned Preachers as not a few are turn'd Physitians which truly in my judgement amount no higher for the most part then Empiricks and Mountebancks in both making more work for able Divines and Physitians too This I am sure few men in their wits and willing to live but court the best Physitians nor do I see less reason why they should not desire and employ the best and truest Divines such as are most able and skilful most willing and faithful most authorized and commissionated by Christ and his Church to assist and comfort to instruct and absolve if need be dying sinners beyond what any man ordinarily can do in his health much less in the distempers dejections and darknesses of his sickness both corporal and spiritual who yet now affect in it most what in the frolick of their lives to be their own Teachers and Preachers their own Ordainers and Confessors their own Bishops and Presbyters too contrary to the judgment of all pious Antiquity who thought the Evangelical Ministry not an
make up compleat authority the want of which as we have no cause much to rejoyce in or little to lament so posterity both in Church and State will unfeignedly deplore 3. Yea when any men or women that are eminently good and gracious wise and worthy are taken away either immaturely in their strength or very many of them in a little times these are Gods warnings which are to be laid to heart for the death of the righteous poor or rich is pretious in the fight of the Lord and should be so in the sense of all good men they many times portend some great evil to come when God pulls off his chief Jewels it is a sign he means shortly to strip and undress a Church or Nation of their ornaments and defences When men take off the principal and noblest parts of a fair ship the main-masts rudders prow and upper decks it argues that they intend to break it quite in pieces or to take it much lower and abase it So is it when God pulls up those repagula sluces and banks which either keep off inundations of judgements or dayly discharge the superfluities of epidemick sins by their prayers and tears for the sins of the people When Lot is out of Sodom and Noah shipped in Gods Ark then fire and flood is to be expected 4. When our Parents Fathers or Mothers are taken away though in a good old age as Jacob yet they may frigidam suffundere cast cold water by their deaths upon the varieties heats luxuries and confidences of their young heirs and successors who are prone to live as if they could never die out of this world when yet they see their roots die sure the branches cannot be everlasting It was a notable Instance of filial sympathy which a son of the Duke of Montpensier shewed who coming to his fathers monument in Italy at Puzzolo where he had in the French wars died being killed by ill air and inconveniencies the young Gentleman could not bear the memory of his dead father but amidst infinite passions and tears dies upon his fathers Tomb Guicciardin Hist lib. 5. p. 261. as Guicciardin reports of certainty Yea although estates honours and inheritances do descend upon men by the death of any yet they may lay this to heart that the more talents thou hast the greater account thou must give to God Luke 12.48 It is not considerable as to true internal and eternal comfort what lands moneys honours and titles a man hath but how wisely and nobly how piously and charitably he useth all things The accession of estate is but more fewel cast upon a fire that will at last consume riotous and inordinate livers A man needs not much to be holy and happy for a man may maintain all the vertues at a cheaper rate then any one vice nothing of competency is too little for a virtuous mind and nothing of plenty is sufficient to a vain and vicious spender As dumbness had been a mercy to swearers to profane and filthy speakers so had poverty been riches to many a riotous liver whose making was his marring Luke 15.13 as the Prodigals having his portion in his own hand utterly undid him The more honour and estate any one is master of the more he had need be master of himself of his lusts and passions for riotous expenses will end with Dives his gluttony in eternal poverty and such extream necessities as shall everlastingly want a drop of comfort there being no hope that God will bestow upon those men or women the blessings of eternity which have been such debauched abusers of these blessings which are momentary such as have not been faithful stewards to Gods glory and the worlds good in the little comparatively of this worlds unrighteous mammon as our Saviour tells us how can they expect Buke 16.11 when they come to die that they should be trusted with eternal riches or honours which are the rewards of well doing and recompenses of comely suffering 5. If an excellent wife or husband are parted by death who long lived or were likely to live as turtles in a peaceful sweetness and unspotted society being of one mind and one heart in the Lord joying each others joyes and grieving one anothers griefs who had nothing to envy or desire beyond that love and content which they mutually enjoyed save only the love of God and the fruition of their blessed Saviour in the Kingdom of heaven A blessed pair who so lived that they were dayly ready and preparing to die having nothing to give them any regret at death but only the leaving each other in such a solitude for a season as none but God could supply I need not tell these how they ought to lay to heart eithers death in point of humanity the care must be not to lay it too much to heart 1 Thes 4.13 not to sorrow as meer men and women without hope lest they be swallowed up with too much grief A moderate mourning in such occasions is neither uncomly nor unholy nor unwholesome but as the overflowings of land-floods is beneficial to low grounds when they seasonably abate and leave them dry for if waters stay too long on the richest bottomes they make them cold squallid course and barren Non amissi sed ' praemissi the like effects follow moderate and excessive sorrows upon any worldly occasion whatsoever They must consider each other not as lost but as gone a little before in the same way to happiness 6. So in the loss of children dear by nature deserving by duty especially if our only child more if in the prime and pregnancy of their age most if the hopes and honour of their families the props and pillars of their houses these wounds in the delights of our eyes are prone to go too deep to our hearts to fester and gangrene to something of irreligous discontent and sowrness toward God as if like Jonah Jonah 4.9 we did well to be angry with God and frown upon heaven for the loss of a gourd which had its being from God as St. Austin says of his pregnant son who died at 14. but its sin and mortality from thy self nor can any parents tell how sharp a thorn that child might prove in their eyes and hearts afterward which now seems so fair sweet and lovely a flower to their eyes In such cases not only the highest cordials of divine comforts and Christian hopes but the strictest charms of Gods commands must be applied lest we turn Gods physick into our poyson and by a sullen stubbornness turn a fathers cqastisement to the sharp punishment of an enemy remember God is so much beforehand with us by his bounty that his withdrawings can never be an injury to us He as the spring and occan hath more right in any streams then the channel through which they pass as all runs to him so they come from him So that after Job's example
a childish and stupid indifferency or with a vulgar formality or in some cases with a proud unchristian and unmanly insolency rejoycing and triumphing in the death of those who possibly were thought their betters or equals or rivals or enemies As Ahaz in his distresses sinned yet more against the Lord 2 Chro. 28.22 so do some men and women too amidst those Funerals which concerned them most to lay to heart How doth covetousness ambition envy and lasciviousness make many men and women unfeignedly rejoyce in the death of Parents Children Husbands Wives Rivals and Princes that they can hardly suppress their odious joys and unseasonable contentments from breaking forth into such abhorred expressions as Vitellius a most ungenerous Prince and profligate person used when after the battel ended which in civil wars as that was makes even victory it self sad and ashamed was heard to say when he rode amidst the now putid and unburied carkasses of the slain Citizens The smell of dead strangers corps is pleasing Bonus odor hostis occisi at melior civis but most of dead Roman Citizens being my enemies A speech which Suetonius brands with a stigma of just-infamy so infinitely distant from the clemency of Julius Caesar Quique dolet quoties cogitur esse ferox who ever in the chase commanded to spare the Roman Citizens and was unfeignedly grieved to use necessary severities which are next door to cruelty Poor mortals forget in their revengeful impatiencies military jollities and victorious triumphs how soon the wheel may come about and the same measure may be meeted to them Judg. 1.6 which they meet to others Adoni-Bezek may live to see his own thumbs and great toes one off Should not we tremble before the great and terrible God when we see his judgments so executed that our selves are sometimes made the sad executioners of them upon others who it may be in Gods sight are not greater sinners then our selves 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 Stobaeus Matth. 5.28 They that joy in anothers calanity or insult in their death though just doe adopt a murther and commit man-slaughter in their hearts as Christ speaks of Adultery As a Judge who pleaseth his private spite and malice in that 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 most depraved passion which sucks honey out of anothers gall while he justly condemnes a malefactor to die he may be a just Judge according to the Law of man but is unrighteous according to the Gospel of Christ which commends charity and compassion tenderness and bowels to Christians beyond all burnt sacrifices Gods High Court of Justice will judge even judges themselves and Death will in a few years not only conquer but triumph over those that are lifted up above the fate and pitch of poor mortals in their gloryings over an others ruines Let him that stands upon a mountain never so high and fast remember the day of death is coming he shall also fall and perish like one of the Princes Yet mens sins are not to be measured by the evil or seeming calamity of their death but by the open wickedness and impieties of their lives The same fate may befall good and bad they may die in peace as it is said of Josiah who are slain in warre and of Zedekiah 2 Kin. 22.20 Jer. 34.5 who died blind and in captivity The death of men is the more to be laid to heart by how much less they deserved it from men and more from God It serves to exhort and excite every one of us to search and try our own hearts Vse 2 to examine how far this or another Funeral is gone beyond our eyes and eares so as it is or shall be laid to our hearts What fear what trembling what holy purposes and what humble resolutions are raised in thee What sins mortified what vanities left what neglects repaired what graces increased what improving of life what preparings for death by a constant and conscientious use of all duties opportunities and means proper for so great ends as aym at eternity Your mourning with never so great pomp and state yea with unfeigned grief out of humane and momentary reflexions onely is not that just improvement which God expects As Fullers earth cleanseth spots of cloaths and Wood-ashes rince foul vessels so should the contemplation of anothers death their dust and ashes help to cleanse our souls In vain do you wear black mourning on your bodies if you still keep pullatas atratas animas black and sullied soules soyled and scorched with the inordinate flames of lust pride malice covetousness c. which are the soot of hell These sine black garments are but in stead of courser sackeloth the fittest coverings indeed for your bodies of sin and death but they must put you in mind to get your soules cloathed in white garments the robes of Christs righteousness for justification and sanctification without which thou wilt follow this corps to thy grave also with cause enough and too much for such everlasting mournings as admit no comforters or comforts Let thy mourning be not only civil formal and humane but Christian humble penitent Acts 20.25 As Jacob to the Angel so let not a Funeral goe without a blessing as Felix at St. Pauls Preaching so let thy heart tremble at these visible as well as audible instructions of death and judgment to come Retine to thy closet after these Solemnities and earnestly pray to God to give thee Funeral graces that by an holy Christian Chymistry thou mayst extract spirits out of dead bones Doe not play with Death lest it bite or sting thee next as that serpent did a merry Greek of old who jestingly putting his hand into the jawes of a Lion that was figured of stone for an ornamental statue in one of the Temples of the Gods was so stung with a scorpion which lay in the mouth of that Lion that he presently died having first laughed with his companions at that monition he had the night before in his dream as he told them that he should next day be destroyed by a Lion which beast never haunted that place and so he thought himself most secure Death many times lies then nearest us and in wait for us when we least mind the monitions or credit the warnings which may by providence be given us I cannot but make use of this Text as a just vindication of this and the like religious solemnities at Christian Burials Vse 3 against those severe Aristarchus'es and super-reforming Reformers who cast most supercilious browes and use very severe invectives against all Funeral Sermons and much more against all Scriptures read exhortations and prayers used by and to the living at the graves and interments of the dead by which tetrick austerities they seem to me not only to reproach the piety prudence and charity of this deserved famous and well reformed Church in its sacred offices and appointments on such occasions which were seriously approved happily
fit for children not to be denied or envied you only please to give those Christians leave who may without vanity think themselves by Gods mercy as well advised and consciencious in their Religion as your selves yea and more cautious of superstition then you seem to be Eccles 7.16 Be not righteous overmuch neither make thy self over-wise who are thus of late shrunk to be over-righteous and negatively superstitious I say give us leave to use such Christian liberty and duties as God hath allowed Religion encourageth and experience of pious proficiency highly recommends to us by the vote and suffrage of your and our pious Progenitors in the Church of England which in this as many other excellent appointments hath most undeservedly and indignely suffered infinitely below its former reformed worth its admired constitution and most enviable condition through the ignorance petulancy and insolency of some pitiful pretenders God knows for the most part of plebeian spirits and mechanick proportions who undertake thus severely to catechise and discipline not only the Nobility Gentry and Commonalty of this Nation but the Clergy and Ministry of this Church which was not exceeded in all the world as if they never knew how to spell the A b c or primer of Religion for so I esteem these outward orders and exercises of it until some new Masters had lent them their sharp fescues which were first made of a Scotch scabbard This vindication as I owe to the honour of this Nation to the piety of this Reformed Church to my own calling and conscience so I cannot omit to ground it upon this Text and express it upon this occasion as very proper methods and pious means used to lay those things to heart which Solomon here commends and the wisedome of God requires of the living in their respects to the dead who in my judgment are far more becoming to the interests of both living and dead Christians committed to their graves by the sound of the Evangelical trumpet setting forth the hopes of both dead and living by reading prayer or exhortation then by those uncouth soundings of military trumpets which seem only to add to the triumphs and pomp of death but not to the hope or faith or comfort or manners of Christians If it be matter of civil state and decorum to persons of great quality yet I see no sense or reason they should justle out of the Church any offices of Christian piety befitting the dead or the living Thus I have done with the Text and am now to give you Right Honorable and Beloved some little model of this house of mourning to which you are come this day which is greater in many degrees then you are wonted to go to This sad occasion if rightly understood will make its own way to your hearts when I have given you some account of those special regards for which it doth deserve not only a more then ordinary mourning emphatick sympathies from you but to make deeper impressions upon your spirits And this I shall do briefly not tanquam conductitius orator venalis praeco or as a man professoriae linguae truncae manus as Agrippina called Seneca no I thank God I am above any such snares and servitudes of soul as will for fear or favour flatter either the dead or the living What I shall speak of the dead shall be words of soberness and truth as in the presence of God and of you his people 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 as a lover of truth and virtue as an assertor of such honest and ingenuous freedom in speaking as dares to oppose and confute if need be vulgar errors and false surmises And however I am most unfeignedly sorry as a man for this sad occasion yet I am as a Minister so far glad of this present imployment because however I may be less proportionable to its dimensions and your expectations yet I have hereby the opportunity given me to express such an honour love and respect to this noble person's name and memory now dead as I confess was one of my highest ambitions in this world Not only as he stood related a Grand-child Son and Heir apparent to that Right Honorable Family whose happiness I have rather seriously wished then been able ever effectually to promote But taking him in his private sphear and personal confinements you will give me leave to own him as a Gentleman many ways endeared to my particular love care honour and prayers first by long acquaintance from his cradle to his coffin which breeds secret and tacit endearments on our hearts as Ivy that roots where it is long contiguous Next by neerer and domestick conversation he living four years in my house with his Tutor and other attendants befitting his quality at those years when being but a youth of 13 or 14 years he carried himself with so much civility modesty ingenuity and manliness as made his company both worthy and fit for men so little of petulancy pride or moroseness incident to young Gentlemen of high parts and expectations that he seemed by his gentleness candor and humility as if he were ignorant both of his own high and noble quality and also of others usual but ignoble vanities and vapourings which ill become any men but most of all those that pretend to any true honour or generous extraction The confidence of his noble parents and relations committing him thus to my care and superintendency gave me an opportunity as welcome to me as any could have befaln me which was to discharge a solemn promise I made to his most noble Mother seven years before not only with civility but with sanctity at her earnest and importune desiring of me to assure her while I lived I would not be wanting what in me lay to his honour and happiness She also then bespake his living with me when ever it should be opportune for his breeding and my reception of him Gods providence so ordered things that what was passionately desired and seriously promised in time came to pass in which I need not tell you how much the grateful memory of her most deserving virtue commanded me to contribute all the care and discretion I was capable of for the absolving of my soul to God and the dead in that particular that I might answer and follow with my best endeavours of counsels prayers and examples those thoughts of virtue piety and honour which his excellent Mother had living expressed toward him as her only child a Son I am sure of her cares and counsels prayers and tears both living and dying so oft and infinitely solicitous have I seen her noble and pious soul that this her Son might prove a person of such virtue and piety as are the only true foundations of temporal and eternal honour From my domestick care of him he was sent much at my instance and perswasion to Trinity Colledge in Cambridge continuing there two years that he might first add learning to his
by the meritorious death and passion of the Lord of life and glory the great and promised Messias thy beloved Son our blessed Saviour Jesus Christ who by suffering death hath both overcome death and satisfied thy justice for us freeing all true believing and penitent sinners from the sting curse and fear of death both temporal and eternal bringing by his glorious Gospel life and glory honour and happiness to light We beseech thee O heavenly Father for his sake who hath tasted death for us all to magnifie thy infinite mercy upon us before we go from hence and be no more seen O be better to us then ever we should be to our selves or we are utterly lost Bestow upon us all those graces and gifts which may both teach and help us to lead an holy life and die an happy death Prevent us graciously and follow us effectually with the motions and operations of thy holy Spirit which may excite and inable us speedily and throughly to mortifie the life and power of every sin in us even while it is called to day lest death and hell prevent us in our delays and presumptions Sanctifie to us all those occasions monitions and warnings by which thy providence presents the thoughts and state of death to us as the truest glass of all earthly glory that we may so lay them to heart as to die dayly to all inordinate love of our selves and of this world which at best is loss and dung in comparison of the excellency of our Lord Jesus Christ in whom thy love to us is better then life it self Thou hast by thy power given us our lives in this vain world by thy providence thou hast preserved them by thy patience thou hast spared them to this day notwithstanding we have with many sins and much unthankefulness provoked thee to our hurt yea by thy holy Word thou hast shewed and offered to us the way and reward of a better life upon our turning to thee with all our hearts from dead works to serve the living God O teach us so to number our days as to apply our hearts to true wisedom to value this pretious moment not to mispend it yea to redeem it because the days past have been evil and upon this moment depends our eternal fate O thou that hast made our moment here though it be sinful not wholly miserable but hast sweetned it with many mercies let not our eternity be miserable and sinful It is one great comfort in our mortality as to this life that we consider our sins shall not be immortal in us O let not sin die with us but before us as a work of choise and grace not of infirmity force and necessity We humbly lay hold on that eternal life which is thy gift through Jesus Christ our Lord. As we every day grow elder so Lord make us every day somewhat better as neerer to our graves so fitter for heaven teach us to live every day as if it were our last that we may never live in any such way wherein we cannot meet death comfortably make us such as thou wouldst have us while we live that we may find thee such as we would have thee when we die that when we come to die we may have nothing else to do but to resign our bodies to thy custody and our souls to thy mercy who having made this life on earth common to the bad and good the just and the unjust hast certainly prepared another state in which shall be infinite difference and everlasting distinction of recompenses to such as fear thee and such as fear thee not O enable us to do our duty and we are sure to receive thy rewards write thy name in our hearts and we need not doubt but our names are written in heaven even in thy Book of Life Sweeten the bitter thoughts of death to us by our faith and hope in the meritorious death the victorious resurrection and glorious ascension of Jesus Christ for our sakes let us find by our holiness and newness of life by our being dead with Christ and living to him that we are passed from death to life That our departure hence may be a joyful passage to a better life which consists in the vision and fruition of thy self O blessed Creator who must needs be better then all things thou hast made and as more necessary so infinitely more useful sweet and comfortable to us O that we may be willing and fitted to leave all to come to thy self that we may with all the blessed Angels and Saints for ever in heaven see love praise admire adore and enjoy thee O holy Father Son and Spirit the only true God To whom be glory and honour life and power thanks and dominion for ever Amen Februarii 17. Anno 1657. Observationes habitae In Dissectione Corporis Illustrissimi Nobilissimi Viri D. ROBERTI RICH coram Medicinae Doctoribus Chirurgis infra subscriptis 1. INventi sunt Pulmones substantiâ duriores quam secundùm naturam mole longè majores quam pro ratione pectoris toti ferè scrophulosi caseosâ materiâ magna ex parte purulentâ referti Superiori parte lobi dextri lacuna reperta est pure plena ad quantitatem cochlearis unius 2. Aqua collecta in sinistra cavitate Thoracis ad fesque librae quantitatem vel circiter 3. Auricula dextra Cordis major erat sinistrâ proportione ferè quintuplici 4. Mesenterium refertum glandulis scrophulosis aliquibus magnitudinem Ovi Gallinacei aequantibus aliis minoribus materiâ quadam sebaceâ plenis cum purulentiae guttis hinc inde sparsis in aliquibus 5. In substantia Panchreatis glandulae peregrinae huic annexus tumor scrophulosus grandis ad hepar usque protensus Orisicium Venae Portae comprimens 6. Vesicula fellis exteriùs albicans flaccida aliquam quantitatem fellis dilutioris continens 7. Hepar colore Albidiori substantiâ debito majori 8. Splen satìs laudabilis nisi quòd hinc inde granulis scrophulosis refertus 9. Inte Musculos Lumbares glandulae duae ingentes scrophuloae à quinta vertebra sinistrae partis una ad Inguen usque se protendebat ex dextra parte altera non adeo longa Fran. Prujean Geor. Bates Tho. Coxe Robertus Lloyd J. Goddard Theophilus Garancieres Edward Arris Chirurgus John Soper Chirurgus I Have judged my publishing of this Funeral-Sermon upon the immature death of the Son the fittest occasion I am ever like to have while I live to present those who can look upon eminent goodness without evil eyes with a short Epitome of the Mothers worth as it was long since in way of Epitaph composed by a person whose ambition is That justice might be done to the dead as well as to the living Vicious minds and manners like dead carkasses are then best when so buried that nothing may appear to posterity of their noysome and contagious fedities But exemplary and meritorious
FUNERALS MADE CORDIALS IN A SERMON Prepared and in part Preached at the solemn Interment of the Corps of the Right Honorable ROBERT RICH Heire apparent to the Earldom of WARWICK Who aged 23. died Febr. 16. at Whitehall and was honorably buried March 5. 1657. at Felsted in Essex By JOHN GAUDEN D. D. of Bocking in Essex Therefore I hated life for all is vanity and vexation of spirit Eccles 2.17 But the things that are not seen are eternal 2 Cor. 4.18 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 Plato LONDON Printed by T. C. for Andrew Crook and are to be sold at the Green Dragon in St. Pauls Church-yard 1658. TO The Right Honorable the Lady FRANCES RICH. Madam THough I am justly tender of exasperating so vehement and unfeigned a grief as your Ladiship hath constantly expressed to the noble Mr. Rich both living and languishing dying and dead by my applying any such Balsame as may seem to renew your wound and pain yet knowing that your Ladiships greatest comforts next those of divine infusion arise from those proportions which your just sorrows bear to your generous affections which are now become the occasion and measure of your affliction I thought it would neither be offensive to your honour nor unbeseeming my respects if I justified your exceeding grief by representing to the world how diservedly you have loved and how worthily you have mourned for that Gentleman of whose honour and happiness even from his infancy I was most seriously ambitious Hence it is that I have adventured to dedicate to your Name this Funeral Cordial which was first devoted to adorn the Christian Interment and revive the honored Name of your dear Husband that since You lived not long together in your marriage yet You might at least be inseparable in this monument which aims not to add any further secular pomp to his dust much less to gratifie the impertinent curiosity of this or after ages touching his life sickness disease or death but rather to advance the glory of God in his unsearchable ways also to summon such as yet survive him to consider their latter ends that they may betimes even in youth remember their Creator and apply their hearts to true saving and eternal wisdom To these great and good ends I presume your Ladiships passionate piety will permit me to improve so sad a dispensation of providence whose aspect not only looks to your Ladiship but to all that stand within the view reach and terror of so sharp a stroak which deserves to be so far laid to heart by all spectators until they find their hearts mollified and mended through that gracious virtue which may by fear of death and grief for sin make way for faith in Christ and love of God Certainly a penitent and pious use is the best that can be made of such dreadful monitions that no seeming splendor of prosperity no vain confidences of youth and life no cumulations of worldly contents no momentary honours and imaginary pleasures should either blind or divert any of us from dayly taking a serious prospect of our sins and our souls of our death and judgement of our God and Saviour Nothing in all my lifes observation except one unparallel'd instance hath ever faln out of more pregnant and potent influence to abate the presumption of human vanity worldly confidence and earthly glory than the sudden Eclipse and fall of this great Star which was but lately risen to its lustre and conspicuity The contemplation of his so early death is no small warning to us that are yet living especially to those who most dally with death while they affect a dilatory indifferency as to any practise of repentance and true piety being afraid of nothing so much as of being good too soon as if they could be too soon in a capacity of happiness I know the folly and madness of many who have had not only ingenuous but religious breeding is usually such that though they please themselves in being civil and accomplist toward men yet they make no scruple of being neglective rude affrontive yea insolent toward God and therein cruel to their own souls forgetting at once both their moment and God's eternity which desperate frolick usually holds with many not only during the adventerous extravagancies of their youth and spring which is the chief hour of temptation and power of darkness but it extends by the hardning habits and deceitfulness of our sinful hearts to our Autumn and decline God knows our vicious accesses to the vanities and inordinacies of life are early and speedy but our gracious recesses in order to an holy life and happy death are very flow and late if ever unless special grace prevent the best of nature and God's good Spirit perfect the best of our educations Madame I write not at this rate out of a Censorian vanity to reproach others but out of an humble sense of my own infirmities and out of a Christian sympathy to others impendent miseries Alas 't is too evident that many persons otherways of excellent useful parts do live amidst the offers of eternal life and the terrors of eternal death as if they had never laid to heart either their own or any others death no nor the death of their blessed Saviour by the price of whose blood they have been both meritoriously Sacramentally redeemed from their vain conversation It is both a sad and shameful thing to consider that the least and last thoughts of many titularly Christians are devoted to their God their Saviour and their Souls These grand concernments are late unwelcome and but hardly admitted after the surfeits of sensual pleasures the crowds and pester of worldly affairs the importunities of ambitious designs and other busie vanities which so ingross the whole man and time that there is little place allowed in most mens and womens hearts or space in their lives which are always upon the confines and brink of death for that great point of wisedom and work of salvation which consists in beginning betimes to resist and retrench those evils to which our depraved hearts do naturally prompt us that so we might with greater speed and less impediment advance to that Supream and immutable good to which as we are invited and beseeched by the tender mercies and love of God in Christ so by the principles of true reason and religion and no less by the real interests of our own safety honour and eternal felicity The promoting of all which being my main design in publishing this grave piece I hope both your Ladiships great sadness and passion and my own deep resentments for the dead may be sufficient Apology for my freedom both of tongue and pen toward the living not only my natural genius prompting me but my conscience commanding me specially in publique and sacred remonstrances to speak and write out that is to use such honest Parrhesie as will least smother wholesome truths or flatter secure sins Nothing is more deformed
disarmed their revenges forced them to shed teares even over their enemies corps or graves as Alexander the Great did over Darius and Julius Caesar when he saw his potent Rival Pompey the Great 's head deformedly parted from his body by treacherous villany These glasses shewed to every man their own faces in the truest and most unflattering representations Mors sola fatetur Quantula sint hominum corpuscula Some of the ancient Philosophers professed they profited most by conversing with the dead that is with good books whose Authors were long agone dead as to their bodies but living in the noble monuments of their minds Libri animorum urnae Mentium magnarum aeterna monumenta Lipsius their writings which are the urns or repositories of souls here on earth This was very elegant and very true there being as none more durable Monuments so no better Monitors Tutors and Instructers then those that are farthest remote from all passions of fear or flattery from the vices and parties of the age in which men live Nor is the frequenting of dead mens funerals less effectual to work on living mens hearts For as some Nonconformists of old the dead never speak louder then when they are most silenced nor shine brighter then in that night of darkness which is sending them to their long homes and to make their lasting beds in the cold grave that dismal house of darkness Dead men by an holy kind of Magick which is a due meditation of them and our selves doe in a sort revive to us and walk with us yea haunt us and talk with us in a dumb but potent kind of oratory Sometimes their noble deeds and good works praise them and upbraid us who are strangers yet to their worth and enemies to their holy examples Sometimes they lift up their voice like a trumpet of terrour to us in the sad riot and debaucheries and security of of their lives and in the suddenness the despair and dreadfulness of their deaths Sometimes the solemnity of their Funerals the mementoes of their Epitaphs and those Inscriptions which give Marmora animata as it were breath to their dust and a spirit or life to their marble monuments All these summon us to serious reflections that as Pliny tells us the dead sea affords some medicinals and mummy it self is become a useful drug in medicaments so great and special good use may be made of those that are recens mortui new dead among our neighbours friends acquaintance relations superiors inferiors Nulla unquam de morte hominis cunctatio longa As no mans death should be precipitated because life is invaluable and once lost is irreparable so nor is any mans death to be taken with a careless and useless indifferencie specially when it is neer us and like Balshazzars hand on the wall by the fingers of a man pointing to us Mortuorum funera viventium monita or writing as it were either some lesson for us or terrors against us some monition or instruction One of the great Egyptian Kings Sesostris as I remember commanded this to be written on his Tomb or Urn 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 Whoever lookes on my Sepulchre Discite justitiam moniti ne temerite dives let him learn to be religious to fear and serve the gods The Scythians while yet Heathens and synonymous with Barbarity yet were so ingenuous to improve the Deaths of their most deserving Princes that they cut their dead bodies into little pieces which they kept about them as Jewels in precious boxes 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 as amulets or defensatives against vice and maladies no less then incentives to virtue and conservatives of their felicity The Ethiopians in a different manner yet to the same design were wont to put the intire bodies of their Princes exsuccated or dried by sweet spices and the Sun into glass Urns or transparent Coffins which they set in publick and most conspicuous places as Varro tells us the Romans did their Statues to be as it were the great Censors and Monitors no less then the exemplary inciters of posterity to parallel vertues 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 Infinite were the inventions of ingenious Antiquity either to advance the honour of the dead or to vindicate or revenge them as much as might be done by poor mortals from mortality or at least to moderate and qualifie the impotent passions and enormous grief of Survivors Hence they not only held their Geniusses immortal which they venerated by a will-worship and is properly Superstition but they built them stately and portentous Sepulchres for their bodies in Pyramids Mausoles and the like Fabricks which were Miracles of Architecture that their dust might have as stately palaces as themselves once living enjoyed Ludos solennes Besides they instituted solemn Sacrifices and magnificent conventions mixt with activity and bravery Judg. 11. See Ludo. Caepel votum Jephtae interludes and devotion in memorial of them as Jephtah did for his daughters being sacrificed as a 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 curseor Anathema so devoted to God as was not redeemable Alexander the great at the Funeral of Ephestion squandred in a profuseness of passion and prodigality fit for none but himself so many Talents as amounted to more then a million of pounds sterling Nay See Bish Vsser his Chrono Imp. Alex. M. the Roman pride and glory dared Coelum ipsum petere ambitiosà nimis stultitiâ to vye with the Gods in Heaven and by the sumptuous pomp of their Funeral Piles and the Eagles mounting from the flames of them upward to raise the vulgar credulity beyond the thoughts of their Princes mortality to the imaginations of a Deity 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 Rom. vid. Lip alios Thus fearing that Heaven should not be fully planted they sent them Colonies from earth that such as had either deserved very well of mankind or were able unpunished to do much mischief by such soveraign impiety as was great but not good might fill up the lower formes of Heaven which yet wanted Gods to supply them Which fancy did not stray much from that of some Christian Fathers who conceive the fall and defalcation of Angels when they degenerated to Devils is to be repaired by substituting as many Saints or Christian Heroes into their room How the souls of all those got to Heaven whom vulgar clamours and applauses or politick Deifications or Papal Canonizations lift up thither I list not to enquire I believe many of their Spirits went no higher then their Eagles might soar I am sure popular Superstition or passion is prone to fix upon many a golden Calf this title and proclamation Exod. 32.8 These are thy Gods O Israel Nor is any thing more frequent then as Crysologus observes for the pomp of Funerals to lye and flatter Mentitur funeris pompa fallaci vanitate adulantium Multos pompa funeris ad coelum evehit quos peccati pondus
made from the occasions and spectacles of mortality are excellent and many yea as obvious and easie as they are very useful and necessary for the state and heart of poor sinful mortals One Commentator oppressed with the plenty and variety of the benefits which rise from the due contemplation of Death of which he enumerates very few wraps up his thoughts in this oratorious expression He must be a potent and pathetick Orator full of a copious and apt eloquence who can sufficiently set them forth Gregory the Great in his Morals gives us this in general Mr Cartwright on Eccles Fructus mortis tum esse muliplices ut illis recensendis prolixa oratio sufficeret Oculos quos vitae voluptas claudit mortis amaritudo aperit That many times the bitterness of death opens those eyes which the sweetness of life had quite shut up We read that the famous Thomas Waldo of Lions the Father of the Waldenses had his first deaths wound I mean as to his sin and luxury made upon his heart by his seeing one fall down suddenly dead in the streets It was a dart which so strake through his liver that he presently applyed to a severe and pious reformation of life It is your unhappiness Right honorable and beloved that you are not at present blessed with such a Preacher who might most improve to you this sad occasion by shewing you according to the merit and import of it and the Text what are the excellent advantages you may make of it by laying it in the several aspects and instances of it to your heart But if I were able to doe it yet the streights of time and your other occasions urging upon you and me would not permit me to use so diffused and ample a way of speaking as possibly I might in this particular case and at this time attain being my self none of the least pathetick mourners And we know as Synesius tells us nothing is more eloquent then unfeigned sorrow if I list not to be silent or only to weep Great grief hath something exstatick 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 and is capable of as high an Enthusiasm as love Indeed both of them in their paroxysms like some fits of sickness doe as it were lift a man above and transport him beyond his wonted and everyday Self However since your and my duty is not to leave this Text and occasion unapplyed to our hearts give me leave as far as I may with bounds of discretion to set forth to you what advantages Solomon intended and if they cannot reach your hearts possibly they may mine own but I hope by Gods blessing they may come home to all our hearts 1. At the house of mourning upon Funeral occasions lay to heart what is first in view and next to hand Phil. 3.21 that is the state of thy frail and vile body 1. As it is the prison burthen snare poyson and oppression many times of thy precious soul which I doe not now aggravate or lay to its charge and at its best Rom. 7.24 it is but the cage of many foul noxious and noysome humours and diseases its truest stile and title is what Paul gives it a body of death it s own traitor devourer killer and destroyer for the most part conceiving and hatching carrying and contriving many times such principles of mortality and methods of malignity in it as lie in wait and unawares break out to surprize thee in thy greatest security confidence of life Like a flattering and smiling Sea so is a youthful healthful handsome and athletick body soon cast into a dangerous storm of sickness and dashing it self in pieces by violent and unexpected diseases Thus is thy body in its seeming health 2. View the body in its sicknesse and inquietudes its pains and anguishes its various and tedious distempers like the Demoniack in the Gospel sometimes cast into the fire of Calentures sometimes into the water of long and fainting sweats sometimes it 's in an African Syrtes or hot sands boyling its self in its own grease and washing by its unnatural flames that native oyl or Balsam of life which sustains that lamp otherwhile it is condemned to Scotish colds and Northern torpors having in the same little world both the inhabitable Climates Thus tormented between its Canicular fryings and its Hyperborean freezings what tongue can expresse sufficiently the alternative torments which by a strange vicissitude seem to delight in taking turnes to rack the poor and pitiful bodie of man 3. Which now wasted with their intestine conflicts and having nothing to complain of or contend against so much as it self grows faint and feeble exsuccated dis-spirited loathing as Job speaks all manner of food Job 33.20 and robbed of its sleep by those pestilent vapours which rise from it self At length helplesse and hopelesse not able to remove or move it self it would grow its own dunghill and be buried in its own putrefaction and filth if the humanity and charity of some and the mercenary necessity of others did not move them to help this poor carkass whose flesh falls its skin shrivels the beauty and majesty of the face vanisheth the vigour of the eyes sink the sinews are feeble the whole fabrick totters like a crazy house ready to fall with its own weight 4. At last all the powers of nature fail and the soule weary of so crazy and unquiet a lodging which is haunted with so many evil spirits flies away leaving this poor carkass to it self O then look seriously upon it view it well and lay to heart whether the fanciful Poets and other amorous flatterers did not lye strenuously and blaspheme the Creator most wittily when they were ready to swear that they saw a brighter and fairer Heaven in the face of such a body living then that which was over their heads that the lustre of those eyes now sadly and severely closed was sufficient to supply the Sun's absence or dazle its noon-day light that those were the cheeks whose orient beauty made the morning toblush for shame to see it self overcome that those were the lips which contended with roses and conquered all rubies that the eloquence of that mouth and tongue now shut and eternally silent was the charm and amazement of all that were happy to hear it speak that this rare creature was the center and dispenser of all favours or terrours life and death to the world Now O fictitious fool lay to heart and see Quantum mutatus ab illo Hectore what a sad and horrid change on a sudden is befaln this Specter this Empusa this poor and pitiful body how pallid how livid how dreadful how menacing it is at first to all spectators At length how loathsome and putid how offensive and abominable even to those that most loved admired adored it You are forced at last to recant your foolery by removing it out of your sight out of your sent out of your doors
to hide it as carrion in the earth commit it to the wormes and leave it to its own corruption Ossa vides regum vacuis exhausta medullis Vnus Pellaeo juveni non sufficit orbis Sarcophago contentus erit Even this body which was the lanthorn of so bright and noble a soul as Solomon's The Citadel or Fort of so great a strength as Sampson's who had an Army in each Arm The Throne or Metropolis of Beauty as Queen Esther's The Magazeen of so much wit and knowledge as Achitophel's The Seraglio of so much pleasure as Sardanapalus's The Bel and Dagon of so much good cheer as Dives devoured To this deformity necessity poverty rottenness baseness sordidness is it brought in a few days Blessed God! if we laid this to heart could we so much dote and pamper so much indulge and cocker our wretched bodies to the neglect prejudice detriment and destruction of our precious souls Go now O you wanton Herodiasses O you proud Jezebels O you tender delicate women whose curiosity to adorn your bodies poseth Interpreters to know what those artifices and instruments were which you used in Isaiah's time Isa 3. when luxury and curiosity were as it were under age and in their minority which now are much more ingenious adult and full grown after two thousand years improvement Lay to heart what fine dishes you dress for worms for fishes for fowls it may be for dogs to feed upon Lay to heart and consider whether your ways be equal or your hour-glasses proportionate which measure out many hours in a short day to dress your bodies and scarce allow one half hour or a few minutes in one or many days to purge to wash to prepare and adorn your souls by prayers and tears by reading and meditating by humbling and repenting by fitting and dressing them for God Whether it be not an high degree of folly and madness to bestow so much of a momentany and precious life in doing that at morning which is to be undone at night to spend the best and most of your time in a circle of vanity Not that decency and elegancy cost and comeliness are wholly denied by the severities of religion but comparatively they are by the two great Apostles in respect of the inward 1 Tim. 2.9 1 Pet. 3.3 adornings of the soul Go now O you Shee-men you delicate and effeminate Gallants of my own sex lay to heart whether it be worthy of masculine wisedome and strength of manly vertue and honour of Christian gravity and modesty to trifle out your time also in female studies of softness and luxury in being your own babies Idols and Idolaters in studying your backs and bellies your food and raiment more then any good books or any good men or any good and great design worthy of you Ad quid perditio haec To what purpose is this waste of thoughts and time of cost and pains in both sexes O lay to heart what a rotten post you guild for a moment and what a marble pillar you neglect to polish for eternity I mean your souls which are divinae particulae aurae the breath and beam of God in your original Lay to heart when either you see the deformed frowns and fedities of a newly dead body or the black flesh and sordid dust which you may see in the coffins of those that have been long dead think then how little cause you have to be proud of these rotten rags of the soule this rubbidg of mortality how injurious you are to your divine and immortal souls when you leave them to their own native decays and eternal ruines when you neglect to raise polish and improve them when you thus study by Atheistical luxuries to deprave debase and debauch them much worse being wholly or chiefly intent to the trimming feeding and pampering of your bodies as if your souls were given you only for salt to keep you sweet of which you never have so true a view and prospect as when they are represented to you in anothers death Let dead carkaesses be your looking-glasses then bring forth all the flowers of Oratory all the Poets fancies all the ornaments that art and wit can steal from all creatures and see if by these Spices Gums and odours thou canst keep thy vile body from appearing rotten and unsavoury to thee or that by those colours and adornings thou canst preserve it from death and abominable deformity Since then all these things the whole frame and goodly fabrick of our Microcosm these little Epitomies of the great world our petty and pygmy bodies in which the heaven and earth the light and darkness the celestial and elementary bodies are as it were bound up in a small volume or decimo sexto Since as St. Peter says all these things shall be dissolved 2 Pet. 3.11 What manner of persons ought we all to be in all holy conversation and godliness 2. When thou hast taken a full view of this sink of putrefaction a dead body then lay to heart and consider by way of Analogy or proportion if a dead body be such a mass of corruption such a summary of sordidness such an abstract of loathsomness to thy self and others though formerly indeared as friends and lovers to it as wives or husbands as parents or children as friends and favourites yet thou canst now no longer indure its company or sight O how foul how filthy how nasty how ugly how loathsome how abominable would a dead soul be and appear if thou couldst see it as God's pure eyes do Tully had a very good fancy and well expressed That if we could see vertue which is the rational beauty of the soul with our bodily eyes no man would be a suiter to or lover of any other beauty it would so excite attract and concenter all our affections to it By a parallel allusion I may tell you that if we could by any spectacles or opticks by our owne or others eyes heightned to a spiritual perspicacity behold as St. Bernard speaks how rueful dreadful Quam foedum quam horendū sit spectaculum Deo Angelis anima cadaverosa in peccatis mortua libidinum tabe squalida ira invidia tota deformis horrida and execrable an object the soul is to God and Angels when it is as a dead carkass naturally and impenitently dead in sin rotten with predominant vices squallid with enormous lusts dissolved into sensual pleasures and deformed with all manner of confusions and corruptions This alone would monopolize and ingross all the irascible faculties of the soul by which we hate loath abhor detest and fly from any thing Corruptio optimi est pessima no carkass is so unsavoury or pestiferous as mans Hence plagues oft follow great slaughters of men in war unburied carkasses poysoning and infecting the very air No soul but that of man can putrefie or die nor is any putrefaction like that of the divine and reasonable soul become
that we fear to die but not to sin when as all the sad aspects and events of death rise from sin which is the Marah and Meribah the Stygian spring or lake whence our waters of bitterness and strife doe flow not to be healed but by that sacred wood of Christs cross cast into them not in the natural relique but in that mystical merit of him that hung upon it and bare our sins 1 Pet. 2.24 Pro. 19.4 That sin which thou as a fool makest a mock of how canst thou O poor bubble thus play with poyson dally with a dragon sport with a devil and caper over hell Wilt thou die in thy sinful smiles and pleasures Is it not horrid to be smothered in down-beds or drowned in malmsy as the Duke of Clarence was Will it not be bitterness in the latter end Remember this stream of Jordan in which thou swimmest runs to the dead sea The end of all these things as St. Rom. 6.23 Phil. 3.19 Rom. 1.33 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 Paul tells us is destruction and death in all senses For these things cometh the wrath of God upon the children of disobedience and sons of death Peccati deformitatem foetorem reputa as a Commentator observes on this Text. As a dead carkass is to thee loathsome and to be cast out of thy presence so is a soul a sinner that is dead in sin and impenitence while he lives Wouldest thou disarm the terrour power Morticinia non erant sacrificia and sting of death slay thy sin let it not die monte incruentâ a natural death by age and infirmity but a violent one by mortifying and crucifying Sinne must not die with us but before us Deut. 14.21 Nothing that died of it self was to be offered to God as a sacrifice No companion worse when we goe to our long home then sin if it be yet living in us and with us in the love power pleasure and purpose of sinning This worm will never die after death Now is the time to dy to sin while thou livest Now or never ohn 8.21 Lay this to heart lest thou die for ever in thy sins as Christ tells the Jewes for want of timely dying to them For in the sins a man hath committed and not repented of Ezek. 18.24 he shall surely die saith the Lord again again by the Prophet Ezekiel Nor is sin truly repented of unless it be mortified at least in the full and unfeigned resolutions of a believing humble contrite and penitent though dying sinner The will here shall be accepted for the deed and the purpose bears the value of the practise Wheresoever the black characters of sin are washed from the soul by penitent tears 2 Cor. 8.12 and the blood of Christ the lively image of God will appear as the face of the dry land did when the flood was fully asswaged The tyranny of death shall no more prevail when once the dominion of sin is taken away which hath no right but is a meer usurpation upon the reasonable creature 4. Quà m fugax fallax quam certa incerta quam procax procellosa Bern. Lay to heart the frailty and vanity the misery and momentariness of this short sinful and sorrowful life how fallacious and fading how short and vncertain how troublesome and importune this gleam and storm of life is as St Bernard speaks How specious a bubble how delightful a dream how goodly a nothing it is for a reasonable soule to intend to delight in to dote upon to rest and root its happinesse in Wilt thou set thine heart saith the Prophet on that which is not Job 7.17 wilt thou lay out and lavish thy thoughts in such things as have no worth and bear no price in that Country whither thou goest so that when thy vain and vexatious life fails all thy thoughts must perish Psal 146.4 when this little cock-boat of thy carkass comes a ground and splits Magno viatico breve iter non ornatur sed opprimitur Sen. all thy voyage is lost all thy good things with which thou wert not more adorned then incumbred and rather childishly pleased then really profited these sink with thee and are swallowed up in the Abyssus of forgetfulnes never to be buoyed up again nor enjoyed any more by thee as is expressed by Christ in the parabolical history of Dives Luke 16.19 Luke 12.19 which is too oft verified by sad experience of rich men In order to shew you the vanity of all things in this world that you call great or good high or honorable sacred or civil I shall not need beyond your own fresh experience to tell you Right Honorable and Beloved of those strange revolutions and excentrick motions which have befaln the highest Orbs of this British world which have shaken Heaven and Earth Church and State turning the Sun into darkness and the Moon into blood to the terror and astonishment of all the world at home and abroad They are as beasts without understanding who learn not wisedom and humility by those Paradoxes of providence which have posed the wise exhausted the rich debased the honorable diminished the great onely the gracious heart reads these riddles and the spiritual man understands God's meaning in all these intricacies which are like Ezekiels wheels full of dreadful and yet orderly confusions very perplexed in their motions yet evidently guided by that spirit within them Ezek. 1.20 which is wise and wonderful in all its ways These are publick lectures of the vanity and vexation of life which God hath taught us all in this Nation with the sound of the drum trumpet lessons that are written with the point of the sword as their pens and the blood of these Nations as their inck They that run may read and they that live the life of sober men and good Christians will learn Gods meaning to be this That the rich man should not glory in his riches nor the strong man in his strength Jer. 6.23 24. nor the wise man in his wisedom nor the great man in his greatness nor Princes in their Thrones 1 Cor. 1.32 but he that glories should glory in the Lord that he knows his blessed will in order to a better life Look a little lower to this Noble Gentleman whose Corps are here before us and his most Noble Mother who Ires in her dust not far from us There have seldom been afforded in any age in any one family greater instances by which to confute the confidences of poor mortals as to any thing desireable or enjoyable in this life Nothing of education honour estate comliness greatness of relations ampleness of worldly enjoyments could be modestly wished beyond what they seemed to enjoy both of them in the flower of their age in the conspicuity of grand fortunes and honours in the probability of long enjoying all those happinesses which are attainable under the
many pens illustrated by frequent Funerals meeting us every moment and at every turn yet seldom laid to heart but as a cloud it passeth over our heads without showring down any softning drops on our souls These discourses as hail on the hills rattle in every Funeral Sermon and exhortation upon our ears and heads but seldome enter and pierce into our hearts They are like Ghosts or Fantasms that appear and vanish scaring us a little but they touch us not at all notwithstanding the heapes upon heapes which are very ten and twenty years made up of our dead friends kindred and acquaintance who are no sooner removed out of our sights but they are gone out of our memories as to any pious improvement Xerxes is reported to have wept when seeing his vast Army which made a million of fighting men he considered how one century of years would mow them all down as so many flowers or spires of grass in a field The softness of Christians hearts should go beyond the savageness of such an Heathen He considered the breaking of the box but he was not sensible of those sweet resentments that savour of life unto life which a wise and gracious heart extracts out of the objects and meditations of death He beheld the carkasses of so many Lions but he found no honey in any of them He had only the eyes of experience sense and reason but not of grace and religion which looks through the dark mist and medium of death to the prospect of a true and eternal life That great Persian Commander as the Roman Emperors after him Quos nec spectasset quisquā nec spectatuus esset Ludi Seculares Suet. in Claud. when they caused to be proclaimed at their greatest secular Interludes and most solemn Pageants which were presented but once in an hundred years Come and see those shows which no man living ever did see heretofore nor shall ever see again These men I say had the Moon and Stars of common reason and experience to shew them their own and other mens mortality but they wanted the beams of the Sun of righteousness the light of God's word in the Scriptures which every where sets so many afterisks or memorable notes of emphasis and terror upon Death In the day that thou eatest thou shalt die Gen. 2. An Oracle which presently began to be fulfilled as soon as the condition was forfeited just as the sea ebbs from the very first minute of its recess or abatement though sensim pedetentim by silent steps and almost insensible degrees according to the patience and indulgence of a long-suffering God Yet as the candle is dying or consuming as soon as it is lighted or burning and the hour-glass is emptying as soon as it is running so the life of man ran to waste and the exhaustings of death so soon as it ceased to have communion and supplies of immortal influx from the God of life When the intercourse between the spring and the current is once stopped and obstructed the constancy fulness and perennity of the stream presently decays and as it drieth up it dies A sinful man is presently surrounded with a thousand deaths every moment Mille modi mortis c. and though we can die but one death in the conquest or completion yet how many legions of deaths are ever marching in array against us both as to the menacing preparation without us and the disposition or infirmity within us which expose us to die on every side There is not only mors in urna but in olla in victu vestitu halitu death in our coffins and urns but in our cups and pots in our meats and drinks and in our bodies and bowels yea in our breath and bread which we use as the breath staff of life the short reciprocations returns of which are the constant supports of our lives and the chief antemuralia defensatives against death Thus the Philosophers discoursed when death striking upon their hard and flinty hearts Poena ad unum terror ad omnes they saw by the sparks or strictures of reason their own mortal condition But the Divine Oracles are like Thunderbolts falling here and there and neer to every one of us though their execution light not presently on our heads Heb. 9.27 yet the terror and contrition should upon our hearts because it is by an unrepealable decree appointed for all men once to die and after that the judgement Death as a great drag-net fetches all into its capacious bosome this King of terror as Job calls death is verè Rex Catholicus truely a Catholick King reigning over all Pallida mors aequo pulsat pede pauperum tabernas Regumque turres Hor. as the Apostle Paul expresses it even those that most glory in their royal priveledges and titles No Emperor hath any Empire over it nor against it any more then the Brittish King Canutus of Kent had against the seas incroaching upon his Throne Or then that cunning Prince Lewis the 11th of France who as Phil. Commines reports fenced himself Phil. de Com. Histor of France but in vain with holy reliques surrounding his body and bed to see if he could scare away death with those 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 holy terriculaments Kings that have a just power of life and death as to their subjects have no power over their own to prolong their lives or protract their deaths one moment Kings are conquered and cow'd by death Potentates are impotent in this conflict for they assist they very enemy and are traytors to themselves and if no other force doth the force of their own infirmities will certainly destroy them No Protectors can protect themselves or others from this civil war this intestine enemy which is unavoidable irresistable which hath all the engines for battering and arts of undermining us Non domus fundus c. neither house nor land nor father nor friend nor favour nor power nor Courts nor Crowns nor the surest defensative under heaven against men which is a valiant and faithful Army these are all as bulrushes and straws in the way of death which is the way of all the living Death in this absolute empire and unlimited soveraignty using not only jure suo its own right but jure divino God's right as the executioner of his just irrevocable and dreadful sentence upon all mankind Among whom none ever was sufficient to answer that Question Psal 89.48 What man is he that liveth and shall not see death Shall he deliver his soule from the hand of the grave Yea when the Son of the everliving God who is God co-essential and immortal with his Father appeared among men as one of us in the form of sinful flesh Death though he had no just claim against him because no guile or sin was found in him Phil. 2.8 1 Pet. 2.22 John 10.18 yet used its prerogative And though this blessed Messias could
thee as an armed man attended with death and judgment sin and hell an evil conscience and an angry God then I say one day or hour will be as earnestly desired by thee as one drop of water was by Dives and it may be as justly and certainly be denied thee the common fate of riotous Prodigals following thee in this to be reduced to a morsel of bread after sottish profusenesse and shameful luxury We unjustly quarrel with God and nature as Seneca observes that our life is so short when indeed our care is too little to live well which is the onely true life It is one thing to be a man and another to live as a man It was a true fig-tree which was barren and cursed by Christ Maximam partem hominum brutum occupat In most men for a long time the beast in them overlayes the man Sensual lusts are night and day the imperious Incubusses or Ephialtae of their reason What one said with much salt to an Epicure Deus tuus est porcorum Deus is verified in most people during their youth and in many long after even through the whole course of their life They own no other God then the God of swine reverencing the Divine Majesty no more then hogs doe nor expecting more from him then may serve their bellies which is the God they serve as the Apostle speaks nor returning more acknowledgment or service to him yea they live tanquam poeniteret non pecudes natos as if they only repented they were not made only beasts with bodies In titles perhaps noble in estates splendid in words rational and in formalities civil yea perhaps religious in shews but in deeds they are debasers of their native and divine dignity Victa libidine succed it ambitio victa ambitione succedit avaritia victa avaritia succedit superbia vitium inter ipsas virtutes timendum Hieron dethroners of reason despisers of their God and true Religion doting on sensible objects all their lives by a continued succession of vices and inordinate defires and delights which succenturiate or supply the places decayes and recesses of one another as St. Jerome observes till they have wasted life and spirits and time and talents to the very last snuff mean time they have done nothing unde constet vixisse worthy of themselves their relations their God the Church of Christ or their Country From youthful and extravagant lusts they run to pride from pride to hypocrisie from hypocrisie to ambition from ambition to covetousness from covetousness to sacriledge from sacriledge to Atheism from Atheism to stupidity or despair Mean time they have at first it may be with great mirth jollity next with affected gravity and severity not only bought and sold planted and builded married and given in mariage but it may be griped and oppressed killed and possessed subverted and sacrificed all things sacred and civil as much as they could to their own lusts but have never yet had leisure all this while to live or to act any thing but dead works Let them ask their own souls and consciences not quà m fortiter feliciter but quam sanctè justè quid praeclarè quid egregiè fecisti Nay let them ask apart from flatteries Quid non turpiter quid non pudendum quid non poenitendum fecisti What have they done conscienciously justly honestly valiantly for God for the Truth for their own soules or their neighbours good Nay what have they done which in the inward aspect of conscience and many times to outward view of all men is not vile impious to be ashamed of to be repented of They have it may be with Caesar Borgia and Lewis the 11th had much art and Policie but no true piety and charity in them much self-seeking but nothing of self-denying which is the truest touchstone of a Christian constitution They may have been prosperous and yet not pious they may have conquered others but yet not themselves which is the noblest victory They may have gotten much and yet shall be sure to lose all for want of that one thing necessary a good conscience which is the end of living and the 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 only provision for an eternal life A temper of soul which is rightly instructed and guided by the written word of God only sanctified accordingly by his holy spirit practically conformed to his blessed example in all manner of holy conversation this this temper purged by faith in the blood of Christ and so accepted by Gods mercy and dignation through Christs merits makes a good conscience the getting and preserving of which is the main end of life as to our private concern next Gods glory and this alone will bring a man peace in his latter end this alone dares look death and divels in the face to others that have a forme of godliness yet deny the power of it 2 Tim. 3.5 John 3.19 to whom the light of Christian Religion is come and they love darkness more then light their condemnation will be the greater 9. Lay to heart the sameness or variety of aspects wherein death represents to thee the faces and fates of all men living and dying either so alike Eccles 2.16 that as the fool dieth so dieth the wise man as the wicked so the righteous as to the kind and manner of death by sickness pains violence Vide Psal 73.12 Behold these are the ungodly who prosper in the world they increase in riches c. Job 21.7 Wherefore do the wicked live become old yea are mighty in power Jer. 12.1 2. Wherefore doth the way of the wicked prosper why are all they happy that deal very treacherously c. John 7.24 Psal 73.15 suddenness in all shapes or figures of death Besides thou maist observe the frequent riddles and Paradoxes not only of mens lives but of their deaths The righteous and godly that eschew evil and do good who fear God and walk uprightly before him who chuse to suffer rather then sin these are oft persecuted and oppressed with poverty prison banishment and distresses while they live yea and their innocency is many times persecuted to the death by violent and unjust men whereas these live and thrive a long time yea and end their days in prosperous impiety to the great scandal of many that are godly and infinite incouragement of wicked doers as Job David and Jeremiah complain Take heed you judge not as Christ forewarns his Disciples by outward appearance or the fight of thine eyes but judge righteous judgement lest thou condemn the generation of God's people many Prophets Apostles Martyrs and Confessors who have most what been sufferers yea lest thou condemne that Just One Christ himself who died as a Malefactor by popular suffrages and the sentence of a timerous judge nay take heed lest thou condemn the righteous God as if he were unjust in his providences and permissions Take heed thy heart fret not against God nor be
thoughts of death 1 Cor. 7.31 or using this world as if men used it not being so little so nothing of a true and generous Christians main design Yea not only in pursuance of secular and civil advantages with much warpings from law and equity besides violent expressions of their uncharitable passions beyond what becomes men and women professing godliness and tender of the scandals of Christian Religion But further under pretence of religious zeal and special sanctity Blessed Lord what uncharitable fires what unchristian furies are mens spirits ready to kindle in Churches and States both Christian and reformed Tantaene animis coelestibus irae Can heavenly hearts burn with such Kitchin-fires which must be inflamed by pouring the holy oyl of religion upon them untill they come to such conflagrations as kill and destroy even in Gods holy mountain Isa 65.25 raising such fewds and animosities among Christians as are not to be quenched but by each others bloods yea they burn to the nehtermost hell to mutual Anathemas and damnings to eternity Mortales quum simus immortalia non debent esse odia Have we not forgot that we are mortals who maintain such immortal hatred despites cursings condemnings Do we remember the same condemnation from God under which we all naturally lie or that we have the same Redeemer Jesus Christ who hath purchased us to himself and called us to peace love and good order as children of his heavenly Father and brethren to himself and one another Proximorum odia sunt accerbissima Fratrum quoque gratia rara est The neerer we are of kindred must we have less kindness and the more sharp contentions because of the same Country and Church heretofore I beseech you tell me O you torn and tottered flock of Christians now in Old England Can the world in reason think that we Christians are brethren the sons of one Father going on t of Egypt homeward to him every day of this mortal pilgrimage and yet we are every day falling out by the way making religion it self one of the greatest occasions of our bitterest and bloodiest contentions both with each other and with our selves even the more silly and less subtil sort of plain and possibly not ill meaning Christians these are most what gnawing of bones doting about questions endlesly disputing and doubting even while they are decaying and dying So intent as Souldiers to plunder other mens opinions and to live as it were upon the spoils of the Church of England and the Reformed Religion therein heretofore happily established and professed as if free quarter in professing preaching doubting disputing and denying what ever they list that they much neglect as good husbands the more painful charitable and profitable duties of Gods husbandry planting watering and weeding those principles and plants of religion which bear the graces of repentance mortification newness of life charity humility and good works from being Isaacs and Jacobs plain and peaceable spirited professors are turned Ismaels and Esaus rough handed of a more ferine temper living by their bow and sword their hands against every man that is not of their faction and party and their hearts alienated highly from such as were heretofore their Mother Fathers and Brethren These scorching heats of angry differences among Christians spirits do very much dry up all the dews of grace and sweeter influences of Gods Spirit Few consider how soon the Sun may go down upon their wrath Ephes 4.26 not only that of a natural day which should never be for he that sleeps in uncharitable passions hath the Divel for his bed-fellow that night not only in his bed but in his bosome but that Sun of our natural life may go down before thy distempers are alaied to a Christian composure Many Christians in our later dog days are so agitated and hurried up and down with the heat of the weather 1 Tim. 1.16 and the vexatious gadflies of endless and vain janglings that like cattel in Summer they cannot fall to their food wasting much time and spirits in unprofitable disputes following first this faction next that mode in religion 2 Tim. 3.7 ever learning and never coming to the knowledge of saving and necessary which are practical truths So that like the poor Link-boys in winter-nights at London they so spend their lights in running to and fro after every wind of doctrine other mens fantasies opinions and humors that they are fain to go to their own home and to be in the dark going down to their graves in sorrow neither so chearful nor comfortable as Christians might do Isa 50.11 who less delighted living in those sins and sparks which themselves have kindled From this occasion and the like meditation of death lay to heart how much it concerns and becomes thee to carry great moderation as in all things Phil. 4.5 so chiefly in thy passions to be prudent in all the dispensations of thy endeavours cares fears joys loves hopes desires and griefs as well as of thy anger these streams of thy soul must not be let go too plentifully at the flashes or flood-gates which run to waste lest thou robbest that course which should drive thy mill I mean carry on the grand preparations for death and eternity by a sober exact and holy life in which all passions and affections may have their holy use and a comely part to act It is great pity in that one passion of grief which is the softest and most human to see tears plentifully shed for some temporal losse Mollissima corda Humano generi dare se natura fatetur Quum lacrymas dedit or for the death of some dear friend and yet so little so seldome applied to soften and supple the hard and callous heart of a sinner Men and women too are prone to be prodigal of these precious drops which are as the pearls of a penitent sinners eyes and cheeks whose water is turned into wine even of Angels when they rejoyce to see a sinners penitent sorrows which end in eternal joys Lacrymae poenitentium vinum Angelorum Luke 15.10 when every tear quencheth a fiery dart of the Divel or rinseth the conscience of some remaining filth of sin St. Austin confesseth and deploreth his excessive softness after his conversion in mourning for the death of his dear friend Alipius Flebam Didonem occisam cum animam meam mortuam non flebam as somewhat beyond the gravity and moderation of a Christians sorrow And more he bewaileth those fond tears which before his conversion he wept when he read the fable of Didoes death when at the same time he neither deplored nor considered as he saith the dead estate of his own heart and soul to God The blessed Angels if they did visibly converse with us might justly ask most women and men too as these did Mary at the Sepulchre John 20.13 Ploratur lacrymis amissa pecunia veris. Woman why weepest
arbitrary business but of Divine Authority and Institution of highest necessity in the Church so esteemed and so used by all good Christians The modern neglect and indifferency to it either argues the Clergy miserably embased in all points from their ancient dignity or the minds and actions of Christians to become very degenerous and licentious unholy and unthankful not to be mended till the majesty of Religion and the double honour of the Ministry be restored 11. Lay to heart upon the whole matter drawing all the beams of my discourse and your meditations into one point arising from this or the like Funeral-occasions in what posture thou art for death how furnished fitted and prepared I once told this Noble Gentleman two months before he died when I saw his tedious cough very importune and his dispiritings so great that I could say little to him Sir you have nothing so much concerns you as to prepare and to dare to die Ask thy soul O poor mortal not what goods thou hast laid up for many years not what beauty and virtue thou hast married not what honours thou enjoyest not what lands thou possessest or expectest but what preparation thou hast made to meet thy God what defensative to encounter death how far the power of sin is weakned how far the progress of grace is advanced what viaticum aeternitatis provision for eternity thou hast made A Christian must not onely look to Augustus his 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 Sueton. in vita Augusti a gentle and civil or well-natured death but to a gracious a comfortable death for himself and also hopeful and exemplary to others about him The last lightnings or coruscations of a good Christian should be if his natural spirits permit his brightest as the preludium of eternity 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 He should adorn his death as the last act of his life with speaking good of God with telling all about him what the Lord hath done for his soul what experiences of trials and conflicts of comforts and refreshings by Christ his Word and Spirit I allow any mans or womans death-bed to be their pulpit let them then turn preachers as much as they can let them shew forth the loathsome and deadly deformities of sin the worth and excellencies they have found in Christ and his grace the benefit found in his Word Spirit Ministrations and true Ministers that so the surviving world may be the better for those nayles which as Masters of the Assemblies as now candidates and expectants yea percipients of Heaven dying Christians do happily fasten in the minds memories and consciences of their weeping auditors The best Sermons are those that dying men and women preach before their own Funerals Gen. 29. Deut. 32. 1 Kings 2.1 Joshua 23. John 14 15 16 and 19. Chapters 1 Sam. 25.37 as Jacob Moses Joshua and David did yea our blessed Lord Jesus most expressed his inmost and sublimest sense to his Disciples a little before he died as to heavenly comforts prayers and praises A Christian should avoid what possibly may be to die like Nabal as if his heart were first quite dead as a stone within him I mean when God gives spirits and strength to express themselves None are such Infidels as not to believe these dying Orators who are got beyond our pulpit-strains and affected forms above all human fears and flatteries all studies of sides and factions Illum vita nondum dissimulatio deseruit Sueton. in vita Tiberii then or never they are in good earnest Few with Tiberius can be such hypocrites as to act a part only of piety when they are going off the stage of life If we are grafted in the tree of life we shall bear some good fruits living or dying I know the best experiments of grace and the surest both 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 and 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 signes and indications of sincerity are from a good conscience kept up in our lives not hudled up in haste a little before death as goods in a scare-fire only upon the alarm of sickness and death but wisely leisurely gravely and practically methodised and digested yea expressed in our health in the humble and impartial constancy of attending holy duties private and publique in orderly waiting on the true and duly ordained Ministry of Christ in his Church in frequent devout and fervent partakings of the Lords Supper in righteous holy charitable and exemplary lives toward all men which are both useful to mankind by good works and acceptable to God in all humility adorning the Christian and reformed Religion highly magnifying the glory of the grace of God in Jesus Christ An humble heart and an holy life are the best cordials in our deaths for without peace and holiness as the Apostle tells us no man shall see God And Heaven it self will not be welcome to us if holiness be not Heb 12.14 Nec coelum ipsum placebit cui sanctitas displicet for its happiness is no other but perfected holiness then we shall be such as we would be hereafter when we like to be such as God would have us here 12. Last of all The neerer the more remarkable and emphatick any object of death or Funeral-occasion is the more we should lay it to heart As when great wise valiant and honest men like mighty Cedars of Lebanon fall by death either natural or violent by open hostility or treachery as Abner died 2 Sam. 9.33 whose Biere David himself followed honoring by a most generous example that virtue loyalty and fortitude which he found in an enemy toward him nor doth he do it in a courtly formality but with ample publick and unfeigned sorrow even to weeping looking upon that sad and shameful accident as a great reproach and affront to his own party and cause as a dehonesting of his own honour and that Religion which he professed to remove so great a scandal and dishonour from his person conscience Kingdom and profession as attends all treacherous murtherings even of reconciled enemies and rivals David himself doth Abner this honour at his burial to follow the Biere 1. So in the deaths of such excellent Princes as have been or were like to be the Patres patriae Fathers of their Country maintainers of law and justice provident for the publick good in peace and plenty Patrons of learning virtue and established Religion wise and valiant assertors when need requires of their own honour and their peoples safety merciful dispensers of such favours and remissions as may abate the rigors of law with regard to human surprises and infirmities and yet neither weaken the hands of justice nor strengthen the hands of malicious offenders Such Kings and Princes yea any soveraign Magistrates under any title as Joshua and other Judges that are not wholly degenerate from their dignity duty and place are to be duly lamented and their deaths are seriously to be laid to heart because they do not only shew us the
large extents of deaths dominion and soveraignty above all Psal 8.6 for even these Gods Dii umbratiles die like men but they are frequently attended as the succession of months in the year with some alteration of weather many times for the worse So that where any people is blessed with good Kings and gracious Princes it is happy if they do serò in caelum redire in this part of deity Immortality come neerest to the Gods by living long and happily with their people and going as late as may be to Heaven For as good Princes are by good Subjects justly esteemed inter publica gentis bona praecipua Dei dona the chiefest worldly blessings that God can give mankind so their death must needs be reckoned inter luctus epidemicos publica damna among the greatest losses and grounds of most publique sorrow Although they die as Moses Joshua and David in good old ages full of days and honour as Augustus did among the Romans Optimum esset è Republicâ Rom. Severum aut non nasci aut nunquam denasci of whom it might truly be said as was of Severus the Emperor It had been happy for the Empire if either he had never been born or never had died for as he attained the Empire with much war and blood so he setled it with so much justice wisedom and honour for a long time that it was a felicity not possible to survive him But if good and hopeful Princes be cut off immaturely by death as Josiah among the Jews 2 Chro. 35.25 and our pious K. Ed. the 6. no wonder if they go to their graves by water with infinite sad hearts and weeping eyes becoming the piety and humanity of their people Hence the mourning of Hadadrimmon in the valley of Megiddon became not only a Proverb Zach. 12.11 but the highest pattern for publick lamentation at the sad fate and death of an excellent Prince And not without cause may this be a superlative grief because it ever follows where the Shepheard is smitten the sheep are either scattered or wounded or shrewdly warned of God to humble themselves under his mighty hand and unsearchable judgements Matth. 26.31 2. Yea when great and eminent Priests or Prophets of God and his Church as Samuel Jehojada John Baptist James die a natural death or are slain who kept up the majesty of Religion the beauty of holiness and the order of Gods worship being the chariots and horsemen of Israel as Eliah was So among Christian Churches 1 Kings 2.12 such Ministers as have been exemplary in their lives potent in their true doctrine severest exactors of discipline upon themselves burning and shining lights that have been valiant for the truth not popular not partial but unblameable venerable and admirable in all things filling that sphear in which God and the Church had orderly set them either as Bishops or Presbyters by preaching praying writing living and governing the Church worthy of their holy order and function So as did those ancient and renowned Bishops Polycarp of Smyrna Ignatius of Antioch St. Ambrose of Milan St. Cyprian of Carthage St. Athanasius of Alexandria St. Chrysostome of Constantinople St. Iraeneus of Lions St. Austin of Hippo St. Gregory of Rome with infinite other worthy of their successions in that name and order in all Churches and ages sufficient in my judgement to vindicate the office degree name dignity and use of Bishops every where and no where more then in England which had of late as worthy Bishops as ever the Church enjoyed in any place or age since the Apostles When I say such Fathers of the Church die who were in their times as was said of St. Ambrose the Munimenta ornamenta urbis orbis defence and ornaments of their Churches and Countrys the personal death of such Fathers ought to be laid greatly to heart such as was that not long ago of the most learned pious industrious humble indefatigable and Apostolick Bishop Bishop Vsher the late Lord Primate of Armagh As also that of the most eloquent and venerable and painful Bishop of Norwich Doctor Hall with many others now at rest in the Lord of whom the world was not worthy which sought to bury them in silence indignities poverty and obscurity before they were dead or any way had ill deserved of this Church and State or the reformed Religion of which they were most able defenders How much more when the very Function order and degree of that Catholick race the primitive Apostolick and most excellent government of the Church by Bishops comes in any Christian or reformed Church to be destroyed extirpated and buried as it were with the burial of an Ass cast into the graves of the common people and exposed to be trodden under the feet of plebeian contempt Which venerable Order though sixteen hundred years old in the Catholick Church and above 1400 in * In the Council of Arles in France before the first great Nicene Council about the year of Christ 230. three Brittish Bishops were present and subscribed viz. Eborius of York Restitutus of London Adelphius of Colchester as Bishop Vsher observes in his De prim Eccl. Brit. Sirmondus Concil Gall. Tom. 1. p. 9. Lucius the King of the Britans as Bede tells us Hist l. 1. c. 4. received the faith by such as were sent from Elcutherius the 12th Bishop of Rome from the Apostles as Heâ—sippus tells us in Euseb l. 4. c. 22. As Calvin in Epist ad Sadoletum de Necessi Refor Eccles Zanchius Epist ad Elizab Regin am Angl. in Epist ad Grindal Archiep. Cant. Isaac Casaub Epist ad Reg. Jacob. ante Exer. Baron Moulin Ep. ad Epis Winto Beza Epist ad Grindal Archiep. Cant. Pet. Martyr ad Juelli Apolog. praefat Isa 57.1 Psal 116.15 these British Churches yet died not of old age or onely inward decays in the vitals but by force and outward violence which government in its due constitution no Christian or reformed Church not wholly under a democratick or popular spirit yea no one eminent reformed Divine but did highly approve and desire the happiness to enjoy as hath been made evident by their writings But no testimony new or old no reason or Scripture no sense of justice or civility no publick honour of Church or State can preserve where men are resolved to destroy good and all This is certainly a just ground of great and better lamentation to those that lay to heart the licentious fedities indignities insolencies popular confusions and all sorts of irreligions which must necessarily follow the want of due government in any Church yea and the extirpation of that which is not more reverend for its primitive Institution and Catholick descent from the Apostles then for its excellent use and admirable constitution carrying with it the truest and best proportions as well as benefits of grave and authoritative government in which order and counsel
God is to be blessed taking as well as giving Consider again that parents sins are oft visited by childrens immature deaths 1 Kings 14.13 as was threatned against Eli yea sometimes hopeful childron are cut off because some good thing was found in them as in Jereboam's childs case Sometimes they are the Idols of jealousie which take up parents hearts too much and therefore are taken away from them that there might be less distance between them and God their heavenly Father Vnicum bonum verum summum immutabile immarcessibile quod amittere non potes quamdiu amare non desinis Aug. who hath the wisedom of a father and the tenderness of a mother weaning us oft from those brests which we were too fond of and out of which we sucked more wind then wholesome nourishment All losses are mercies which end in the souls gain nor can that be a losse in any creature-comfort if it finds recompenses in his love who is the only immutable and unloseable good As for vain or vicious parents who are rather peremptores quam parentes when their children are taken away from their contagion I know not how they can have any greater summons from heaven or motives on earth to move their hearts to speedy repentance and preparation for death then when they see their prime branches lopped off as presages that the whole bulk of the tree root and branch shall ere long be hewn down and without repentance cast into unquenchable fire 7. Last of all in the death of such as are remarkable for nothing but their sin and wickedness for the dissoluteness of their lives the stupidity or despair of their deaths dying unawares and cut off by unexpected stroaks of heaven because their sin was great before God it may be a violent immature and preposterous fate yea it may be flagrante crimine as Absalom in his unnatural rebellion against his Prince and parents 2 Sam. 18. or possibly by the hand of human justice or by private duels or by their own debaucheries which are a self-assasination even these are not lightly to be laid to heart in any family kindred or acquaintance or neighbourhood because they are like Gods thunderbolts not every days terror nor striking every one therefore the more to be dreaded by all though the punishment falls but on one Poena ad unum terror ad omnes though the ruine falls upon the head but of one yet the news may justly make the ears to tingle and hearts to tremble of all that see and hear of it No man does deserves or suffers from God or man or himself so bad but the same might be exemplified in thee and me to the astonished world we might be the beacons on fire that should scare all the Country far more then any house on fire can do We read of David though otherways of a mind great and gracious 2 Sam. 18.33 full of courage and constancy becoming the majesty of a pious King yet he takes the dreadful fate of his son Absalom so to heart the three streams of parental penitent and pious affections meeting in one current that he forgets the comfort of victory his own and the publick safety the suppressing of so dangerous and popular a rebellion the restitution of his throne and dominion which my young Master under the colour of doing speedier and better justice or reforming publick disorders had almost snatched from him not without the ready applause and assistance of vulgar levity giddiness vileness and ingratitude to such a Prince yet all these weighty concernments sink in Davids soul and only grief swims uppermost publikely manifesting its either excess or just violence in words too high indeed for any Tragedy and never heard from any father or son in the case of a Kingdom Would God I had died for thee O Absalom my son my son The loss of a good child is tolerable of a wicked one is intolerable especially if bad by neglect or example 2 Sam. 12.23 because he is eternally lost David comforted himself He should go to that Infant whose innocency gave hopes of its safety though it were the fruit of his sin but in Asaloms desperate case he deplores geminam aeternam mortem a double and eternal death and this alone may serve to justifie the so great passions of Davids soul in that particular Yet besides this Absaloms sins and sufferings made secret reflexions upon the fathers offences which had not only occasioned but deserved such unnatural fires to burn in his own bowels which were only to be quenched with their own blood nor had David been only excessive in his rebellious presumings against God but defective too in his reproving of his sons hence sad effects of paternal indulgence toward dangerous and comminitting children whose sins are imputable in great part to their parents 1 Sam. 3.13 and so their sufferings on all sides are but the punishments of such unzealous fondnesses as Eli used to the ruine of himself and his sons yea of his whole house by intolerable toleration of such impieties as will certainly overthrow roof and foundation root and branch of any family under heaven Would we have less cause to mourn in the death of any one we love endeavour to make them as good as we can while they are with us however having done our duty and expressed the best evidences of a true and faithful love to them in order to their eternal good we shall with more comfort and patience bear their death which many times gives us greater regrets for our own neglect of that Christian duty and holy love which we owe to the souls of our relations then for their corporal absence the one being reparable the other never either in this or the world to come I have now finished these instances of particular cases in which the death of any is to be laid to heart proportionably to the weight of the becasion whose circumstances or manner of dying as the feathers of some birds are sometimes as heavy as their bodies and substances It were too much for me to drive this discourse which in the whole texture of it is pathetick and applicative to a further thinness or fineness like leaf-gold by multiplied uses which are there necessary where as in the riveting or clinching of nails we suspect the doctrines have not taken good hold on the hearers minds and hearts of which in this case I am not very jealous as to the most of you whose affections may be read in your attention There are only three Uses which I conceive may not impertinently be added as advantages to or deductions from the main of that I have hitherto set down 1. Vse To reprove the unchristian barbarous and inhuman temper of those hearts which are made of flint not flesh who are so far from laying to heart with any humble mortifying and compassionating reflexions the death of any that they either carry it with
established and used for above an hundred yeares by the most noble wise and religious persons in this Nation of all degrees with no small benefit of piety to the living especially the common people but they crosse also the permissions yea the Institutions even of God himself in his holy word as by Solomons pen here so by the Apostles afterward injoyning us to Preach and so to pray in season and out of season to doe all things to edification and with decency becomming Christians as well as men especially in such eases as most affect the living in reference both to their own others mortal state which dasheth all faith hope and holy industry of a godly life the best men being of all men most miserable 1 Cor. 15.19 if there be not a frequent and full Antidote against our dying and sorrowing condition duely applyed from the holy word of God as to the happy and hopeful state of such as live and die in the Lord 1 Cor. 14 26 40 2 Tim. 4.2 both as to their spirits which return to God and their bodies which rest in hopes of an happy resurrection to glory For which purpose we see the Scripture hath furnished the Church with as many clear 1 Thess 4.13 See the long discourse of the Resurrection 1 Cor. 15. large and pregnant places to establish the faithful in that Article of their faith the bodies resurrection as any other point whatsoever There needs no other Form of Liturgy of exhortation or consolation or prayer or gratulation or benediction or comprecation then what is guided by and grounded upon the Scripture Nor was there other prescribed or used in the Church of England by any discreet Minister If such sad occasions may nay must in many respects be duely and devoutly laid to heart by the living as I have shewed you what hinders I beseech you but that Sermons instructions exhortations consolations and prayers too may be used at them in order to apply them most neerly to and work most effectually upon the hearts of the living And then especially when the hearts of men and women of parents and children of neighbours and friends yea of enemies and strangers too are most prone to be moved and affected to good purpose some being softened by common sympathies of humanity others steeped in teares by their more indeared relations and tender affections the whole assembly being as it were in the bath and furnace more pliable humble and melting then at any other time If we Christians only brought the eyes the hearts and senses of beasts to these Funeral-occasions it were venial to give our children parents friends husbands wives kindred and our selves no other honour or comfort then the burial of an asse or of a dead dog would afford and require or if we came together only as so many Gymnosophists Brachmans and Philosophers or so many Heathens Indians and meer men without hope and not as Christians who have much to learn to hear to say to pray and to practice upon these texts of mortality not only as to natural death but as to the spiritual and eternal death as to judgment to come as to a resurrection and after recompenses their scrupulous restraint were excusable but blessed be God what a field of excellent matter as to saith and manners as to hope and comfort in reference to both dead and living Christians is there to be gone through to be beaten oft over from the Scriptures suggestion and direction that the living the living might duely effectually and frequently lay those things to heart which are presented to them by every Funeral-occasion but not easily improved by the generality of people if they have nothing else but a dumb shew and silent procession at their Funerals Object But some are afraid of superstition lest we pray for the dead or praise God on their behalf beyond that ancient gratulation for their departure in the faith and that comprecation for a blessed consummation of the Kingdome of Christ and all his Church at and after the Resurrection which is under a divine promise upon all good Christians hopes hearts and future expectations blessings certainly no less lawful to be prayed for as the ancient Churches did then desired and expected by all the faithful living as I believe they are by all the Saints departed Answ To these Objecters I answer Let them forbear Funeral Sermons exhortations and prayers till they get more wit to understand their own good and more charity then to grudge others their Christian liberty either to do or get good in such wayes as Gods word and the customes of this Christian well reformed Church allow us This Indulgence I easily grant to such as are simply and honestly scrupulous but to others that are rudely captious and contemptuous yea ridiculously clamorous and contumacious against any thing which they doe not form and fancy though they give no reason why they scruple or condemn it my answer is as that of our Saviour to the Pharisees You hypocrites Matth. 16.3 can you discern the face of the sky and can you not discern the signs of the times Are you so fearful of praying for the dead that you will not pray for and with the living Can you endure the pomp of a Funeral and not the piety of it Can you bear with Trumpets Banners Escucheons and not with the word of God with Sermons and Prayers which sanctifie all things in themselves lawful and expedient Is not sanctity the best part of Christians Solemnities who in all temporal things must look to things eternal Are you so afraid of superstition that you grudge us our devotions and holy exercises as God gives us more signal calls and occasions Can you endure Heraldry and not the Liturgy in this part of it which sets forth very handsomely and fully to the living out of the lively oracles of God those most pertinent places and excellent truths which make most for the good hope comfort and instruction of the living both in respect of their dead relations and themselves Take heed you swallow not camels while you strain at gnats If you think a dead Christian that dies in the faith of Christ and in the compass of our charity differs not from a dead Heathen or a dead beast if their spirits goe all one way with their bodies to the dust if neither they dying nor you living have any lively hope of a resurrection without which all your faith living is but dead and in vain if you know not how to make a holy rational and religious use of their death much good may you have with those dumb shewes which you have lately taken up with your silent solemnities and processions at the Funerals of your Christian friends much comfort may you have in your burnt wine and biscuits in your black cloaks and ribbands in your mourning gloves and boxes of sweet-meats which good you somtimes get gape for at Funerals These are toyes
honour under the conduct of an excellent Governour Mr. Mole sometime Vniversity Orator whom I cannot mention without such honour and love as are due to modest and most deserving worth Next that he might add Honour to Learning especially in an age where Ignorance and Rusticity began very rudely to vie with both the famous Vniversities decrying all good Learning and useful studies to make way for pitiful raptures and silly enthusiasms that is putting out the two great lights of heaven that hedg-creeping gloe-worms might shine the better that instead of a sage Nobility a prudent Gentry a learned Clergy judicious Lawyers and knowing Physitians the honour civility piety the souls the estates the Laws and Religion the bodies and lives of this so renowned a Church and populous a Nation might be exposed to the wills and hands of John-a-Leidens and Jackstraw's to Cnipperdolins and Muncers to Hackets and Naylors to Lack-latin preachers pettifogging Barretors and impudent Mountebanks all of them perfect Impostors in their several professions A project so unchristian so inhuman so barbarous so diabolical as suted no interest but that of the kingdom of darkness which the wise and merciful God hath hitherto defeated and I hope ever will if he have any favour toward England beyond Turkey Tartary or Barbary From Cambridge he travelled a second time into France where he had been before he came to me abiding there above two years and gaining such improvements as are usually most aimed at by young Gallants because most conspicuous and generally accepted by all persons of civility and breeding who are glad to see that English roughness moroseness and surliness which commonly like rust attends Country Gentlemen of only domestick and home-spun education taken off by that politure douceur debonaireté and gentlenesse which forraigne conversation in which young Masters are least flattered contributes to Gentlemen that have any thing of candor and suppleness in their nature In all places abroad his demeanour was generally such as became a person of his years and quality which is testified to me by a Gentleman that is 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 worthy of credit who attended him in all his motions During his absence in France that the world may see my respects to him were not flashy and formal but serious and real I had prepared a large volume for him against that time in which he could best bear and entertain it for even little books are great burthens to young Gallants when their overactive spirits make then most busily idle This great work I had furnished and fortified with all the strength of reason and religion of virtue and honour of grace and civility of useful humanity and solid Divinity gained by my reading or experience in order to satisfie all his relations to God and man yea to exceed all the expectations of his noble friends who could not but expect and wish an accomplished Son to repair that loss which the world had of his excellent Mother The matter of this composure I had advanced as much as I could with all the comely beauties of Oratory and majesty of language to avoid what might be all tediousness in the most curious and coy Readers of so copious a variety the whole fabrick was both founded and formed after that great and goodly model or Idea of all true worth for judicious piety and useful virtue which was most remarkable and for many years observed by me in his noble Mother that by his beholding so fair a figure and so neer an example of piety virtue and honour he might not only grow in love with it but by the secret charm of reading be transformed into it But my attending the setledness of his station and condition of life as most proper for such a present caused my deferring so long the publishing of it even untill the fatal closing of his eyes for whose sight it was chiefly designed hath now condemned it to correspond with that silence and darkness to which he is gone as to this world I now appeal to all Hearers and Readers of any Nobleness and ingenuity whether I am not excusable if I do with more then ordinary resentments of sorrow lay to heart the death of this young Nobleman to whom I was so truly devoted and justly indeared After that rate of care and kindness which the blessed St. John expressed so far to a young man of great hopes as the Ecclesiastical Histories tell us that when the good old man heard his dear depositum had deserted his breeding Euseb Histo l. 3. c. 20. and endangered his soul he not only severely reproved that Bishop for Bishops above Presbyters were so early to whose custody he had committed him but himself in his decrepit years true love never growing old or cold and infirm sought him found him followed him overtook him overcame him first with the young mans self-confusions then with his own paternal prayers and tears which never ceased till he had recovered so welcome a captive to Christ and his Church So loth was that holy man and so was I though vastly short of that beloved Disciple that either the labour of love should be lost upon any or that any we love should be lost for want of any labour for their good no defensative being too much to preserve a soul from the snares of sin and the hazzards of damnation After he was returned into England I shall but further afflict my self to tell you how amidst all the welcome receptions visits and caresses which he received or payed to his many noble and neer relations he forgot not by any juvenile or supercilious negligence to express to me and mine such civility kindness and noble gratitude as shewed both living and dying that he had a real value love and confidence of me I confess I unfeignedly deplore my loss of him not that I either hoped or expected any secular advantages by his private or publique station beyond those civil courtesies which I have oft enjoyed from his other noble relations which if I did never deserve yet I hope I did never abuse As for publique favours attainable by any mans mediation I understand my self and the times so well in the point of preferment as not to look toward any which are now rare to he seen in England for any Ecclesiastick of my proportions nor am I so vain as to seek in vain those little great things for my self further then an Evangelical and unenviable plow in a poor Country village where as in most populous and plebeian Auditories much good seed is lost much study and pains frustrated by falling on the thority stony and high-way grounds But my work and wages I hope are with Him who is a merciful Master and most impartially bountiful Patron to all faithful Labourers in his husbandry among which I beseech God I may be found one in whom ability industry and fidelity may help to keep up the authority of Evangelical Ministry from being trodden under
vertues must never wholly die nor be buried in oblivion because to the injury both of the dead and the living The name of the wicked justly rots but the name of the righteous ought to be had in everlasting remembrance It is fit they should be quite forgotten who never did any thing worthy of memory or imitation Nor is it less fit to remember those with eternal honour who did all things with honour and in reference to Eternity Commendation is the least reward due to Vertue Imitation is the highest commendation of it just commendation and imitation make the most noble and durable Monument for it Which good ends are aimed at by this following Inscription dedicated to the Mothers Vrne at the Sons Funeral that seeing how Holy the Parent or Root was mankind may conjecture how hopeful the Son or Branch might be and how happy themselves may be by imitating both of Them in those things which were praise-worthy in Them That God in all may have the glory of all as infinitely above all Piae Memoriae Sacrum Quam a Posteris meritò exigit Nobilissima Heroina ac Domina D. ANNA RICH. Illustrissimâ Devonienfis Comitis Familiâ oriunda Warwicensis Filio Haeredi connubio juncta Ingens utriusque Gentis decus ornamentum Praestantissimum verae Nobilitatis Nobilissimarumque virtutum exemplar Optatissimis Animi Corporisque dotibus Supra Invidiam Laudemque cumulata Animi excelsi constantis generosi Nec Aulae splendore nec Sortis suae fastigio elati Ingenii vividi elegantis splendidi Ad summa pulcherrimaque nati Genii benigni amoeni mitissimi Ad infimorum usum suaviter demissi Sermonis politi Rerum pondere magis quà m verborum numero copiosi Gestus decori gratissima Majestatis Comitatisque temperie venerandi Amoris puri invicti stupendi Amicitiae cordatae fidae amicissimae Vitae Admirationi quà m Laudi proximae Conscientiae probè instructae Christique sanguine perpurgatae Pietatis non vulgaris non fictae non verbosae Quanta quanta fuit Tota vera solida sincera Ad speciem plausum populumve Nihil datum Ad Deum ad Christum omnia Quicquid praeclari dixeris Viator cogitaverisve Par esse non potes meritis nedum nimius Id enim omne quâ Fuit Fecitque superavit Illa Quantum Res verba superant effectusque Cogitata Aureus reverâ Pudicitiae Formae Nodus unio fulgentissimus Candoris Judicii Nodus unio fulgentissimus Acuminis prudentiae Nodus unio fulgentissimus Humilitatis honoris Nodus unio fulgentissimus Gravitatis dulcedinis Nodus unio fulgentissimus Sublimitatis patientiae Nodus unio fulgentissimus Rationis pietatis Nodus unio fulgentissimus Humanae divinaeque pulchritudinis Nodus unio fulgentissimus Sexum Aetatem Spem vota Amicorum Faecundissima virtute supergressa Cui ad summam Mortalium Claritatem Nihil defuit Nec ipse poteris ultra desiderare Lector Praeter Vitam in Terris diuturniorem Quum enim Annos Nondum 27. numerasset Caelo Matura Spectatissimos Parentes Nobilissimum Conjugem Integerrimos Fratres Numerosissimos Amicos Charissimum Filiolum unicum castissimi Amoris pignus Mortales denique omnes Amplissimam sibi virtutum Messem pollicentes Pio certè pretiosoque Numini placido felicique Sibi Solis Invidis laeto Caeteris acerbo tristissimóque FATO Infanda tam praesentis quam posterae aetatis Jactura deseruit Aug. 24. 1638. Hoc Devotissimi pectoris monumentum Lubens Maerensque posuit J. G. AN EPITAPH UPON The LADY RICH. POssest of all that Nature could bestow All we can wish to be or reach to know Equal to all the patterns which our mind Can frame of good beyond the good we find All beauties which have power to bless the sight Mixt with transparent vertues greater light At once producing love and reverence The admiration of the soul and sense The most discerning thoughts the calmest breast Most apt to pardon needing pardon least The largest mind and which did most extend To all the Lawes of Daughter Wife and Friend The most allow'd example by what line To live what path to follow what decline Who best all distant vertues reconcil'd Strict cheerful humble great severe and mild Constantly pious to Her latest breath Not more a Pattern in Her life then death The Lady RICH lies here More frequent Tears Have never honour'd any Tomb then Hers. SIDNEY GODOLPHIN THE SUMMARY OF THE SERMON OF Funeral Solemnities civil and religious Page 1 1 Of Feasting its danger and disadvantages p. 6 2 Of the House of Mourning its advantages p. 8 Of Holy Necromancy learning from the dead p. 9 The Honour paid antiently to the dead p. 11 3 Who the living are in the Text p. 12 No advantages from the livings devotion to the dead Romish Superstition p. 13 4 How the living may be benefitted by the dead p. 15 5 The Hearts decays dangers distempers p. 17 Account to be given of others deaths p. 21 6 Fourteen considerations rising from the death of any to be laid to heart by the living 1 Of our mortal and vile bodies in their health sickness decay death p. 24 Not to be preferred before our souls p. 26 How little cause we have to be proud of our selves or to flatter others 2 Consid By way of analogy the putid horror and fedity of a dead soul p. 27 3 Consid The fedity and horror of sin as the meritorious cause of all deaths p. 29 4 Consid The vanity of this life and all things in it set forth in the pregnant instance of this noble Gentleman 5 Consid Of the certain uncertainty of death Its Catholick Empire p. 37 6 The danger of delaying Repentance p. 42 The pious importunity of Ministers urging speedy Repentance p. 44 Impenitence riseth from unbelief p. 47 Death-bed Repentance less certain and less comfortable to our selves and others p. 50 Vulgar pleas for delaying repentance answered p. 54 Of rational and religious living how far in our power p. 57 7 Consid Of God's patience and long suffering to us p. 59 8 Lay to heart the death of Christ the onely antidote against the curse and terror of death p. 61 9 Consâ—d The chiefe end of our lives unprofitable and pernicious waste of a short and pretious life p. 63 10. Consid The seeming samenesse of mens deaths after their various lives Arguments for an after life or being p. 67 11 The folly of Christians uncharitable and excessive passions as to any concerns of this life p. 70 12 The wisedom of Christians moderation in all things in their passion or grief for the dead p. 74 Of timely disposing our selves to die when we are sick p. 74 Why sick men are more attended by Physitians then Divines p. 75 13 Consider how prepared thou art at present for death of adorning the last act of a Christians life p. 77 All Christians may be preachers on their death-beds p. 78 14 What deaths are most emphatick and chiefly to be laid to heart p. 79 1 Of Kings and Soveraign Magistrates p. 80 2 Of chief-Priests Prophets and Ministers of God's Church p. 81 3 Of any gracious and eminent Christian p. 83 4 Of neer Relations as Parents Husbands Wives Children p. 85 5 Of such as have been very wicked and die in their sin p. 87 Of David's mourning so passionately for Absalom p. 88 Three Vses 1 Reproving such hearts as are senseless and unconcerned in any ones death or joy in it p. 89 2 Vse exam How we have improved this and the like spectacles of death p. 91 3 Vse vindicating religious as well as civil Solemnities at Christians burials p. 92 Lastly An account of this noble Personage Mr. ROBERT RICH from his cradle to his coffin His education domestick Academick forraign His temper of body and mind His health sickness disease death p. 92 The conclusion A Prayer preparatory for death p. 115 The judgement of six Doctors in Physick and two Chirurgeons upon the dissection of the Corps p. 120 An Epitaph upon His noble Mother added as an honour to the Funeral urne and memory of this Her onely Child