turfe and entertain creeping things in the cells and little chambers of our eyes and dwell with worms till time and death shall be no more We must needs die That 's our sentence But that 's not all We are as water spilt on the ground which cannot be gathered up again Stay 1. We are as water weak and of no consistence alwaies descending abiding in no certain place unlesse where we are detained with violence and every little breath of winde makes us rough and tempestuous and troubles our faces every trifling accident discomposes us and as the face of the waters wafting in a storm so wrinkles it self that it makes upon its forehead furrows deep and hollow like a grave so doe our great and little cares and trifles first make the wrinkles of old age and then they dig a grave for us And there is in nature nothing so contemptible but it may meet with us in such circumstances that it may be too hard for us in our weaknesses and the sting of a Bee is a weapon sharp enough to pierce the finger of a childe or the lip of a man and those creatures which nature hath left without weapons yet they are arm'd sufficiently to vex those parts of men which are left defenselesse and obnoxious to a sun beame to the roughness of a sowre grape to the unevenness of a gravel-stone to the dust of a wheel or the unwholsome breath of a starre looking awry upon a sinner 2 But besides the weaknesses and naturall decayings of our bodies if chances and contingencies be innumerable then no man can reckon our dangers and the praeternaturall causes of our deaths So that he is a vain person whose hopes of life are too confidently increased by reason of his health and he is too unreasonably timorous who thinks his hopes at an end when he dwels in sicknesse For men die without rule and with and without occasions and no man suspecting or foreseeing any of deaths addresses and no man in his whole condition is weaker then another A man in a long Consumption is fallen under one of the solemnities and preparations to death but at the same instant the most healthfull person is as neer death upon a more fatall and a more sudden but a lesse discerned cause There are but few persons upon whose foreheads every man can read the sentence of death written in the lines of a lingring sicknesse but they sometimes hear the passing bell ring for stronger men even long before their own knell cals at the house of their mother to open her womb and make a bed for them No man is surer of tomorrow then the weakest of his brethren and when Lepidus and Aufidius stumbled at the threshold of the Senate and fell down and dyed the blow came from heaven in a cloud but it struck more suddenly then upon the poor slave that made sport upon the Theatre with a praemeditated and foredescribed death Quod quisque vitet nunquam homini satis cautum est in horas There are sicknesses that walk in darknesse and there are exterminating Angels that fly wrapt up in the curtains of immateriality and an uncommunicating nature whom we cannot see but we feel their force and sink under their sword and from heaven the vail descends that wraps our heads in the fatall sentence There is no age of man but it hath proper to it self some posterns and outlets for death besides those infinite and open ports out of which myriads of men and women every day passe into the dark and the land of forgetfulnesse Infancie hath life but in effigie or like a spark dwelling in a pile of wood the candle is so newly lighted that every little shaking of the taper and every ruder breath of air puts it out and it dies Childhood is so tender and yet so unwary so soft to all the impressions of chance and yet so forward to run into them that God knew there could be no security without the care and vigilance of an Angel-keeper and the eies of Parents and the armes of Nurses the provisions of art and all the effects of Humane love and Providence are not sufficient to keep one child from horrid mischiefs from strange and early calamities and deaths unlesse a messenger be sent from heaven to stand sentinell and watch the very playings and the sleepings the eatings and the drinkings of the children and it is a long time before nature makes them capable of help for there are many deaths and very many diseases to which poor babes are exposed but they have but very few capacities of physick to shew that infancy is as liable to death as old age and equally exposed to danger and equally uncapable of a remedy with this onely difference that old age hath diseases incurable by nature and the diseases of childhood are incurable by art and both the states are the next heirs of death 3 But all the middle way the case is altered Nature is strong and art is apt to give ease and remedy but still there is no security and there the case is not altered 1 For there are so many diseases in men that are not understood 2 So many new ones every year 3 The old ones are so changed in circumstance and intermingled with so many collaterall complications 4 The Symptoms are oftentimes so alike 5 Sometimes so hidden and fallacious 6 Sometimes none at all as in the most sudden and the most dangerous imposthumations 7 And then the diseases in the inward parts of the body are oftentimes such to which no application can be made 8 They are so far off that the effects of all medicines can no otherwise come to them then the effect and juices of all meats that is not till after two or three alterations and decoctions which change the very species of the medicament 9 And after all this very many principles in the art of Physick are so uncertain that after they have been believed seven or eight ages and that upon them much of the practise hath been established they come to be considered by a witty man and others established in their stead by which men must practise and by which three or four generations of men more as happens must live or die 10 And all this while the men are sick and they take things that certainly make them sicker for the present and very uncertainly restore health for the future that it may appear of what a large extent is humane calamity when Gods providence hath not onely made it weak and miserable upon the certain stock of a various nature and upon the accidents of an infinite contingency but even from the remedies which are appointed our dangers and our troubles are certainly increased so that we may well be likened to water our nature is no stronger our abode no more certain If the sluces be opened it falls away and runneth apace if its current be stopped it swels and grows troublesome and spils over
present evils of Christendome then we have to doe with his boasted discovery of Catilines conspiracie What is it to me that Rome was taken by the Gaules and what is it now to Camillus if different religions be tolerated amongst us These things that now happen concern the living and they are made the scenes of our duty or danger respectively and when our wives are dead and sleep in charnel houses they are not troubled when we laugh loudly at the songs sung at the next marriage feast nor do they envy when another snatches away the gleanings of their husbands passion It is true they envy not and they lie in a bosome where there can be no murmure and they that are consigned to Kingdomes and to the feast of the marriage supper of the Lamb the glorious and eternall Bride-groom of holy souls they cannot think our marriages here our lighter laughings and vain rejoycings considerable as to them And yet there is a relation continued stil Aristotle said that to affirm the dead take no thought for the good of the living is a disparagement to the laws of that friendship which in their state of separation they cannot be tempted to rescind And the Church hath taught in generall that they pray for us they recommend to God the state of all their Relatives in the union of the intercession that our blessed Lord makes for them and us and S. Ambrose gave some things in charge to his dying brother Satyrus that he should do for him in the other world he gave it him I say when he was dying not when he was dead And certain it is that though our dead friends affection to us is not to be estimated according to our low conceptions yet it is not lesse but much more then ever it was it is greater in degree and of another kind But then we should do well also to remember that in this world we are something besides flesh and bloud that we may not without violent necessities run into new relations but preserve the affections we bear to our dead when they were alive We must not so live as if they were perished but so as pressing forward to the most intimate participation of the communion of Saints And we also have some waies to expresse this relation and to bear a part in this communion by actions of intercourse with them and yet proper to our state such as are strictly performing the will of the dead providing for and tenderly and wisely educating their children paying their debts imitating their good example preserving their memories privately and publikely keeping their memorials and desiring of God with hearty and constant prayer that God would give them a joyfull resurrection and a mercifull judgement for so S. Paul prayed in behalf of Onesiphorus that God would shew them a mercy in that day that fearfull and yet much to be desired day in which the most righteous person hath need of much mercy and pity and shall find it Now these instances of duty shew that the relation remains still and though the Relict of a man or woman hath liberty to contract new relations yet I doe not finde they have liberty to cast off the old as if there were no such thing as immortality of souls Remember that we shall converse together again let us therefore never doe any thing of reference to them which we shall be asham'd of in the day when all secrets shall be discovered and that we shall meet again in the presence of God In the mean time God watcheth concerning all their interest and he will in his time both discover and recompense For though as to us they are like water spilt yet to God they are as water fallen into the sea safe and united in his comprehension and inclosures But we are not yet passed the consideration of the sentence This descending to the grave is the lot of all men neither doth God respect the person of any man The rich is not protected for favour nor the poor for pity the old man is not reverenced for his age nor the infant regarded for his tenderness youth and beauty learning and prudence wit and strength lie down equally in the dishonours of the grave All men and all natures and all persons resist the addresses and solennities of death and strive to preserve a miserable and an unpleasant life and yet they all sink down and die For so have I seen the pillars of a building assisted with artificiall props bending under the pressure of a roof and pertinaciously resisting the infallible and prepared ruine Donec certa dies omni compage solutâ Ipsum cum rebus subruat auxilium till the determin'd day comes and then the burden sunk upon the pillars and disorder'd the aides and auxiliary rafters into a common ruine and a ruder grave so are the desires and weak arts of man with little aides and assistances of care and physick we strive to support our decaying bodies and to put off the evil day but quickly that day will come and then neither Angels nor men can rescue us from our grave but the roof sinks down upon the walls and the walls descend to the foundation and the beauty of the face and the dishonours of the belly the discerning head and the servile feet the thinking heart and the working hand the eyes and the guts together shall be crush'd into the confusion of a heap and dwell with creatures of an equivocall production with worms and serpents the sons and daughters of our own bones in a house of durt and darkness Let not us think to be excepted or deferred If beauty or wit or youth or Nobleness or wealth or vertue could have been a defence and an excuse from the grave we had not met here to day to mourn upon the hearse of an excellent Lady and God only knows for which of us next the Mourners shall go about the streets or weep in houses {non-Roman} {non-Roman} {non-Roman} {non-Roman} {non-Roman} {non-Roman} {non-Roman} {non-Roman} {non-Roman} {non-Roman} We have liv'd so many years and every day and every minute we make an escape from those thousands of dangers and deaths that encompasse us round about and such escapings we must reckon to be an extraordinary fortune and therefore that it cannot last long Vain are the thoughts of Man who when he is young or healthfull thinks he hath a long thread of life to run over and that it is violent and strange for young persons to die and naturall and proper onely for the aged It is as naturall for a man to die by drowning as by a feaver And what greater violence or more unnaturall thing is it that the horse threw his Rider into the river then that a drunken meeting cast him into a feaver and the strengths of youth are as soon broken by the strong sicknesses of youth and the stronger intemperance as the weaknesse of old age by a cough or an asthma or a continuall
A Funerall Sermon PREACHED At the Obsequies of the Right Honble and most vertuous Lady THE LADY FRANCES Countesse of CARBERY Who deceased October the 9th 1650. at her House GOLDEN-GROVE in CARMARTHEN-SHIRE By JER. TAYLOR D. D. LONDON Printed by I. F. for R. Royston at the Angel in Ivie-lane M.DC.L To the right Honorable and truly Noble Richard Lord Vaughan Earle of Carbery Baron of Emlim and Molinger Knight of the Honorable Order of the Bath My Lord I Am not asham'd to professe that I pay this part of service to your Lordship most unwillingly for it is a sad office to be the chief Minister in a house of mourning and to present an interested person with a branch of Cypresse and a bottle of tears And indeed my Lord it were more proportionable to your needs to bring something that might alleviate or divert your sorrow then to dresse the hearse of your Dear Lady and to furnish it with such circumstances that it may dwell with you and lie in your closet and make your prayers and your retirements more sad and full of weepings But because the Divine providence hath taken from you a person so excellent a woman fit to converse with Angels and Apostles with Saints and Martyrs give me leave to present you with her picture drawn in little and in water-colours sullyed indeed with tears and the abrupt accents of a reall and consonant sorrow but drawn with a faithfull hand and taken from the life and indeed it were too great a losse to be depriv'd of her example and of her rule of the originall and the copie too The age is very evil and deserv'd her not but because it is so evil it hath the more need to have such lives preserv'd in memory to instruct our piety or upbraid our wickednesse For now that God hath cut this tree of paradise down from its seat of earth yet so the dead trunk may support a part of the declining Temple or at least serve to kindle the fire on the altar My Lord I pray God this heap of sorrow may swell your piety till it breaks into the greatest joyes of God and of religion and remember when you pay a tear upon the grave or to the memory of your Lady that Deare and most excellent Soule that you pay two more one of repentance for those things that may have caus'd this breach and another of joy for the mercies of God to your Dear departed Saint that he hath taken her into a place where she can weep no more My Lord I think I shall so long as I live that is so long as I am Your Lordships most humble Servant TAYLOR A Funerall Sermon c. 2 SAMUEL 14. 14. For we must needs die and are as water spilt on the ground which cannot be gathered up again neither doth God respect any person yet doth he devise means that his banished be not expelled from him WHen our blessed Saviour and his Disciples viewed the Temple some one amongst them cried out Magister aspice quales lapides Master behold what faire what great stones are here Christ made no other reply but foretold their dissolution and a world of sadness and sorrow which should bury that whole Nation when the teeming cloud of Gods displeasure should produce a storm which was the daughter of the biggest anger and the mother of the greatest calamity which ever crush'd any of the sons of Adam The time shall come that there shall not be left one stone upon another The whole Temple and the Religion the ceremonies ordained by God and the Nation beloved by God and the fabrick erected for the service of God shall run to their own period and lie down in their severall graves Whatsoever had a beginning can also have an ending and it shall die unless it be daily watered with the purles flowing from the fountain of life and refreshed with the dew of Heaven and the wells of God And therefore God had provided a tree in Paradise to have supported Adam in his artificiall immortality Immortality was not in his nature but in the hands and arts in the favour and superadditions of God Man was alwaies the same mixture of heat and cold of dryness and moisture ever the same weak thing apt to feel rebellion in the humors and to suffer the evils of a civil warre in his body naturall and therefore health and life was to descend upon him from Heaven and he was to suck life from a tree on earth himself being but ingraffed into a tree of life and adopted into the condition of an immortall nature But he that in the best of his daies was but a Cien of this tree of life by his sinne was cut off from thence quickly and planted upon thorns and his portion was for ever after among the flowers which to day spring and look like health and beauty and in the evening they are sick and at night are dead and the oven is their grave And as before even from our first spring from the dust of the earth we might have died if we had not been preserved by the continuall flux of a rare providence so now that we are reduced to the laws of our own nature we must needs die It is naturall and therefore necessary It is become a punishment to us and therefore it is unavoidable and God hath bound the evil upon us by bands of naturall and inseparable propriety and by a supervening unalterable decree of Heaven and we are fallen from our privilege and are returned to the condition of beasts and buildings and common things And we see Temples defiled unto the ground and they die by Sacrilege and great Empires die by their own plenty and ease full humors and factious Subjects and huge buildings fall by their owne weight and the violence of many winters eating and consuming the cement which is the marrow of their bones and Princes die like the meanest of their Servants and every thing finds a grave and a tombe and the very tomb it self dies by the bigness of its pompousness and luxury Phario nutantia pondera saxo Quae cineri vanus dat ruitura labor and becomes as friable and uncombined dust as the ashes of the Sinner or the Saint that lay under it and is now forgotten in his bed of darkness And to this Catalogue of mortality Man is inrolled with a Statutum est It is appointed for all men once to die and after death comes judgment and if a man can be stronger then nature or can wrestle with a decree of Heaven or can escape from a Divine punishment by his own arts so that neither the power nor the providence of God nor the laws of nature nor the bands of eternall predestination can hold him then he may live beyond the fate and period of flesh and last longer then a flower But if all these can hold us and tie us to conditions then we must lay our heads down upon a
with a greater diffusion If it be made to stand stil it putrefies and all this we doe For 4. In all the processe of our health we are running to our grave we open our own sluces by vitiousness and unworthy actions we powre in drink and let out life we increase diseases and know not how to bear them we strangle our selves with our own intemperance we suffer the feavers and the inflammations of lust and we quench our soules with drunkennesse we bury our understandings in loads of meat and surfets and then we lie down upon our beds and roar with pain and disquietness of our soules Nay we kill one anothers souls and bodies with violence and folly with the effects of pride and uncharitablenesse we live and die like fools and bring a new mortality upon our selves wars and vexatious cares and private duels and publike disorders and every thing that is unreasonable and every thing that is violent so that now we may adde this fourth gate to the grave Besides Nature and Chance and the mistakes of art men die with their own sins and then enter into the grave in haste and passion and pull the heavy stone of the monument upon their own heads And thus we make our selves like water spilt on the ground we throw away our lives as if they were unprofitable and indeed most men make them so we let our years slip through our fingers like water and nothing is to be seen but like a showr of tears upon a spot of ground there is a grave digged and a solemn mourning and a great talk in the neigbourhood and when the daies are finished they shall be and they shall be remembred no more And that 's like water too when it is spilt it cannot be gathered up again There is no redemption from the grave inter se mortales mutua vivunt Et quasi cur sores vitäi lampada tradunt Men live in their course and by turns their light burns a while and then it burns blew and faint and men go to converse with Spirits and then they reach the taper to another and as the hours of yesterday can never return again so neither can the man whose hours they were and who lived them over once he shall never come to live them again and live them better When Lazarus and the widows Son of Naim and Tabitha and the Saints that appeared in Jerusalem at the rusurrection of our blessed Lord arose they came into this world some as strangers onely to make a visit and all of them to manifest a glory but none came upon the stock of a new life or entred upon the stage as at first or to perform the course of a new nature and therefore it is observable that we never read of any wicked person that was raised from the dead Dives would fain have returned to his brothers house but neither he nor any from him could be sent but all the rest in the New Testament one onely excepted were expressed to have been holy persons or else by their age were declared innocent Lazarus was beloved of Christ those souls that appeared at the resurrection were the souls of Saints Tabitha raised by S Peter was a charitable and a holy Christian and the maiden of twelve years old raised by our blessed Saviour had not entred into the regions of choice and sinfulnesse and the onely exception of the widows son is indeed none at all for in it the Scripture is wholly silent and therefore it is very probable that the same processe was used God in all other instances having chosen to exemplifie his miracles of nature to purposes of the Spirit and in spirituall capacities So that although the Lord of nature did not break the bands of nature in some instances to manifest his glory to succeeding great and never failing purposes yet besides that this shall be no more it was also instanced in such persons who were holy and innocent and within the verge and comprehensions of the eternall mercy We never read that a wicked person felt such a miracle or was raised from the grave to try the second time for a Crown but where he fell there he lay down dead and saw the light no more This consideration I intend to you as a severe Monitor and an advice of carefulness that you order your affairs so that you may be partakers of the first resurrection that is from sin to grace from the death of vitious habits to the vigour life and efficacy of an habituall righteousnesse For as it hapned to those persons in the New Testament now mentioned to them I say in the literall sense Blessed are they that have part in the first resurrection upon them the second death shall have no power meaning that they who by the power of Christ and his holy Spirit were raised to life again were holy and blessed souls and such who were written in the book of God and that this grace happened to no wicked and vitious person so it is most true in the spirituall and intended sense You onely that serve God in a holy life you who are not dead in trespasses and sins you who serve God with an early diligence and an unwearied industry and a holy religion you and you onely shal come to life eternall you onely shall be called from death to life the rest of mankind shall never live again but passe from death to death from one death to another to a worse from the death of the body to the eternall death of body and soul and therefore in the Apostles Creed there is no mention made of the resurrection of wicked persons but of the resurrection of the body to everlasting life The wicked indeed shall be haled forth from their graves from their everlasting prisons where in chains of darknesse they are kept unto the judgement of the great day But this therefore cannot be called in sensu favoris a resurrection but the solennities of the eternall death It is nothing but a new capacity of dying again such a dying as cannot signifie rest but where death means nothing but an intolerable and never ceasing calamity and therefore these words of my text are otherwise to be understood of the wicked otherwise of the godly The wicked are spilt like water and shall never be gathered up again no not in the gatherings of eternity They shall be put into vessels of wrath and set upon on the flames of hell but that is not a gathering but a scattering from the face and presence of God But the godly also come under the sense of these words They descend into their graves and shall no more be reckoned among the living they have no concernment in all that is done under the sun Agamemnon hath no more to do with the Turks armies invading and possessing that part of Greece where he reigned then had the Hippocentaur who never had a beeing and Cicero hath no more interest in the