know that Senators take their name from age That therefore which is the weakness of old mens eyes that their visual spirits not uniting till some distance they better discern things further off is the praise and strength of their mental eyes they see either judgements or advantages afar off and accordingly frame their determinations It is observed that old Lutes sound better then new and it was Rehoboam's folly and undoing that he would rather follow the counsel of his green heads that stood before him then of those grave Senators that had stood before his wiser father Not that meer Age is of it self thus rich in wisdom and knowledge but Age well cultured well improved There are old men that do but live or rather have a being upon earth so have stocks and stones as well as they who can give no proof of their many yeers but their gray hairs and infirmities There are those who like to Hermogenes are old men whiles they are boys and children when they are old men These the elder they grow are so much more stupid Time is an ill measure of age which should rather be meted by proficiency by ripeness of judgement by the monuments of our commendable and useful labours If we have thus bestowed our selves our Autumn will shew what our Spring was and the colour of our hair will yeeld us more cause to fear our pride then our dejection §. 6. Age in some is vigorous and well affected We accuse our Age of many weaknesses and indispositions But these imputations must not be universal Many of these are the faults of the person not of the age He said well As all Wine doth not turn sowre with age no more doth every Nature Old Oil is noted to be clearer and hotter in Medicinal use then new There are those who are pettish and crabbed in youth there are contrarily those who are milde gentle sociable in their decayed yeers There are those who are crazie in their prime and there are those who in their wane are vigorous There are those who ere the fulness of their age have lost their memory as Hermogenes Cornivus Antonius Caracalla Georgius Trapezuntiâ—s and Nizolius There are those whose intellectuals have so happily held out that they have been best at the last Plato in his last yeer which was fourscore and one died as it were with his Pen in his hand Isocrates wrote his best Piece at ninety four yeers And it is said of Demosthenes that when death summoned him at an hundred yeers and somewhat more he bemoaned himself that he must now die when he began to get some knowledge And as for spiritual graces and improvements Such as be planted in the house of the Lord shall flourish in the courts of our God They also shall bring forth more fruit in their age and shall be fat and well liking § 7. The fourth advantage of Age Neer approach to our end But the chief benefit of our Age is our neer approach to our journeys end for the end of all motion is rest which when we have once attained there remains nothing but fruition Now our Age brings us after a weary race within some breathings of our goal for if young men may die old men must A condition which a meer carnal heart bewails and abhors complaining of Nature as niggardly in her dispensations of the shortest time to her noblest creature and envying the Oaks which many generations of men must leave standing and growing No marvel for the worldling thinks himself here at home and looks upon death as a banishment he hath placed his heaven here belowe and can see nothing in his remove but either annihilation or torment But for us Christians who know that whiles we are present in the body we are absent from the Lord and do justly account our selves forraigners our life a pilgrimage heaven our home how can we but rejoyce that after a tedious and painful travel we do now draw neer to the threshold of our Fathers house wherein we know there are many mansions and all glorious I could blush to hear an heathen say If God would offer me the choice of renewing my age and returning to my first childhood I should heartily refuse it for I should be loth after I have passed so much of my race to be called back from the goal to the bars of my first setting out and to hear a Christian whining and puling at the thought of his dissolution Where is our faith of an heaven if having been so long sea-beaten we be loth to think of putting into the safe and blessed harbour of immortality Comforts against the fears and pains of death §. 1. The fear of Death natural THou fearest death Thou wert not a man if thou didst not so The holiest the wisest the strongest that ever were have done no less He is the King of fear and therefore may and must command it Thou mayst hear the man after Gods own heart say The sorrows of death compassed me And again My soul is full of troubles my life draweth nigh to the grave I am counted with them that go down to the pit as a man that hath no strength free among the dead Thou mayst hear good and great Hezekiah upon the message of his death chattering like a Crane or a Swallow and mourning as a Dove Thou fearest as a man I cannot blame thee But thou must overcome thy fear as a Christian which thou shalt do if from the terrible aspect of the messenger thou shalt cast thine eyes upon the gracious and amiable face of the God that sends him Holy David shews the way The snares of death prevented me In my distress I called upon the Lord and cried unto my God he heard my voice out of his Temple and my cry came before him even into his ears Lo he that is our God is the God of salvation and unto God the Lord belong the issues of death Make him thy friend and Death shall be no other then advantage It is true as the Wise man saith that God made not Death but that through envie of the devil Death came into the world But it is as true that though God made him not yet he is pleased to employ him as his messenger to summon some souls to judgment to invite others to glory and for these later Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his Saints And what reason hast thou to abominate that which God accounts precious §. 2. Remedy oâ— fear Acquaintance with death Thou art afraid of death Acquaint thy self with him more and thou shalt fear him less Even Bears and Lions which at the first sight afrighted us upon frequent viewing lose their terrour snure thine eyes to the sight of death and that face shall begin not to displease thee Thou must shortly dwell with him for a long time for the days of darkness are many do thou
death another trembles to expect it one beggs for life another will sell it dearer here one would rescue one life and loseth two there another would hide himself where he findes a merciless death here lies one bleeding and groaning and gasping parting with his soul in extremity of anguish there another of stronger spirits kills and dies at once here one wrings her hands and tears her hair and seeks for some instrument of a self-inflicted death rather then yeeld her chaste body to the lust of a bloody ravisher there another clings inseparably to a dear husband and will rather take part of the murtherers sword then let go her last embraces here one tortured for the discovery of hid treasure there another dying upon the rack out of jealousie Oh that one man one Christian should be so bloodily cruel to another Oh that he who bears the image of the merciful God should thus turn fiend to his own flesh and blood These are terrible things my son and worthy of our bitterest lamentations and just fears I love the speculation of Seneca's resolutely-wise man that could look upon the glittering sword of an executioner with erected and undazeled eyes and that makes it no matter of difference whether his soul pass out at his mouth or at his throat but I should more admire the practice whiles we carry this clay about us nature cannot but in the holiest men shrink in at the sight and sense of these tyrannous and tragical acts of death Yet even these are the due revenges of the Almighties punitive justice so provoked by our sins as that it may not take up with an easier judgement Dost thou not see it ordinary with our Physitians when they finde the body highly distempered and the blood foul and inflamed to order the opening of a vein and the drawing out of so many ounces as may leave the rest meet for correction Why art thou over-troubled to see the great Physitian of the world take this course with sinful mankinde Certainly had not this great Body by mis dieting and wilful disorder contracted these spiritual diseases under which we languish had it not impured the blood that runs in these common veins with riot and surfets we had never been so miserable as to see these torrents of Christian blood running down our chanels Now yet as it is could we bewail and abandon our former wickedness we might live in hope that at the last this deadly issue might stop and dry up and that there might be yet left a possibility of a blessed recovery § 7. The woful miseries of Pestilence allaid by consideration of the hand that smites us Thou art confounded with grief to see the pestilence raging in our streets in so frequent a mortality as breeds a question concerning the number of the living and the dead That which is wont to abate other miseries heightens this The company of participants It was certainly a very hard and sad option that God gave to King David after his sin of numbring bring the people Chuse thee whether seven yeers famine shall come unto thee in thy Land or three moneths flight before thine enemies or three days pestilence We may believe the good King when we hear him say I am in a great strait Doubtless so he was but his wise resolutions have soon brought him out Let us fall now into the hand of the Lord for his mercies are great and let me not fall into the hand of man He that was to send these evils knew their value and the difference of their malignity yet he opposes three days pestilence to seven yeers famine and three months vanquishment so much oddes he knew there was betwixt the dull activity of man and the quick dispatch of an Angel It was a favour that the Angel of death who in one night destroyed an hundred fourscore and five thousand Assyrians should in three daies cut off but seventy thousand Israelites It was a great mercy that it was no worse We read of one City shall I call it or Region of Cayro wherein eighteen hundred thousand were swept away in one years pestilence enow one would think to have peopled the whole earth and in our own Chronicles of so generall a mortality that the living were hardly sufficient to bury the dead These are dreadfull demonstrations of Gods heavy displeasure but yet there is this alleviation of our misery that we suffer more immediatly from an holy just mercifull God The Kingly Prophet had never made that distinction in his wofull choyce if he had not known a notable difference betwixt the sword of an Angell and an enemy betwixt Gods more direct and immediate infliction and that which is derived to us through the malice of men It was but a poor consolation that is given by a victorious enemy to dying Lausus in the Poet Comfort thy selfe in thy death with this that thou fallest by the hand of great Aeneas but surely we have just reason to â—aise comfort to our souls when the pains of a pestilentiall death compasse us about from the thought and intuition of that holy and gracious hand under which we suffer so as we can say with good Eli It is the Lord. It is not amisse that we call those marks of deadly infection Gods Tokens such sure they are and ought therefore to call up our eyes and hearts to that Almighty power that sends them with the faithfull resolution of holy Iob Though thou kill me yet will I trust in thee It is none of the least miseries of contagious sicknesse that it bars us from the comfortable society and attendance of friends or if otherwise repaies their love and kinde visitation with death Be not dismaid my son with this sad solitude thou hast company with thee whom no infection can indanger or exclude there is an invisible friend that will be sure to stick by thee so much more closely by how much thou art more avoided by neighbours and will make all thy bed in thy sickness and supply thee with those cordialls which thou shouldst in vain expect from earthly visitants Indeed justly doe we style this The sicknesse eminently grievous both for the deadlinesse and generality of the dispersion yet there is a remedy that can both cure and conâ—ine it Let but every man look well to the plague of his own heart and the Land is healed Can we with David but see the Angell that smites us and erect an Altar and offer to God the sacrifices of our praiers penitence obedience we shall hear him say It is enough The time was and that time may not be forgotten when in the dayes of our late Soveraigne our Mother City was almost desolated with this mortall infection When thousands fell at our side and ten thousands at our right hand upon the publique humiliation of our soules the mercy of the Almighty was pleased to command that raging disease in the height of its fury
carried them thus corrected in their bosome for coolnesse and for the pleasure of their smoothnesse The sting of death is sinne Hee may hisse and winde about us but he cannot hurt us when that sting is pulled out Look up O thou beleeving soul to thy blessed Saviour who hath pluckt out this sting of death and happily triumphs over it both for himself and thee O death where is thy sting O grave where is thy victory §. 8. Death is but aparting to meet again Thy soul and body old companions are loth to part Why man it is but the forbearing their wonted society for a while they doe but take leave of each other till they meet againe in the day of Resurrection and in the mean time they are both safe and the better part happy It is commendable in the Jews otherwise the worst of men that they call their grave Beth Chajim the house of the living and when they return from the buriall of their neighbours they pluck up the grasse and cast it into the aire with those words of the Psalmist They shall flourish and put forth as the grasse upon the earth Did wee not beleeve a Resurrection of the one part and a re-uniting of the other wee had reason to be utterly daunted with the thought of a dissolution now wee have no cause to bee dismayed with a little intermission Is it an Heathen man or a Christian such I wish he had been whom I hear say The death which wee so fear and flee from doth but respite life for a while doth not take it away the day will come which shall restore us to the light again Settle thy soul my sonne in this assurance and thou canst not bee discomforted with a necessary parting § 9. Death is but a sleep Thou art afraid of death When thou art weary of thy dayes labour art thou afraid of rest Hear what thy Saviour who is the Lord of life esteems of death Iohn 11. 11. Our friend Lazarus sleepeth And of Jairus his daughter The maid is not dead but sleepeth Neither useth the Spirit of God any other language concerning his servants under the Old Testament Now shall I sleep in the dust saith holy Job And of David When thy days be fulfilled and thou shalt sleep with thy fathers Nor yet under the New For this cause many are weak and sickly among you and many sleep saith the Apostle Lo the Philosophers of old were wont to call sleep the brother of death but God says death is no other then sleep it self A sleep both sure and sweet When thou liest down at night to thy repose thou canst not be so certain to awake again in the morning as when thou layest thy self down in death thou art sure to wake in the morning of the Resurrection Out of this bodily sleep thou mayst be affrightedly startled with some noises of sudden horrour with some fearful dreams with tumults or alarms of War but here thou shalt rest quietly in the place of silence free from all inward and outward disturbances whiles in the mean time thy soul shall see none but visions of joy and blessedness But Oh the sweet and heavenly expression of our last rest and the issue of our happie resuscitation which our gracious Apostle hath laid forth for the consolation of his mournful Thessalonions For if we believe saith he that Jesus died and rose again even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him Lo our belief is antidote enough against the worst of death And why are we troubled with death when we believe that Jesus died And what a triumph is this over death that the same Jesus who died rose again And what a comfort it is that the same Jesus who arose shall both come again and bring all his with him in glory And lastly what a strong Cordial is this to all good hearts that all those which die well do sleep in Jesus Thou thoughtst perhaps of sleeping in the bed of the grave and there indeed is rest but he tells thee of sleeping in the bosome of Jesus and there is immortality and blessedness Oh blessed Jesu in thy presence is the fulness of joy and at thy right hand are pleasures for evermore Who would desire to walk in the world when he may sleep with Jesus § 10. Death sweetned to us by Christ. Thou fearest death It is much on what terms and in what form death presents himself to thee If as an enemy as that is somewhere his style the last enemy death thy unpreparation shall make him dreadful thy readiness and fortitude shall take off his terrour If as a messenger of God to fetch thee to happiness what reason hast thou to be afraid of thine own bliss It is one thing what death is in himself a privation of life as such Nature cannot chuse but abhor him Another thing what he is by Christ made unto us an introduction to life an harbinger to glory Why would the Lord of Life have yeelded unto death and by yeelding vanquisht him but that he might alter and sweeten Death to us and of a fierce Tyrant make him a Friend and Benefactor And if we look upon him thus changed thus reconciled how can we chuse but bid him welcome § 11. The painfulness of Christs â—eath Thou art afraid of the pangs of death There are those that have died without any great sense of pain some we have known to have yeelded up their souls without so much as a groan And how knowest thou my son what measure God hath allotted to thee Our death is a Sea-voyage so the Apostle I desire to lanch forth wherein some finde a rough and tempestuous passage others calm and smoothe such thine may prove so as thy dissolution may be more easie then a fit of thy sickness But if thy God have determined otherwise Look unto Jesus the Authour and Finisher of our faith the Son of God the Lord of glory see with what agonies he conflicted what torments he endured in his death for thee Look upon his bloody sweat his bleeding temples his furrowed back his nailed hands and feet his racked joynts his pierced side Hear his strong cries consider the shame the pain the câ—rse of the Cross which he underwent for thy sake Say whether thy sufferings can be comparable to his He is a cowardly and unworthy Souldier that follows his General sighing Lo these are the steps wherein thy God and Saviour hath trod before thee Walk on courageously in this deep and bloody way after a few paces thou shalt overtake him in glory For if we suffer with him we shall also reign together with him §. 12. The vanity and miseries of life Thou shrinkest at the thought of death Is it not for that thou hast over-valued life and made thy home on earth Delicate persons that have pampered themselves at home are loth to stir abâ—â—ad especially