CHAPTER I.
A GENERAL PREPARATION TOWARDS A HOLY AND BLESSED DEATH, BY WAY OF
CONSIDERATION.
A man is a bubble, (said the Greek
proverb,)[1] which Lucian represents
with advantages and its proper circumstances, to this purpose; saying, that all
the world is a storm, and men rise up in their several generations, like
bubbles descending a Jove pluvio, from God and the dew of heaven, from a
tear and drop of rain, from nature and Providence; and some of these instantly
sink into the deluge of their first parent, and are hidden in a sheet of water,
having had no other business in the world, but to be born, that they might be
able to die: others float up and down two or three turns, and suddenly
disappear, and give their place to others: and they that live longest upon the
face of the waters are in perpetual motion, restless and uneasy; and, being
crushed with a great drop of a cloud, sink into flatness and a froth; the
change not being great, it being hardly possible it should be more a nothing
that it was before. So is every man: he is born in vanity and sin; he comes
into the world like morning mushrooms, soon thrusting up their heads into the
air, and conversing with their kindred of the same production, and as soon they
turn into dust and forgetfulness - some of them without any other interest in
the affairs of the world, but that they made their parents a little glad and
very sorrowful: others ride longer in the storm; it may be until seven years of
vanity be expired, and then peradventure the sun shines hot upon their heads,
and they fall into the shades below, into the cover of death and darkness of
the grave to hide them. But if the bubble stands the shock of a bigger drop,
and outlives the chances of a child, of a careless nurse, of drowning in a pail
of water, of being overlaid by a sleepy servant, or such little accidents, then
the young man dances like a bubble, empty and gay, and shines like a dove's
neck, or the image of a rainbow, which hath no substance, and whose very
imagery and colours are fantastical; and so he dances out the gaiety of his
youth, and is all the while in a storm, and endures only because he is not
knocked on the head by a drop of bigger rain, or crushed by the pressure of a
load of indigested meat, or quenched by the disorder of an ill-placed humour:
and to preserve a man alive in the midst of so many chances and hostilities is
as great a miracle as to create him; to preserve him from rushing into nothing,
and at first to draw him up from nothing were equally the issues of an almighty
power. And therefore the wise men of the world have contended who shall best
fit man's condition with words signifying his vanity and short abode. Honour
calls a man "a leaf," the smallest, the weakest piece of a short-lived,
unsteady plant. Pindar calls him "the dream of a shadow:" another "the dream of
the shadow of smoke." But St. James spake by a more excellent spirit, saying,
`Our life is but a vapour,'[2] viz,
drawn from the earth by a celestial influence; made of smoke, or the lighter
parts of water tossed with every wind, moved by the motion of a superior body,
without virtue in itself, lifted up on high, or left below, according as it
pleased the sun, its foster-father. But it is lighter yet. It is but
appearing;[3] a fantastic vapour, an
apparition, nothing real; it is not so much as a mist, not the matter of a
shower, nor substantial enough to make a cloud; but it is like Cassiopeia's
chair, or Pelop's shoulder, or the circles of heaven, fainorena, for which you cannot have a word that can
signify a vernier nothing. And yet the expression is one degree more made
diminutive; a vapour, and fantastical, or a mere appearance, and
this but for a little while neither,[4] the very dream, the phantasm, disappears in a
small time, "like the shadow that departed; or like a tale that is told, or as
a dream when one waketh." A man is so vain, so unfixed, so perishing a
creature, that he cannot long last in the scene of fancy: a man goes off, and
is forgotten, like the dream of a distracted person. The sum of all is this:
that thou art a man, than whom there is not in the world any greater instance
of heights and declinations, of lights and shadows, of misery and folly, of
laughter and tears, of groans and death.
And because this consideration is of great
usefulness and great necessity to many purposes of wisdom and the spirit, all
the succession of time, all the changes in nature, all the varieties of light
and darkness, the thousand thousands of accidents in the world, and every
contingency to every man and to every creature, doth preach our funeral sermon,
and calls us to look and see how the old sexton, Time, throws up the earth,
and digs a grave, where we must lay our sins or our sorrows, and sow our
bodies, till they rise again in a fair or an intolerable eternity. Every
revolution which the sun makes about the world divides between life and death;
and death possesses both those portions by the next morrow; and we are dead to
all those months of which we have already lived, and we shall never live them
over again: and still God makes little periods of our age.[5] First we change our world, when we come from
the womb to feel the warmth of the sun. Then we sleep and enter into the image
of death, in which state we are unconcerned in all the changes of the world:
and if our mothers or our nurses die, or a wild boar destroy our vine-yards, or
our king be sick, we regard it not, but, during that state, are as
disinterested as if our eyes were closed with the clay that weeps in the bowels
of the earth. At the end of seven years our teeth fall and die before us,
representing a formal prologue to the tragedy; and still, every seven years it
is odds but we shall finish the last scene: and when nature, or chance, or
vice, takes our body in pieces, weakening some parts and loosing others, we
taste the grave and the solemnities of our own funerals, first, in those parts
that ministered to vice; and next, in them that served for ornament; and, in a
short time, even they that served for necessity become useless and entangled
like the wheels of a broken clock. Baldness is but a dressing to our
funerals,[6] the proper ornament of
mourning, and of a person entered very far into the regions and possession of
death; and we have many more of the same signification - gray hairs, rotten
teeth, dim eyes, trembling joints, short breath, stiff limbs, wrinkled skin,
short memory, decayed appetite. Every day's necessity calls for a reparation of
that portion which death fed on all night, when we lay in his lap, and slept in
his outer chambers. The very spirits of a man prey upon the daily portion
portion of bread and flesh, and every meal is a rescue from one death, and lays
up for another; and while we think a thought, we die; and the clock strikes,
and reckons on our portion of eternity: we form our words with the breath of
our nostrils - we have the less to live upon for every word we speak.
Thus nature calls us to meditate of
death by those things which are the instruments of acting it; and God, by all
the variety of his providence, makes us see death everywhere, in all variety of
circumstances, and dressed up for all the fancies, and the expectation of every
single person. Nature hath given us one harvest every year, but death hath two;
and the spring and the autumn send throngs of men and women to charnel-houses;
and the summer long men are recovering from their evils of the spring, till the
dog-days come, and the Sirian star makes the summer deadly; and the fruits of
autumn are laid up for all the year's provision, and the man that gathers them
eats and surfeits, and dies and needs them not, and himself is laid up for
eternity; and he that escapes till winter only stays for another opportunity,
which the distempers of that quarter minister to him with great variety. Thus
death reigns in all the portions of our time. The autumn with its fruit
provides disorders for us, and the winter's cold turns them into sharp
diseases, and the spring brings flowers to strew our hearse, and the summer
gives green turf and brambles to bind upon our graves. Calentures and surfeit,
cold and agues, are the four quarters of the year, and all minister to death;
and you can no whither, but you tread upon a dead man's bones.
The wild fellow, in Petronius, that escaped upon
a broken table from the furies of a shipwreck, as he was sunning himself upon
the rocky shore, espied a man, rolled upon his floating bed of waves, ballasted
with sand in the folds of his garment, and carried by his civil enemy, the sea,
towards the shore to find a grave: and it cast him into some sad thoughts;[7] that peradventure this man's wife, in some
part of the continent, safe and warm, looks next month for the good man's
return; or it many be, his son knows nothing of the tempest; or his father
things of that affectionate kiss, which still is warm upon the good man's
cheek, ever since he took a kind of farewell; and he weeps with joy to think
how blessed he shall be when his beloved boy returns into the circle of his
father's arms. These are the thoughts of mortals, this is the end and sum of
all their designs: a dark night and an ill guide, a boisterous sea and a broken
cable, a hard rock and a rough wind, dashed in pieces the fortune of a whole
family; and they that shall weep loudest for the accident are not yet entered
into the storm, and yet have suffered shipwreck. Then looking upon the carcass,
he knew it, and found it to be the master of the ship, who, the day before,
cast up the accounts of his patrimony and his trade, and named the day when he
thought to be at home: see how the man swims who was so angry two days since;
his passions are becalmed with the storm, his accounts cast up, his cares at an
end, his voyage done, and his gains are the strange events of death, which,
whether they be good or evil, the men that are alive seldom trouble themselves
concerning the interest of the dead.
But seas alone do not break our vessel in pieces:
everywhere we may be shipwrecked. A valiant general, when he is to reap the
harvest of his crowns and triumphs, fights unprosperously, or falls into a
fever with joy and wine, and changes his laurel into cypress, his triumphal
chariot to a hearse; dying the night before he was appointed to perish in the
drunkenness of his festival joys. It was a sad arrest of the loosenesses and
wilder feasts of the French court, when their king (Henry II.) was killed
really by the sportive image of a fight. And many brides have died under the
hands of paranymphs and maidens, dressing them for uneasy joy, the new and
undiscerned chains of marriage, according to the saying of Bensirah, the wise
Jew, "The bride went into her chamber, and knew not what should befall her
there." Some have been paying their vows, and giving thanks for a prosperous
return to their own house, and the roof hath descended upon their heads, and
turned their loud religion into the deeper silence of a grave. And how many
teeming mothers have rejoiced over their swelling wombs, and pleased themselves
in becoming the channels of blessing to a family; and the midwife hath quickly
bound their heads and feet, and carried them forth to burial! Or else the
birth-day of an heir hath seen the coffin of the father brought into the house,
and the divided mother hath been forced to travail twice, with a painful birth
and a sudden death.[8]
There is no state, no accident, no circumstance
of our life, but it hath soured by some sad instance of a dying friend; a
friendly meeting often ends in some mischance, and makes an eternal parting;
and when the poet Eschylus was sitting under the walls of his house, an eagle
hovering over his bald head mistook it for a stone, and let fall his oyster,
hoping there to break the shell, but pierced the poor man's skull.
Death meets us everywhere, and is procured by
every instrument, and in all chances and enters in at many doors; by violence
and secret influence; by the aspect of a star and the stink of a mist; by the
emissions of a cloud and the meeting of a vapour; by the fall of a chariot and
the stumbling at a stone; by a full meal or an empty stomach; by watching at
the wine or by watching at prayers; by the sun or the moon; by a heat or a
cold; by sleepless nights or sleeping days; by water frozen into the hardness
and sharpness of a dagger,[9] or water thawed
into the floods of a river; by a hair or a raisin; by violent motion or sitting
still; by severity or dissolution; by God's mercy or God's anger; by everything
in providence and everything in manners; by everything in nature and everything
in chance.[10] Eripitur persona, manetres;
we take pains to heap up things useful to our life, and get our death in
the purchase; and the person is snatched away, and the goods remain. And all
this is the law and constitution of nature; it is a punishment to our sins, the
unalterable event of Providence, and the decree of Heaven. The chains that
confine us to this condition are strong as destiny, and immutable as the
eternal laws of God.
I have conversed with some men who rejoiced in
the death or calamity of others, and accounted it as a judgment upon them for
being on the other side, and against them in the contention; but within the
revolution of a few months the same man met with a more uneasy and unhandsome
death; which when I saw, I wept, and was afraid; for I knew that it must be so
with all men; for we also shall die,[11] and
end our quarrels and contentions by passing to a final sentence.
It will be very material to our best and
noblest purposes, if we represent this scene of change and sorrow a little more
dressed up in circumstances; for so we shall be more apt to practice those
rules, the doctrine of which is consequent to this consideration. It is a
mighty change that is made by the death of every person, and it is visible to
us who are alive. Reckon but from the sprightfulness of youth, and the fair
cheeks and full eyes of childhood, from the vigorousness and strong flexure of
the joints of five-and-twenty, to the hollowness and dead paleness, to the
loathsomeness and horror, of a three days' burial, and we shall perceive the
distance to be very great and very strange. But so have I seen a rose newly
springing from the clefts of its hood, and, at first, it was fair as the
morning, and full with the dew of heaven, as a lamb's fleece; but when a ruder
breath had forced open its virgin modesty, and dismantled its too youthful and
unripe retirements, it began to put on darkness, and to decline to softness and
the symptoms of a sickly age; it bowed the head, and broke its stalk; and at
night, having lost some of its leaves and all its beauty, it fell into the
portion of weeds and outworn faces. The same is the portion of every man and
every woman; the heritage of worms and serpents, rottenness and cold dishonour,
and our beauty so changed that our acquaintance quickly knew us not; and that
change mingled with so much horror, or else meets so with our fears and weak
discoursings, that they who, six hours ago, tended upon us, either with
charitable or ambitious services, cannot, without some regret, stay in the room
alone where the body lies stripped of its life and honour. I have read of a
fair young German gentleman, who, living, often refused to be pictured, but put
off the importunity of his friends' desire by giving way, that, after a few
days' burial, they might send a painter to his vault, and, if they saw cause
for it, draw the image of his death unto the life. They did so, and found his
face half eaten, and his midriff and backbone full of serpents; and so he
stands pictured among his armed ancestors. So does the fairest beauty
change,[12] and it will be as bad
with you and me; and then what servants shall we have to wait upon us in the
grave? what friends to visit us? what officious people to cleanse away the
moist and unwholesome cloud reflected upon our faces from the sides of the
weeping vaults, which are the longest weepers for our funeral?
This discourse will be useful, if we
consider and practise the following rules and considerations respectively:
1. All the rich and all the covetous men in the
world will perceive, and all the world will perceive for them, that it is but
an ill recompense for all their cares, that, by this time all that shall be
left will be this,[13] that the neighbours
shall say, "He died a rich man;" and yet his wealth will not profit him in the
grave, but hugely swell the sad accounts of doomsday. And he that kills the
Lord's people with unjust or ambitious wars, for an unrewarding interest, shall
have this character;[14] that he threw away
all the days of his life, that one year might be reckoned with his name, and
computed by his reign or consulship: and many men, by great labours and
affronts, many indignities and crimes, labour only for a pompous epitaph, and a
loud title upon their marble; whilst those into whose possessions their heirs
or kindred are entered are forgotten, and lie unregarded as their ashes, and
without concernment or relation, as the turf upon the face of their grave.[15] A man may read a sermon, the best and most
passionate that ever man preached, if he shall but enter into the sepulchres of
kings. In the same Escurial where the Spanish princes live in greatness and
power, and decree war or peace, they have wisely placed a cemetery, where their
ashes and their glory shall sleep till time shall be no more; and where our
kings have been crowned their ancestors lie interred, and they must walk over
their grandsire's head to take his crown. There is an acre sown with royal
seed, the copy of the greatest change, from rich to naked, from ceiled roofs to
arched coffins, from living like gods to die like men. There is enough to cool
the flames of lust, to abate the heights of pride, to appease the itch of
covetous desires, to sully and dash out the dissembling colours of a lustful,
artificial, and imaginary beauty. There the warlike and the peaceful, the
fortunate and the miserable, the beloved and the despised princes mingle their
dust, and pay down their symbol of mortality, and tell all the world that when
we die our ashes shall be equal to kings', and our accounts easier, and our
pains for our crowns shall be less. To my apprehension, it is a sad record
which is left by Atheneus concerning Ninus, the great Assyrian monarch, whose
life and death are summed up in these words: "Ninus, the Assyrian, had an ocean
of gold, and other riches, more than the sand in the Caspian Sea; he never say
the stars, and perhaps he never desired it; he never stirred up the holy fire
among the Magi, nor touched his god with the sacred rod according to the laws;
he never offered sacrifice, nor worshipped the deity, nor administered justice,
nor spake to his people, nor numbered them; but he was most valiant to eat and
drink, and having mingled his wines, he threw the rest upon the stores. This
man is dead; behold his sepulchre; and now hear where Ninus is. Some time I was
Ninus, and drew the breath of a living man; but now am nothing but clay. I have
nothing but what I did eat, and what I served to myself in lust; that was and
is all my portion. The wealth with which I was esteemed blessed, my enemies
meeting together shall bear away, as the mad Thyades carry a new goat. I am
gone to hell; and when I went thither I neither carried gold, nor horse, nor
silver chariot. I that wore a mitre am now a little heap of dust." I know not
anything that can better represent the evil condition of a wicked man, or a
changing greatness.[16] From the greatest
secular dignity to dust and ashes his nature bears him; and from thence to hell
his sins carry him, and there he shall be for ever under the dominion of chains
and devils, wrath and an intolerable calamity. This is the reward of an
unsanctified condition, and a greatness ill-gotten or ill-administered.
2. Let no man extend his thoughts, or let his
hopes wander towards future and far-distant events and accidental
contingencies. This day is mine and yours, but ye know not what shall be on the
morrow and every morning creeps out of a dark cloud, leaving behind it an
ignorance and silence deep as midnight, and undiscerned as are the phantasms
that make a chrisom-child to smile; so that we cannot discern what comes
hereafter,[17] unless we had a light from
heaven brighter than the vision of an angel, even the spirit of prophecy.
Without revelation we cannot tell whether we shall eat to-morrow, or whether a
squinancy shall choke us: and it is written in the unrevealed folds of Divine
predestination, that many who are this day alive shall to-morrow be laid upon
the cold earth, and the women shall weep over their shroud, and dress them for
their funeral. St. James, in his Epistle, notes the folly of some men, his
contemporaries, who were so impatient of the event of to-morrow, or the
accidents of next year, or the good or evils of old age, that they would
consult astrologers and witches, oracles and devils, what should befall them
the next calends-what should be the event of such a voyage-what God had written
in his book concerning the success of battles, the election of emperors, the
heirs of families, the price of merchandise, the return of the Tyrian fleet,
the rate of Sidonian carpets: and as they were taught by the crafty and lying
demons, so they would expect the issue; and oftentimes, by disposing their
affairs in order towards such events, really did produce some little accidents
according to their expectation; and that made them trust the oracles in greater
things, and in all. Against this he opposes his counsel, that we should not
search after forbidden records,[18] much less
by uncertain significations: for whatsoever is disposed to happen by the order
of natural causes or civil counsels, may be rescinded by a perculiar decree of
Providence, or be prevented by the death of the interested persons; who, while
their hopes are full, and their causes conjoined, and the work brought forward,
and the sickle put into the harvest, and the first-fruits offered and ready to
be eaten, even then, if they put forth their hand to an event that stands but
at the door, at that door their body may be carried forth to burial before the
expectation shall enter into fruition. When Richilda, the widow of Albert earl
of Ebersberg, had feasted the emperor Henry III. and petitioned, in behalf of
her nephew Welpho, for some lands formerly possessed by the earl her husband,
just as the emperor held out his hand to signify his consent, the chamber-floor
suddenly fell under them, and Richilda, falling upon the edge of a
bathing-vessel, was bruised to death, and staid not to see her nephew sleep in
those lands which the emperor was reaching forth to her, and placed at the door
of restitution.
3. As our hopes must be confined, so must our
designs;[19] let us not project long designs,
crafty plots, and diggings so deep that the intrigues of a design shall never
be unfolded till our grandchildren have forgotten our virtues or our vices. The
work of our soul is cut short, facile, sweet, and plain, and fitted to the
small portions of our shorter life; and as we must not trouble our iniquity, so
neither must we intricate our labour and purposes with what we shall never
enjoy. This rule does not forbid us to plant orchards, which shall feed our
nephews with their fruit; for by such provisions they do something towards an
imaginary immortality, and do charity to their relatives: but such projects are
reproved which discompose our present duty by long and future designs;[20] such which, by casting our labours to
events at distance, make us less to remember our death standing at the door. It
is fit for a man to work for his day's wages, or to contrive for the hire of a
week, or to lay a train to make provisions for such a time as it is within our
eye, and in our duty, and within the usual periods of man's life; for
whatsoever is made necessary is also made prudent; but while we plot and busy
ourselves in the toils of an ambitious war, or the levies of a great estate,
night enters in upon us, and tells all the world how like fools we lived, and
how deceived and miserably we died. Seneca tells of Senecio Cornelius, a man
crafty in getting, and tenacious in holding, a great estate, and one who was as
diligent in the care of his body as of his money, curious of his health as of
his possessions, that he all day long attended upon his sick and dying friend;
but when he went away, was quickly comforted, supped merrily, went to bed
cheerfully, and on a sudden being surprised by a squinancy, scarce drew his
breath until the morning, but by that time died, being snatched from the
torrent of his fortune, and the swelling tide of wealth, and a likely hope
bigger than the necessities of ten men. This accident was much noted then in
Rome, because it happened in so great a fortune, and in the midst of wealthy
designs; and presently it made wise men to consider how imprudent a person he
is who disposes of ten years to come, when he is not lord of tomorrow.
4. Though we must not look so far off, and pry
abroad, yet we must be busy near at hand; we must, with all arts of the spirit,
seize upon the present,[21] because it passes
from us while we speak, and because in it all our certainty does consist. We
must take our waters as out of a torrent and sudden shower, which will quickly
cease dropping from above, and quickly cease running in our channels here
below: this instant will never return again, and yet it may be, this instant
will declare or secure the fortune of a whole eternity. The old Greeks and
Romans taught us the prudence of this rule; but Christianity teaches us the
religion of it. They so seized upon the present, that they would lose nothing
of the day's pleasure.[22] "Let us eat and
drink, for to-morrow we shall die;" that was their philosophy; and at their
solemn feasts they would talk of death to heighten the present drinking, and
that they might warm their veins with a fuller chalice, as knowing the drink
that was poured upon their graves would be cold and without relish. "Break the
beds, drink your wine, crown your heads with roses, and besmear your curled
locks with nard; for God bids you to remember death:" so the epigrammatist
speaks the sense of their drunken principles.[23] Something towards this signification is that of Solomon,
"There is nothing better for a man than that he should eat and drink, and that
he should make his soul enjoy good in his labour; for that is his portion; for
who shall bring him to see that which shall be after him?[24] But although he concludes all this to be vanity, yet
because it was the best thing that was then commonly known, that they should
seize upon the present with a temperate use of permitted pleasures, I had
reason to say[25] that Christianity taught us
to turn this into religion. For he that by a present and constant holiness
secures the present, and makes it useful to his noblest purposes, he turns his
condition into his best advantage, by making his unavoidable fate become his
necessary religion.
To the purpose of this rule is that collect of
Tuscan hieroglyphies which we have from Gabriel Simeon: "Our life is very
short; beauty is a cozenage; money is false and fugitive; empire is adious, and
hated by them that have it not, and uneasy to them that have; victory is always
uncertain, and peace, most commonly, is but a fraudulent bargain; old age is
miserable, death is the period, and is a happy one, if it be not sorrowed by
the sins of our life: but nothing continues but the effects of that wisdom
which employs the present time in the acts of a holy religion and a peaceable
conscience." For they make us to live even beyond our funerals, embalmed in the
spices and odours of a good name, and entombed in the grave of the holy Jesus,
where we shall be dressed for a blessed resurrection to the state of angels and
beatified spirits.
5. Since we stay not here, being people but of a
day's abode, and our age is like that of a fly and contemporary with a gourd,
we must look somewhere else for an abiding city, a place in another country to
fix our house in, whose walls and foundation is God, where we must find rest,
or else be restless for ever. For whatsoever ease we can have or fancy here, is
shortly to be changed into sadness or tediousness;[26] it goes away too soon, like the periods of our life, or
stays too long, like the sorrows of a sinner; its own weariness, or a contrary
disturbance, is its load; or it is eased by its revolution into vanity and
forgetfulness; and where either there is sorrow, or an end of joy, there can be
no true felicity; which, because it must be had by some instrument, and in some
period of our duration, we must carry up our affections to the mansions
prepared for us above, where eternity is the measure, felicity is the state,
angels are the company, the Lamb is the light, and God is the portion and
inheritance.
In the accounts of a man's life, we do
not reckon that portion of days in which we are shut up in the prison of the
womb; we tell our years from the day of our birth; and the same reason that
makes our reckoning to stay so long, says also, that then it begins too soon.
For then we are beholden to others to make the account for us; for we know not
of a long time whether we be alive or no, having but some little approaches and
symptoms of a life. To feed, and sleep, and move a little, and imperfectly, is
the state of an unborn child: and when he is born he does no more for a good
while; and what is it that shall make him to be esteemed to live the life of a
man? and when shall that account begin? For we should be loath to have the
accounts of our age taken by the measures of a beast; and fools and distracted
persons are reckoned as civilly dead; they are no parts of the commonwealth,
not subject to laws, but secured by them in charity, and kept from violence as
a man keeps his ox; and a third part of our life is spent before we enter into
a higher order, into the state of man.
2. Neither must we thing that the life
of a man begins when he can feed himself, or walk alone, when he can fight, or
beget his like; for so he is contemporary with a camel or a cow; but he is
first a man when he comes to a certain, steady use of reason, according to his
proportion; and when that is, all the world of men cannot tell precisely. Some
men are called at age at fourteen; some at one-and-twenty; some never; but all
men late enough; for the life of a man comes upon him slowly and insensibly.
But as, when the sun approaches towards the gates of the morning, he first
opens a little eye of heaven, and sends away the spirits of darkness, and gives
light to a cock, and calls up the lark to matins, and by and by gilds the
fringes of a cloud, and peeps over the eastern hills, thrusting out his golden
horns, like those which decked the brows of Moses when he was forced to wear a
veil because himself had seen the face of God; and still, while a man tells the
story, the sun gets up higher, till he shows a fair face and a full light, and
then he shines one whole day, under a cloud often, and sometimes weeping great
and little showers, and sets quickly; so is a man's reason and his life. He
first begins to perceive himself to see or taste, making little reflections
upon his actions of sense, and can discourse of hies and dogs, shells and play,
horses and liberty; but when he is strong enough to enter into arts and little
institutions, he is at first entertained with trifles and impertinent things,
not because he needs them, but because his understanding is no bigger, and
little images of things are laid before him, like a cock-boat to a whale, only
to play withal; but before a man comes to be wise, he is half dead with gouts
and consumptions, with catarrhs and aches, with sore eyes and a wornout body.
So that if we must not reckon the life of a man but by the accounts of his
reason, he is long before his soul be dressed; and he is not to be called a man
without a wise and an adorned soul, a soul at least furnished with what is
necessary toward his well-being; but by that time his soul is thus furnished
his body is decayed; and then you can hardly reckon him to be alive, when his
body is possessed by so many degrees of death.
3. But there is yet another arrest. At first he
wants strength of body, and then he wants the use of reason; and when that is
come, it is ten to one but he stops by the impediments of vice, and wants the
strength of the spirit; and we know that body and soul and spirit are the
constituent parts of every Christian man. And now let us consider what that
thing is which we call years of discretion. The young man is past his tutors,
and arrived at the bondage of a caitiff spirit; he is run from discipline, and
is let loose to passion; the man by this time hath wit enough to choose his
vice, to act his lust, to court his mistress, to talk confidently and
ignorantly and perpetually, to despise his betters, to deny nothing to his
appetite, to do things that, when he is indeed a man, he must for ever be
ashamed of; for this is all the discretion that most men show in the first
stage of their manhood; they can discern good from evil; and they prove their
skill by leaving all that is good, and wallowing in the evils of folly and an
unbridled appetite. And, by this time, the young man hath contracted vicious
habits, and is a beast in manners, and therefore it will not be fitting to
reckon the beginning of his life; he is a fool in his understanding, and that
is a sad death; and he is dead in trespasses and sins, and that is a sadder; so
that he hath no life but a natural, the life of a beast or a tree; in all other
capacities he is dead; he neither hath the intellectual nor the spiritual life,
neither the life of a man nor of a Christian; and this sad truth lasts too
long. For old age seizes upon most men while they still retain the minds of
boys and vicious youth, doing actions from principles of great folly, and a
mighty ignorance, admiring things useless and hurtful, and filling up all the
dimensions of their abode with businesses of empty affairs, being at leisure to
attend no virtue; they cannot pray because they are busy, and because they are
passionate; they cannot communicate because they have quarrels and intrigues of
perplexed causes, complicated hostilities, and things of the world, and
therefore they cannot attend to the things of God; little considering that they
must find a time to die in; when death comes they must be at leisure for that.
Such men are like sailors loosing from a port, and tossed immediately with a
perpetual tempest, lasting till their cordage crack, and either they sink or
return back again to the same place; they did not make a voyage, though they
were long at sea. The business and impertinent affairs of most men steal all
their time, and they are restless in a foolish motion: but this is not the
progress of a man; he is no further advanced in the course of a life, though he
reckon many years;[27] for still his soul is
childish and trifling like an untaught boy.
If the parts of this sad complaint find their
remedy, we have by the same instruments also cured the evils and the vanity of
a short life. Therefore,
1. Be infinitely curious you do not set back your
life in the accounts of God by the intermingling of criminal actions, or the
contracting of vicious habits. There are some vices which carry a sword in
their hand, and cut a man off before his time. There is a sword of the Lord,
and there is a sword of a man, and there is a sword of the devil. Every vice of
our own managing in the matter of carnality, of lust or rage, ambition or
revenge, is a sword of Satan put into the hands of a man: these are the
destroying angels; sin is the Apollyon, the destroyer that is gone out, not
from the Lord, but from the tempter; and we hug the poison, and twist willingly
with the vipers, till they bring us into the regions of an irrecoverable
sorrow. We use to reckon persons as good as dead if they have lost their limbs
and their teeth, and are confined to a hospital, and converse with none but
surgeons and physicians, mourners and divines, those paltinctores, the
dressers of bodies and souls to funeral; but it is worse when the soul, the
principle of life, is employed wholly in the offices of death, and that man was
worse than dead of whom Seneca tells, that being a rich fool, when he was
lifted up from the baths and set into a soft couch, asked his slaves, As ego
jam sedeo? Do I now sit? The beast was so drowned in sensuality and the
death of his soul, that, whether he did sit or no, he was to believe another.
Idleness and every vice are as much of death as a long disease is, or the
expense of ten years; and `she that lives in pleasures if dead while she
liveth' (saith the apostle;) and it is the style of the Spirit concerning
wicked persons, `they are dead in trespasses and sins.' For as every sensual
pleasure and every day of idleness and useless living lops off a little branch
from our short life, so every deadly sin, and every habitual vice does quite
destroy us; but innocence leaves us in our natural portions and perfect period;
we lose nothing of our life if we lose nothing of our soul's health; and
therefore, he that would live a full age must avoid a sin as he would decline
the regions of death and the dishonours of the grave.
2. If we would have our life lengthened,[28] let us begin betimes to live in the
accounts of reason and sober counsels, of religion and the spirit, and then we
shall have no reason to complain that our abode on earth is so short; many men
find it long enough, and indeed it is so to all senses. But when we spend in
waste what God hath given us in plenty, when we sacrifice our youth to folly,
our manhood to lust and rage, our old age to covetousness and irreligion, not
beginning to live till we are to die, designing that time to virtue which
indeed is infirm to everything and profitable to nothing; then we make our
lives short, and lust runs away with all the vigorous and healthful part of it,
and pride and animosity steal the manly portion, and craftiness and interest
possess old age; velut ex pleno et abundanti perdimus, we spend as if
we had too much time, and knew not what to do with it: we fear everything, like
weak and silly mortals, and desire strangely and greedily, as if we were
immortal; we complain our life is short, and yet we throw away much of it, and
are weary of many of its parts: we complain that day is long, and the night is
long, and we want company, and seek out arts to drive the time away, and then
weep because it is gone too soon. But so the treasure of the capitol is but a
small estate when Caesar comes to finger it, and to pay with it all his
legions; and the revenue of all Egypt and the eastern provinces was but a
little sum when they were to support the luxury of Mark Antony, and feed the
riot of Cleopatra; but a thousand crowns is a vast proportion to be spent in
the cottage of a frugal person, or to feed a hermit. Just so is our life: it is
too short to serve the ambition of a haughty prince, or an usurping rebel; too
little time to purchase great wealth, to satisfy the pride of a vain-glorious
fool, to trample upon all the enemies of our just or unjust interest; but for
the obtaining virtue, for the purchase of sobriety and modesty, for the actions
of religion, God gave us time sufficient, if we make the `outgoings of the
morning and evening,' that is, our infancy and old age, to be taken into the
computations of a man. Which we may see in the following particulars:
1. If our childhood, being first consecrated, by
a forward baptism, be seconded by a holy education and a complying obedience;
if our youth be chaste and temperate, modest and industrious, proceeding
through a prudent and sober manhood to a religious old age, then we have lived
our whole duration,[29] and shall never die,
but be changed, in a just time, to the preparations of a better and an immortal
life.
2. If, besides the ordinary returns of our prayer
and periodical and festival solemnities, and on seldom communions, we would
allow to religion and the studies of wisdom those great shares that are trifled
away upon vain sorrow, foolish mirth, lust, and impertinent amours, and balls
and reveling and banquets, all that which was spent viciously, and all that
time that lay fallow and without employment, our life would quickly amount to a
great sum. Tostatus Abulensis was a very painful person, and a great clerk, and
in the days of his manhood he wrote so many books, and they not ill ones, that
the world computed a sheet for every day of his life; I suppose they meant
after he came to the use of reason and the state of a man: and John Scotus died
about the two-and-thirtieth year of his age; and yet, besides his public
disputations, his daily lectures of divinity in public and private, the books
that he wrote, being lately collected and printed at Lyons, do equal the number
of volumes of any two the most voluminous fathers of the Latin church. Every
man is not enabled to such employments, but every man is called and enabled to
the works of a sober and a religious life; and there are many saints of God
that can reckon as many volumes of religion and mountains of piety as those
others did of good books. St. Ambrose (and I think, from his example, St.
Augustine) divided every day into three tertias of employment: eight hours he
spent in charity and doing assistance to others, dispatching their business,
reconciling their enmities, reproving their vices, correcting their errors,
instructing their ignorances, transacting the affairs of his diocese; and the
other eight hours he spent in study and prayer. If we were thus minute and
curious in the spending of our time, it is impossible but our life would seem
very long. For so have I seen an amorous person tell the minutes of his absence
from his fancied joy, and while he told the sands of his hour-glass, or the
throbs and little beatings of his watch, by dividing an hour into so many
members, he spun out its length by number, and so translated a day into the
tediousness of a month. And if we tell our days by canonical hours of prayer,
our weeks by a constant revolution of fasting-days or days of special devotion,
and over all these draw a black cypress, a veil of penitential sorrow and
severe mortification, we shall soon answer the calumny and objection of a short
life. He that governs the day and divides the hours hastens from the eyes and
observation of a merry sinner; but loves to stand still, and behold, and tell
the sighs, and number the groans and sadly-delicious accents of a grieved
penitent. It is a vast work that any man may do if he never be idle: and it is
a huge way that a man may go in virtue if he never goes out of his way by a
vicious habit or a great crime: and he that perpetually reads good books, if
his parts be answerable, will have a huge stock of knowledge. It is so in all
things else. Strive not to forget your time, and suffer none of it to pass
undiscerned; and then measure your life, and tell me how you find the measure
of its abode. However, the time we live is worth the money we pay for it; and
therefore it is not to be thrown away.
3. When vicious men are dying, and scared with
the affrighting truths of an evil conscience, they would give all the world for
a year, for a month: nay, we read of some that called out with amazement,
inducias usque ad mane - truce but till the morning: and if that year or
some few months were given, those men think they could do miracles in it. And
let us awhile suppose what Dives would have done if he had been loosed from the
pains of hell, and permitted to live on earth one year. Would all the pleasures
of the world have kept him one hour from the temple? would he not perpetually
have been under the hands of priests, or at the feet of the doctors, or by
Moses' chair, or attending as near the altar as he could get, or reviving poor
Lazarus, or praying to God, and crucifying all sin? I have read of a melancholy
person, who saw hell but in a dream or a vision, and the amazement was such,
that he would have chosen ten times to die rather than feel again so much of
that horror: and such a person cannot be fancied but that he would spend a year
in such holiness that the religion of a few months would equal the devotion of
many years, even of a good man. Let us but compute the proportions. If we
should spend all our years of reason so as such a person would spend that one,
can it be thought that life would be short and trifling in which he had
performed such a religion, served God with so much holiness, mortified sin with
so great a labour, purchased virtue at such a rate and so rare an industry? It
must needs be that such a man must die when he ought to die, and be like ripe
and pleasant fruit falling from a fair tree, and gathered into baskets for the
planter's use. He that hath done all his business, and is begotten to a
glorious hope by the seed of an immortal spirit, can never die too soon, nor
live too long!
Xerxes wept sadly when he say his army of
1,300,000 men, because he considered that within a hundred years all the youth
of that army should be dust and ashes; and yet, as Seneca well observes of him,
he was the man that should bring them to their graves; and he consumed all that
army in two years for whom he feared and wept the death after a hundred. Just
so we do all. We complain that within thirty or forty years, a little more, or
a great deal less, we shall descend again into the bowels of our mother, and
that our life is too short for any great employment; and yet we throw away
five-and thirty years of our forty, and the remaining five we divide between
art and nature, civility and customs, necessity and convenience, prudent
counsels and religion; but the portion of the last is little and contemptible,
and yet that little is all that we can prudently account of our lives. We bring
that fate and that death near us of whose approach we are so sadly
apprehensive.
4. In taking the accounts of your life, do not
reckon by great distances, and by the periods of pleasure, or the satisfaction
of your hopes, or the sating your desires; but let every intermedial day and
hour pass with observation. He that reckons he hath lived but so many harvests,
thinks they come not often enough, and that they go away too soon;[30] some lose the day with longing for the
night, and the night in waiting for the day. Hope and fantastic expectations
spend much of our lives; and while with passion we look for a coronation, or
the death of an enemy, or a day of joy, passing from fancy to possession
without any intermedial notices, we throw away a precious year, and use it but
as the burden of our time, fit to be pared off and thrown away, that we may
come at those little pleasures which first steal our hearts, and then steal our
life.
5. A strict course of piety is the way to prolong
our lives in the natural sense, and to add good portions to the number of our
years; and sin is sometimes by natural casualty, very often by the anger of God
and the Divine judgment, a cause of sudden and untimely death. Concerning which
I shall add nothing (to what I have somewhere else said of this article,[31] ) but only the observation of Epiphanius;
that for three thousand three hundred and thirty-two years, even to the
twentieth age, there was not one example of a son that died before his father;
but the course of nature was kept, that he who was first born in the descending
line did first die, (I speak of natural death, and therefore Abel cannot be
opposed to this observation,) till that Terah, the father of Abraham, taught
the people a new religion, to make images of clay and worship them; and
concerning him it was first remarked, that `Haran died before his father Terah
in the land of his nativity:' God, by an unheard of judgment and a rare
accident punishing his newly-invented crime by the untimely death of his
son.
6. But if I shall describe a living man, a man
that hath that life that distinguishes him from a fool or a bird, that which
gives him a capacity next to angels, we shall find that even a good man lives
not long, because it is long before he is born to this life, and longer yet
before he hath a man's growth. "He that can look upon death, and see its face
with the same countenance with which he hears its story;[32] that can endure all the labours of his life with his soul
supporting his body; that can equally despise riches when he hath them and when
he hath them not; that is not sadder if they lie in his neighbour's trunks, nor
more brag if they shine round about his own walls: he that is neither moved
with good fortune coming to him nor going from him; that can look upon another
man's lands evenly and pleasedly, as if they were his own, and yet look upon
his own, and use them too, just as if they were another man's; that neither
spends his goods prodigally and life a fool, nor yet keeps them avariciously
and like a wretch; that weighs not benefits by weight and number, but by the
mind and circumstances of him that gives them; that never thinks his charity
expensive if a worthy person be the receiver; he that does nothing for opinion
sake, but everything for conscience, being as curious of his thoughts as of his
actings in markets and theatres, and is as much in awe of himself as a whole
assembly: he that knows God looks on, and contrives his secret affairs as in
the presence of God and his holy angels; that eats and drinks because he needs
it, not that he may serve a lust or load his belly; he that is bountiful and
cheerful to his friends, and charitable and apt to forgive his enemies; that
loves his country, and obeys his prince, and desires and endeavours nothing
more than that he may do honour to God:" this person may reckon his life to be
the life of a man, and compute his months, not by the course of the sun, but
the zodiac and circle of his virtues; because these are such things which fools
and children, and birds and beasts, cannot have; these are therefore the
actions of life, because they are the seeds of immortality. That day in which
we have done some excellent thing we may as truly reckon to be added to our
life as were the fifteen years to the days of Hezekiah.
As our life is very short, so it is very
miserable; and therefore it is well it is short. God, in pity to mankind, lest
his burden should be insupportable, and his nature an intolerable load, hath
reduced our state of misery to an abbreviator; and the greater our misery is,
the less while it is like to last: the sorrows of a man's spirit being like
ponderous weights, which by the greatness of their burden make a swifter
motion, and descend into the grave to rest and ease our wearied limbs; for then
only we shall sleep quietly, when those fetters are knocked off, which not only
bound our souls in prison, but also ate the flesh, till the very bones opened
the secret garments of their cartilages, discovering their nakedness and
sorrow.
1. Here is no place to sit down in, but
you must rise as soon as you are set, for we have gnats in our chambers, and
worms in our gardens,[33] and spiders and
flies in the palaces of the greatest kings. How few men in the world are
prosperous! What an infinite number of slaves and beggars, of persecuted and
oppressed people, fill all corners of the earth and groans, and heaven itself
with weeping, prayers, and sad remembrances! How many provinces and kingdoms
are afflicted by a violent war, or made desolate by popular diseases! Some
whole countries are remarked with fatal evils or periodical sicknesses. Grand
Cairo, in Egypt, feels the plague every three years returning like a quartan
ague, and destroying many thousands of persons. All the inhabitants of Arabia,
the desert, are in a continual fear of being buried in huge heaps of sand, and
therefore dwell in tents and ambulatory houses, or retire to unfruitful
mountains, to prolong an uneasy and wilder life. And all the countries round
about the Adriatic Sea feel such violent convulsions by tempests and
intolerable earthquakes, that sometimes whole cities find a tomb, and every man
sinks with his own house made ready to become his monument, and his bed is
crushed into the disorders of a grave. Was not all the world drowned at one
deluge and breach of the divine agner? And shall not all the world again be
destroyed by fire? Are there not many thousands that die every night, and that
groan and weep sadly every day? But what shall we think of the great evil which
for the sins of men God hath suffered to posses the greatest part of mankind?
Most of the men that are now alive, or that have been living for many ages, are
Jews, heathens, or Turks; and God was pleased to suffer a base epileptic
person, a villain and a vicious, to set up a religion which hath filled all the
nearer parts of Asia, and much of Africa, and some part of Europe; so that the
greatest number of men and women born in so many kingdoms and provinces are
infallibly made Mahometan, strangers and enemies to Christ, by whom alone we
can be saved. This consideration is extremely sad, when we remember how
universal and how great an evil it is, that so many millions of sons and
daughters are born to enter into the possession of devils to eternal ages.
These evils are the miseries of great parts of mankind, and we cannot easilyconsider more particularly the evils which happen to us, being the inseparable
affections or incidents to the whole nature of man.
2. We find that all the women in the world are
either born for barrenness or the pains of childbirth, and yet this is one of
our greatest blessings; but such indeed are the blessings of this world, we
cannot be well with nor without many things. Perfumes make our heads ache,
roses prick our fingers, and in our very blood, where our life dwells, is the
scene under which nature acts many sharp fevers and heavy sicknesses. It were
too sad if I should tell how many persons are afflicted with evil spirits, with
spectres and illusions of the night; and that huge multitudes of men and women
live upon man's flesh, nay, worse yet, upon the sins of men, upon the sins of
their sons and of their daughters, and they pay their souls down for the bread
they eat, buying this day's meal with the price of the last night's sin.
3. Or if you please in charity to visit a
hospital, which is indeed a map of the whole world, there you shall see the
effects of Adam's sin, and the ruins of human nature; bodies laid up in heaps,
like the bones of a destroyed town, homines precartt spiritus et male
haerentis - men whose souls seem to be borrowed, and are kept there by art
and the force of medicine - whose miseries are so great, that few people have
charity or humanity enough to visit them, fewer have the heart to dress them,
and we pity them in civility or with a transient prayer, but we do not feel
their sorrows by the mercies of a religious pity; and, therefore, as we leave
their sorrows in many degrees unrelieved and uneased, so we contract by our
unmercifulness a guilt by which ourselves become liable to the same calamities.
Those many that need pity, and those infinities of people that refuse to pity,
are miserable upon a several charge, but yet they almost make up all
mankind.
4. All wicked men are in love with that which
entangles them in huge varieties of troubles; they are slaves to the worst of
masters, to sin and to the devil, to a passion and to an imperious woman. Good
men are for ever persecuted, and God chastises every son whom he receives; and
whatsoever is easy is trifling and worth nothing; and whatsoever is excellent
is not to be obtained without labour and sorrow; and the conditions and states
of men that are free from great cares are such as have in them nothing rich and
orderly, and those that have are stuck full of thorns and trouble. Kings are
full of care, and learned men in all ages have been observed to be very poor,[34] honestas miserias accusant - they
complain of their honest miseries.
5. But these evils are notorious and confessed;
even they also whose felicity men stare at and admire, besides their splendour
and the sharpness of their light, will, with their appendant sorrows, wring a
tear from the most resolved eye; for not only the winter is full of storms and
cold and darkness, but the beauteous spring hath blasts and sharp frosts; the
fruitful teeming summer is melted with heat, and burnt with the kisses of the
sun, her friend, and choked with dust; and the rich autumn is full of sickness;
and we are weary of that which we enjoy, because sorrow is its biggest portion;
and when we remember, that upon the fairest face is placed one of the worst
sinks of the body, the nose, we may use it not only as a mortification to the
pride of beauty, but as an allay to the fairest outside of condition which any
of the sons and daughters of Adam do posses. For look upon kings and
conquerors: I will not tell that many of them fall into the condition of
servants,[35] and their subjects rule over
them, and stand upon the ruins of their families, and that to such persons the
sorrow is bigger than usually happens in smaller fortunes; but let us suppose
them still conquerors, and see what a goodly purchase they get by all their
bounds of the river Rhine: I speak in the style of the Roman greatness; for
now-adays the biggest fortune swells not beyond the limits of a petty province
or two, and a hill confines the progress of their prosperity, or a river checks
it: but whatsoever tempts the pride and vanity of ambitious persons is not so
big as the smallest star which we see scattered in disorder and unregarded upon
the pavement and floor of heaven. And if we would suppose the pismires had but
our understandings, they also would have the method of a man's greatness, and
divide their little mole-hills into provinces and exharchates; and if they also
grew as vicious and as miserable, one of their princes would lead an army out,
and kill his neighbour ants, that he might reign over the next handful of a
turf. But then, if we consider at what price and with what felicity all this is
purchased, the sting of the painted snake will quickly appear, and the fairest
of their fortunes will properly enter into this account of human
infelicities.
We may guess at it by the constitution of
Augustus's fortune, who struggled for his power, first, with the Roman
citizens, then with Brutus and Cassius, and all the fortune of the republic;
then with his colleague, Mary Antony; then with his kindred and nearest
relatives; and, after he was wearied with slaughter of the Romans, before he
could sit down and rest in his imperial chair, he was forced to carry armies
into Macedonia, Galatia, beyond Euphrates, Rhine, and Danubius; and when he
dwelt at home in greatness, and within the circles of a mighty power, he hardly
escaped the sword of the Egnatii, of Lepidus, Caepio, and Muraena: and after he
had entirely reduced the felicity and grandeur into his own family, his
daughter, his only child, conspired with many of the young nobility, and, being
joined with adulterous complications, as with an impious sacrament,[36] they affrighted and destroyed the fortune
of the old man, and wrought him more sorrow than all the troubles that were
hatched in the baths and beds of Egypt between Antony and Cleopatra.[37] This was the greatest fortune that the
world had then or ever since, and therefore we cannot expect it to be better in
a less prosperity.
6. The prosperity of this world is so infinitely
soured with the overflowing of evils, that he is counted the most happy that
hath the fewest; all conditions being evil and miserable, they are only
distinguished by the number of calamities. The collector of the Roman and
foreign examples, when he had reckoned two-and-twenty instances of great
fortunes, every one of which had been allayed with great variety of evils; in
all his reading or experience, he could tell but of two who had been famed for
an entire prosperity. Quintus Metellus, and Gyges the king Lydia: and yet
concerning the one of them he tells, that his felicity was so considerable (and
yet it was the bigger of the two) that the oracle said that Aglaus the
Sophidius, the poor Arcadian shepherd, was more happy than he-that is, he had
fewer troubles; for so indeed we are to reckon the pleasures of this life; the
limit of our joy is the absence of some degree of sorrow, and he that hath the
least of this is the most prosperous person. But then we must look for
prosperity, not in palaces or courts of princes, not in the tents of
conquerors, or in the gaieties of fortunate and prevailing sinners; but rather
in the cottages of honest, innocent, and contented persons, whose mind is no
bigger than their fortune, nor their virtue less than their security. As for
others, whose fortune looks bigger, and allures fools to follow it, like the
wandering fires of the night, till they run into rivers, or are broken upon
rocks with staring and running after them, they are all in the condition of
Marius, than whose condition nothing was more constant, and nothing more
mutable: if we reckon them amongst the miserable, they are the most
miserable.[38] For just as is a man's
condition, great or little, so is the state of his misery: all have their
share; but kings and princes, great generals and consuls, rich men and mighty,
as they have the biggest business and the biggest charge, and are answerable to
God for the greatest accounts, so they have the biggest trouble, that the
uneasiness of their appendage may divide the good and evil of the world, making
the poor man's fortune as eligible as the greatest; and also restraining the
vanity of man's spirit, which a great fortune is apt to swell from a vapour to
a bubble; but God in mercy hath mingles wormwood with their wine, and so
restrained the drunkenness and follies of prosperity.
7. Man never hath one day to himself of entire
peace from the things of the world, but either something troubles him, or
nothing satisfies him, or his very fulness swells him and makes him breathe
short upon his bed. Men's joys are troublesome; and besides that the fear of
losing them takes away the present pleasure, (and a man hath need of another
felicity to preserve this,) they are also wavering and full of trepidation, not
only from their inconstant nature, but from their weak foundation: they arise
from vanity, and they dwell upon ice, and they converse with the wind, and they
have the wings of a bird, and are serious but as the resolutions of a child,
commenced by chance, and managed by folly, and proceeded by inadvertency, and
end in vanity and forgetfulness. So that, as Livius Drusus said of himself, he
never had any play-days or days of quiet when he was a boy;[39] for he was troublesome and busy, a restless and unquiet
man - the same may every man observe to be true of himself; he is always
restless and uneasy, he dwells upon the waters, and leans upon thorns, and lays
his head upon a sharp stone.
1. The effect of this consideration is
this, that the sadnesses of this life help to sweeten the bitter cup of death.
For let our life be never so long, if our strength were great as that of oxen
and camels, if our sinews were strong as the cordage at the foot of an oak, if
we were as fighting and prosperous people as Siccius Dentatus, who was on the
prevailing side in a hundred and twenty battles, who had three hundred and
twelve public rewards assigned him by his generals and princes for his valour
and conduct in sieges and sharp in nine triumphs; yet still the period shall be
that all this shall end in death, and the people shall talk of us awhile, good
or bad, according as we deserve, or as they please; and once it shall come to
pass that concerning every one of us it shall be told in the neighbourhood that
we are dead. This we are apt to think a sad story, but therefore let us help it
with a sadder; for we therefore need not be much troubled that we shall die,
because we are not here in ease, nor do we dwell in a fair condition; but our
days are full of sorrow and anguish, dishonoured and made unhappy with many
sins, with a frail and a foolish spirit, entangled with difficult cases of
conscience, ensnared with passions, amazed with fears, full of cares, divided
with curiosities and contradictory interests, made airy and impertinent with
vanities, abused with ignorance and prodigious errors, made ridiculour with a
thousand weaknesses, worn away with labours, loaden with diseases, daily vexed
with dangers and temptations, and in love with misery: we are weakened with
delights, afflicted with want, with the evils of myself and of all my family,
and with the sadnesses of all my friends, and of all good men, even of the
whole church; and therefore methinks we need not be troubled that God is
pleased to put an end to all these troubles, and to let them sit down in a
natural period, which, if we please, may be to us the beginning of a better
life. When the Prince of Persia wept because his army should all die in the
revolution of an age, Artabanus told him that they should all meet with evils
so many and so great that every man of them should wish himself dead long
before that. Indeed it were a sad thing to be cut of the stone, and we that are
in health tremble to think of it; but the man that is wearied with the disease
looks upon that sharpness as upon his cure and remedy; and as none need to have
a tooth drawn, so none could well endure it but he that felt the pain of it in
his head: so is our life so full of evils, that therefore death is no evil to
them that have felt the smart of this, or hope for the joys of a better.
2. But as it helps to ease a certain
sorrow, as a fire draws out fire, and a nail drives forth a nail, so it
instructs us in a present duty, that is, that we should not be so fond of a
perpetual storm, nor dote upon the transient guads and gilded thorns of this
world. They are not worth a passion, nor worth a sigh or a groan, not of the
price of one night's watching; and therefore they are mistaken and miserable
persons who, since Adam planted thorns round about paradise, are more in love
with the hedge than with the fruits of the garden, sottish admirers of things
that hurt them, of sweet poisons, gilded daggers, and silken halters. Tell them
they have lost a bounteous friend, a rich purchase, a fair farm, a wealthy
donative, and you dissolve their patience; it is an evil bigger than their
spirit can bear; it brings sickness and death; they can neither eat nor sleep
with such a sorrow. But if you represent to them the evils of a vicious habit,
and the dangers of a state of sin, if you tell them they have displeased God,
and interrupted their hopes of heaven, it may be they will be so civil as to
hear it patiently, and to treat you kindly, and first to commend, and then
forget your story, because they prefer this world with all its sorrows before
the pure unmingled felicities of heaven. But it is strange that any man should
be so passionately in love with the thorns which grow on his own ground that he
should wear them for armlets, and knit them in his shirt, and prefer them
before a kingdom and immortality. No man loves this world the better for his
being poor; but men that love it because they have great possessions, love it
because it is troublesome and chargeable, full of noise and temptation, because
it is unsafe and ungoverned, flattered and abused; and he that considers the
troubles of an over-long garment and of a crammed stomach, a trailing gown and
a loaden table, may justly understand that all that for which men are so
passionate is their hurt and their objection - that which a temperate man would
avoid and a wise man cannot love.
He that is no fool, but can consider wisely, if
he be in love with this world, we need not despair but that a witty man might
reconcile him with tortures, and make him think charitably of the rack, and be
brought to dwell with vipers and dragons, and entertain his guests with the
shrieks of mandrakes, cats, and screech-owls, with the fling of iron, and the
harshness of rending of silk, or to admire the harmony that is made by a herd
of evening wolves, when they miss their draught of blood in their midnight
revels. The groans of a man in a fit of the stone are worse than these, and the
distractions of a troubled conscience are worse than those groans; and yet a
careless merry sinner is worse than all that. But if we could from one of the
battlements of heaven espy how many men and women at this time lie fainting and
dying for want of bread, how many young men are hewn down by the sword of war,
how many poor orphans are now weeping over the graves of their father, by whose
life they were enabled to eat; if we could but hear how many mariners and
passengers are at this present in a storm, and shriek out because their keel
dashes against a rock, or bulges under them; how many people there are that
weep with want, and are mad with oppression, or are desperate by too quick a
sense of a constant infelicity; in all reason we should be glad to be out of
the noise and participation of so many evils. This is a place of sorrows and
tears, of great evils and a constant calamity; let us remove from hence, at
least in affections and preparation of mind.
[1] Pomfolne o
anzrwpos.
[2] James, iv. 14,
[3] fainminm.
[4] Hroz oigon.
[5] Nihil sibi quisquame de futuro debet
promittere. Id quo-que, quod tenetur, per manus exit, et ipsam quam premimus,
horam casus incidit. Volvitur tempus rata quidem lege, sed per
obscurum.-Seneca.
[6] Ut mortem eitius venire credas, Scito jam
capitis perisae partem.
[7] Navigationes longas, et, pererratis
litoribus alienis, seros in partriam reditus proponimus, militiam, et
castrensium laborum tarda manu pretia, procurationes, officiorumque per officia
processus, cum interim ad latus mors est; quae quoniam nunquam cogitatur nisi
aliena, subinde nobis ingerantur morialitatis exempla, non diutius quam miramur
hasura.-Senec.
[8] Quia lex cadem manet omnes, Gemitum dare
sorte sub una, Cognataque funera nobis Aliena in morte dolere. Prud. Hymn.
Exequiis Defunctor.
[9] Aut ubi mors non est, si jugulatis,
aque?-Martial.
[10] Currit mortalibus evum, Nec nasci bis posse
datur; fugit hera, rapitque Tartareus torrens, as sacum ferre sub umbras. Si
qua animo placuere, negat.-Sil Ital 1.xv.
[11] Tefnafi khoa o eyw
tote oexomai ottote ken oh Zeus efzg telesa.-It x.365.
[12] Anceps forma bonum mortalibus, Exigui
donum breve temproris; Ut fulgor, teneris qui radiat genis, Momento rapitur,
nullaque non dies Formosi spolium corporis abstulit.-Sence. Hipp. 770.
[13] Rape, congere, aufer, posside;
relinquendum est. Martial
[14] Annos omnes prodegit, ut ex eo annus unus
numeretur, et per mille indignitates laboravit in titulum sepulchri.--Sen.
[15] Jam eorum prabendas alii possident, et
nescio utrum de its cogitant.-Gerson.
Me veterum frequens - Memphis Pyramidum docet, Me pressae tumulo lacryma
glorie, Me projecta jacentium Passim per polulos busta Quiritium, Et vilis
Zephyro jocus Jactati cineres et procerum rogi, Fumantumque cadvarea Regnorum
tacito, Fufe silentio Mestum multa monent.-Cas.1.ii.Od. 27.
[16] Afanasias o ouk
estin, ouo an sunayayxs Ta Tantalou talant ekeina leyohena. All an apofanxs,
tauta kataleiyees tisin. Menand. Clcrc.p.214.
[17] Quid sit futurum cras, fuge querere, et
Quem fors dierum cunque debit, lucro Appone.-Horat. 1.ix.15.
[18] Tentaris numeros, ut melius, quicquid
erit, pati, Seu plures hyemes, seu tribuit Jupiter ultimam. Horat.1.ii.2.
[19] Certa amittimus, dum incerta petimus;
atque hoe evenit in labore atque in dolore, ut mors obrepat interim-Plaut.
Pseud. Act ii. Seen.3.
[20] Quid brevi fortes jaculamur evo Multa? 2.
16. Jam te premet nox, fabuleque Manes, Et domus exillis Plutonia.
I.4.-Horat.
[21] Ille enim ex futuro suspenditur, cui
irritum est praens. Seneca.
[22] Etate fruere; mobili cursu
fugit.-Seneca.
[23] Martial. 1.ii.Epig.59.
[24] Eccles. iii. 22; ii. 24.
[25] Amici, dum vivimus, vivamus. pine, legei to glumrra, kai esfie, kai perikeiso Anfea totontot
gignomef ezapinms. Hoc etiam faciunt, ubi discubuere, tenentque Pocula
sape homines, et inumbrant ora coronis, Ex animo ut dicant, brevis est hic
fructus homullis; Jam fuerit, neque post unquam revocare licebit. Lucret. lib.
iii. 925.
[26] Quis sapiens bono Confidat fragili? dum
licet, utere:
[27] Bis jam consul trigesimus instat, Et
numerat paucos vix tua vita dies.-Mart. i. 16.
[28] Edepol, proinde ut bene vivitur, diu
vivitur.-Plaut. Trinum. Non acccpimus brevem vitam, sed fecimus; nec inopes
ejus sed prodigi sumus.-Seneca.
[29] Sed potes, Publi, geminare magna Sccula
fama. Quem sui raptum gemuere cives, Hie diu vixit. Sibi quisque famam Scribat
haeredem: rapiunt avarae aetera Lunae.-Casim. ii.2.
[30] In spe viventibus proximum quodque tempus
clabitur, subitque aviditas temporis, et miserrimus, atque miserrima omnia
efficiens, metus mortis - Ex hac autem indigentia timor nascitur, et cupiditas
fururi exedens animum.-Seneca.
[31] Life of Christ, part iii. Disc.14.
[32] Seneca e Vita beata cap. 20.
[33] Nula requies in terris; surgite, postquam
sederitis; hie est locus pulicum et culicum.
[34] Villis adulator pieto jacet ebrius ostro,
Et qui solicitat numtas, ad praemia peccat. Sola pruinoisis horret facundia
pannis, Atque inopi lingua desertas invocat artes. Petron. c. 83. p. 249.ed.
Ant. Hine et jocus apud Aristophaneon in Avibus-934.
[35] Vilis servus habet regni bona, cellaque
capti Derides festam Romulcamque casam.-Petron. Frag. 21. Omnia, crede mihi,
etiam felicibus dubia sunt.-Seneca.
[36] Et adulterio velut sacramento
adacti.-Tacit.
[37] Plusque et iterum timenda cum Antonio
mulier.
[38] Quem si inter miseros posueris,
miserrimus; inter felices, felicissimus reperiebatur.
[39] Uni sibi nec puero unquam ferias
contigisse. Seditious et foro gravis.