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 ridiculous 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 doat upon the transient gauds 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 that hedge than all 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 filing 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 all 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. CHAPTER II. A GENERAL PREPARATION TOWARDS A HOLY AND SECTION I. Three Precepts preparatory to a holy Death, to be 1. HE that would die well, must always look for death, every day knocking at the gates of the grave: and then the gates of the grave shall never prevail upon him to do him mischief. This was the advice of all the wise and good men of the world, who, especially in the days and periods of their joy and festival egressions, chose to throw some ashes into their chalices, some sober remembrances of their fatal period". Such was the black shirt of Saladine, the tombstone presented to the Emperor of Constantinople on his coronation-day; the Bishop of Rome's two reeds with flax and a wax-taper; the Egyptian skeleton served up at feasts; and 2 Propera vivere, et singulos dies singulas vitas puta. Nihil interest inter diem et seculum. Si sapis, utaris totis, Coline, diebus ; Extremúmque tibi semper adesse putes.-Martial. Trimalcion's banquet in Petronius, in which was brought in the image of a dead man's bones of silver, with spondyles exactly returning to every of the guests, and saying to every one, that you and you must die, and look not one upon another, for every one is equally concerned in this sad representment. These in fantastic semblances declare a severe counsel and useful meditation; and it is not easy for a man to be gay in his imagination, or to be drunk with joy or wine, pride or revenge, who considers sadly, that he must, ere long, dwell in a house of darkness and dishonour, and his body must be the inheritance of worms, and his soul must be what he pleases, even as a man makes it here by his living good or bad. I have read of a young hermit, who, being passionately in love with a young lady, could not, by all the arts of religion and mortification, suppress the trouble of that fancy, till at last being told that she was dead, and had been buried about fourteen days, he went secretly to her vault, and with the skirt of his mantle wiped the moisture from the carcass, and still at the return of his temptation laid it before him, saying, Behold, this is the beauty of the woman, thou didst so much desire: and so the man found his cure. And if we make death as present to us, our own death, dwelling and dressed in all its pomp of fancy and proper circumstances; if any thing will quench the heats of lust, or the desires of money, or the greedy passionate affections of this world, this must do it. But withal, the frequent use of this meditation, by curing our present inordinations, will make death safe and friendly, and by its very custom will make, that the king of terrors shall come to us without his affrighting dresses; and that we shall sit down in the grave as we compose ourselves to sleep, and do the duties of nature and choice. The old people that lived near the Riphæan mountains, were taught to converse with death, and to handle it b Heu, heu, nos miseros! quàm totus homuncio nil est ! In ferrum mens prona viris, animæque capaces Mortis, et ignavum redituræ parcere vitæ.-Lucan. i. 459. on all sides, and to discourse of it, as of a thing, that will certainly come, and ought so to do. Thence their minds and resolutions became capable of death, and they thought it a dishonourable thing, with greediness to keep a life, that must go from us, to lay aside its thorns, and to return again circled with a glory and a diadem. 2. "He that would die well, must, all the days of his life, lay up against the day of death";" not only by the general provisions of holiness and a pious life indefinitely, but provisions proper to the necessities of that great day of expense, in which a man is to throw his last cast for an eternity of joys or sorrows; ever remembering, that this alone, well performed, is not enough to pass us into paradise; but that alone, done foolishly, is enough to send us to hell: and the want of either a holy life or death makes a man to fall short of the mighty price of our high calling. In order to this rule we are to consider what special graces we shall then need to exercise, and by the proper arts of the spirit, by a heap of proportioned arguments, by prayers and a great treasure of devotion laid up in heaven, provide beforehand a reserve of strength and mercy. Men in the course of their lives walk lazily and incuriously, as if they had both their feet in one shoe: and when they are passively revolved to the time of their dissolution, they have no mercies in store, no patience, no faith, no charity to God, or despite of the world, being without gust or appetite for the land of their inheritance, which Christ with so much pain and blood had purchased for them. When we come to die indeed, we shall be very much put to it to stand firm upon the two feet of a Christian, faith and patience. When we ourselves are to use the articles, to turn our former discourses into present practice, and to feel what we never felt before, we shall find it to be quite another thing, to be willing presently to quit this life and all our present possessions for the hope of a thing, which we were never suffered to see, and such a thing, of which we may fail so many ways, and of which if we fail any way, we are miserable for ever. Then we shall find, how much we have need to have secured the Spirit of God and the grace of faith, by an habitual, perfect, unmoveable reso d Qui quotidiè vitæ suæ manum summam imposuit, non indiget tempore.-Seneca. • Insere nunc, Melibae, pyros, pone ordine vites. |