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just when it is, no man hath reason to complain of so insensible, so sudden, so undiscerned a change.

€ 6. It' is so harmless a thing, that no good man was ever thought the more miserable for dying, but much the happier. When men saw the graves of Calatinus, of the Servilii, the Scipio's, the Metelli, did ever any man amongst the wisest Romans think them unhappy? And when St. Paul fell under the sword of Nero, and St. Peter died upon the cross, and St. Stephen from an heap of stones was carried into an easier grave, they that made great lamentation over them wept for their own interest, and after the manner of men; but the martyrs were accounted happy, and their days kept solemnly, and their memories preserved in never-dying honours. When St. Hilary bishop of Poictiers in France went into the East to reprove the Arian heresy,. he heard that a young noble gentleman treated with his daughter Abra for marriage. The bishop wrote to his daughter that she should not engage her promise, nor do countenance to that request, because he had vided for her a husband, fair, rich, wise, and noble, far beyond her present offer. The event of which was this: She obeyed, and when her father returned from his eastern triumph to his western charge, he prayed to God that his daughter might die quickly; and God heard his prayers, and Christ took her into his bosom, entertaining her with antepasts and caresses of holy love, till the day of the marriage supper of the Lamb shall come. But when the bishop's wife observed this event, and understood of the good man

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her husband, what was done, and why, she never let him alone till he obtained the same favour for her;

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and she also at the prayers of St. Hilary went into a more early grave and a bed of joys.

7. It is a sottish and an unlearned thing to reckon the time of our life, as it is short or long, to be good or evil fortune; life in itself being neither good nor bad, but just as we make it, and therefore so is death.

8. But when we consider, death is not only better than a miserable life, not only an easy and an inno cent thing in itself, but also that it is a state of advantage, we shall have reason not to double the sharpness of our sickness by our fear of death. Certain it is, death hath some good upon its proper stock; praise, and a fair memory, a reverence and religion toward them so great that it is counted dishonest to speak evil of the dead; then they rest in peace, and are quiet from their labours, and are designed to immortality. Cleobis and Biton, Trophonius and Agamedes had an early death sent them as a reward: to the former for their piety to their mother, to the latter for building of a temple. To this all those arguments will minister which relate the advantages of the state of separation and resurrection,

SECT, VIII.

Remedies against Fear of Death, by way of Exercise. 1. He that would willingly be fearless of death must learn to despise the world; he must neither love

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any thing passionately, nor be proud of any circumstance of his life. O death, how bitter is the remembrance of thee to a man that livethzat rest in his possessions, to a man that hath nothing to vex him, and that hath prosperity in all things, yea unto him that is yet able to receive meat; (Ecclus. xli.1.) But the parts of this exercise help each other. If a man be not incorporated in all his passions to the things of the world, he will less fear to be divorced from them by a supervening death; and yet because he must part with them all in death, it is but reasonable he should not be passionate for so fugitive and transient interest. But if any man thinks well of himself for being a handsome person, or if he be stronger and wiser than his neighbours, he must remember that what he boast of, will decline into weakness and dishonour; but that very boasting and complacency will makę death keener and more unwelcome, because it comes to take him from his confidences and pleasures, making his beauty equal to those ladies that have slept some years in charnel-houses, and their strength not so stubborn as the breath of an infant, and their wisdom such which can be looked for in the land where all things are forgotten.

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2. He that would not fear death, must strengthen his spirit with the proper instruments of christian fortitude. All men are resolved upon this, that to bear grief honestly and temperately and to die willingly and nobly, is the duty of a good and of a valiant man: And they that are not so are vicious, and

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fools, and cowards. All men praise the valiant and

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honest;
and that which the very heathens admired in
their noblest examples is especially patience and con-
tempt of death. Zeno Eleates endured torments
rather than discover his friends, or betray them to the
danger of the tyrant: And Calanus, the barbarous
and unlearned Indian, willingly suffered himself tó
be burnt alive; and all the women did so, todo
honour to their husbands' funerals, and to represent
and prove their affections great to their lords. The
religion of a christian does more command fortitude
than ever did any institution; for we are commanded
to be willing to die for Christ, to die for the brethren,
to die rather than give offence or scandal. The effect
of which is this, that he that is instructed to do
the necessary parts of his duty, is by the same instru-
ment fortified against death: as he that does his duty
needs not fear death, so neither shall he; the parts
of his duty are parts of his security. It is certainly a
great baseness and pusillanimity of spirit that makes
death terrible, and extremely to be avoided,

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3. Christian prudence is a great security against the fear of death. For if we be afraid of death, it is but reasonable to use all spiritual arts to take off the apprehension of the evil; But therefore we ought to remove our fear, because fear gives to death wings, and spurs, and darts. Death hastens to a fearful man: If therefore you would make death harmless and slow, to throw off fear is the way to do it; and prayer is the way to do that. If therefore you be afraid of death, con

sider you will have less need to fear it, by how much the less you do fear it; and to cure your direct fear by a reflex act of prudence and consideration*. Fannius had not died so soon, if he had not feared death: And when Cneius Carbo begged the respite of a little time for a base employment of the soldiers of Pompey, he got nothing, but that the baseness of his fear dishonoured the dignity of his third consulship; and he choose to die in a place where none of his meanest servants should have seen him. I remember a story of the wrestler Polydamas, that running into a cave to avoid the storm, the water at last swelled so high, that it began to press that hollowness to a ruin: which, when his fellows espied, they chose to enter into the common fate of all men, and went abroad: but Polydamas thought by his strength to support the earth, till its intolerable weight crushed him into flatness and a grave. Many men run for shelter to a place, and they only find a remedy for their fears by feeling the worst of evils. Fear itself finds no sanctuary but the worst of sufferance: And they that fly from a battle are exposed to the mercy and fury of the pursuers, who, if they faced about, were as well disposed to give laws of life and death as to take them, and at worst can but die nobly; but now even at the very best they live shamefully, or die timourously. Courage is the greatest security; for it does most commonly safeguard the man, but always rescues the condition from an intolerable evil.

* Hustein cum fugeret se Fanius ipse peremit. Mart.

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