than those groans: and yet a merry, careless 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 constantʼinfelicity; 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. CHAP. II. A GENERAL PREPARATION TOWARDS AN HOLY AND BLESSED DEATH, BY WAY OF EXERCISE. SECT. I. Three Precepts preparatory to an Holy Death, to be practised in our whole Life. 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 No. 3. H 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 Trimalcion's banquet in Petronius, in which was brought in the image of a dead man's bones of silver, with spondyls exactly turning 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 eremite, who, being passionately in love with * 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. Heu, heu, nos miseros! quam totus homuncio nil est ! Ergo vivamus, dum licet esse bene. 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 carcase, 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 cir cumstances; 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 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 resolusions became 1 Certè populi quos despicit Arctos Felices errore suo, quos ille timorům inde ruendi In ferrum mens prona viris, animæque capaces 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 expence, 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 into 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 before hand 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 * Qui quotidie vitæ suæ manum imposuit, non indiget tempore. Seneca. + Insere nunc, Melibae, pyros, pone ordine vites. with so much pain and blood hath 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 hopes 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, immoveable resolution. The same is also the case of patience, which will be assaulted with sharp pains, disturbed fancies, great fears, want of a present mind, natural weaknesses, frauds of the devil, and a thousand accidents and imperfections. It concerns us therefore highly, in the whole course of our lives, not only to accustom ourselves to a patient suffering of injuries and affronts, of persecutions and losses, of cross accidents and unnecessary circumstances; but also, by representing death as present to us, to consider with what argument then to fortify our patience, and by assiduous and fervent prayer to God all our life long, to call upon him to give us patience and great assistances, a strong faith, and a confirmed hope, the spirit of God and his holy angels assistants at that time, to resist and to subdue the devil's temptations |