to his own misery, and to no advantages of ease and pleasure. Fear keeps men in bondage all their life, saith St. Paul; and patience makes him his own man, and lord of his own interest and person. Therefore possess yourselves in patience, with reason and religion, and you shall die with ease.

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If all the parts of this discourse be true, if they be better than dreams, and unless Virtue be nothing but words, as a grove is a heap of trees; if they be not the fantasins of hypochondriacal persons, and designs upon the interests of men and their persuasions to evil purposes; then there is no reason but that we should really desire death, and account it among the good things of God, and the sour and laborious felicities of man. St. Paul understood it well, when he desired to be dissolved: He well enough knew his own advantages, and pursued them accordingly. But it is certain, that he that is afraid of death, I mean, with a violent and transporting fear, with a fear apt to discompose his duty or his patience, that man either loves this world too much, or dares not trust God for the next.

SECT. IX.

General Rules and Exercises, whereby our Sickness may become safe and sanctified.

1. TAKE care that the cause of thy sickness be such as may not sour it in the principal and original causes of it. It is a sad calamity to pass into the house

of mourning, through the gates of intemperance, by a drunken meeting, or the surfeits of a loathed and luxurious table: For then a man suffers the pain of his own folly, and he is like a fool smarting under the whip which his own viciousness twisted for his back; then a man pays the price of his sin and hath a pure and an unmingled sorrow in his suffering; and it cannot be alleviated by any circumstances, for the whole affair is a mere process of death and sorrow. Sin is in the head, sickness in the body, and death and an eternity of pains in the tail; and nothing can make this condition tolerable, unless the miracles of the Divine Mercy will be pleased to exchange the eternal anger for the temporal. True it is, that in all sufferings, the cause of it makes it noble or ignoble, honour or shame, tolerable or intolerable. For when patience is assaulted by a ruder violence, by a blow from heaven or earth, from a gracious God or an unjust man, patience looks forth to the doors which way she may escape; and if innocence or a cause of religion keep the first entrance, then, whether she escapes at the gates of life or death, there is a good to be received, greater than the evils of a sickness: But if sin thrust in that sickness, and that hell stands at the door, then patience turns into fury *; and seeing it impossible to go forth with safety, rolls up and down with a circular and infinite revolution, making its motion not from, but upon, its own centre; it doubles the pain, and increases the sorrow, till by its weight it

* Magis his quæ patitur vexat causa patiendi.

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breaks the spirit, and bursts into the agonies of infinite and eternal ages. If we had seen St. Polycarp burning to death, or St. Laurence roasted upon his gridiron, or St. Ignatius exposed to lions, or St. Sebastian pierced with arrows, or St. Attalus carried about the theatre with scorn unto his death, for the cause of Jesus, for religion, for God, and a holy conscience; we should have been in love with flames, and have thought the gridiron fairer than the sponda, the ribs of a marital bed, and should have chosen to converse with those beasts rather than those men that brought those beasts forth, and estimated the arrows to be the rays of light brighter than the moon, and that disgrace and mistaken pageantry were a solemnity richer and more magnificent than Mordecai's procession upon the king's horse, and in the robes of majesty: For so did these holy men account them; they kissed their stakes and hugged their deaths, and ran violently to torments, and counted whippings and secular disgraces to be the enamel of their persons, and the ointment of their heads, and the embalming their names, and securing them for immortality. But to see Sejanus torn in pieces by the people, or Nero crying or creeping timorously to his death, when he was condemned to die more majorum; to see Judas pale and trembling, full of anguish, sorrow, and despair: to oberve the groanings and intolerable agonies of Herod and Antiochus, will tell and demonstrate the causes of patience and impatience to proceed from the causes of the suffering: And it is sin only that makes the cup

bitter and deadly. When men, by vomiting, measure up the drink they took in, and, sick and sad, do again taste their meat turned into choler by intemperance, the sin and its punishment are mingled so that shame covers the face, and sorrow puts a veil of darkness upon the heart: And we scarce pity a vile person that is hawled to execution for murder or for treason, but we say he deserves it, and that every man is concerned in it that he should die. If lust brought the sickness or the shame, if we truly suffer the rewards of our evil deeds, we must thank ourselves; that is, we are fallen into an evil condition, and are the sacrifice of the divine justice. But if we live holy lives, and if we enter well in, we are sure to pass on safe, and to go forth with advantage, if we list ourselves.

2. To this relates, that we should not counterfeit sickness: For he that is to be careful of his passage into a sickness, will think himself concerned that he fall not into it through a trap-door; for so it hath sometimes happened, that such counterfeiting to light and evil purposes, hath ended in a real sufferance.Appian tells of a Roman gentleman, who, to escape the proscription of the Triumvirate, fled, and to secure his privacy, counterfeited himself blind on one eye, and wore a plaister upon it, till, beginning to be free from the malice of the three prevailing princes, he opened his hood, but could not open his eye, but for ever lost the use of it, and with his eye paid for his liberty and hypocrisy. And Cœlius counterfeited the gout, and all its circumstances and pains,

its dressings and arts of remedy and complaint, till at last the gout really entered, and spoiled the pageantry. His arts of dissimulation were so witty, that they put life and motion into the very image of the disease; he made the very picture to sigh and groan.

It is easy to tell upon the interest of what virtue such counterfeiting is to be reproved. But it will be harder to snatch the politics of the world from following that which they call a canonized and authentic precedent. And David's counterfeiting himself mad before the King of Gath, to save his life and liberty, will be sufficient to entice men to serve an end upon the stock and charges of so small an irregularity; not in the matter of manners, but in the rules and decencies o natural or civil deportment. I cannot certainly tel what degrees of excuse David's action might put on. This only, besides his present necessity, the laws, whose coercive or directive power David lived under, had less of severity, and more of liberty, and towards enemies had so little of restraint, and so great a power, that what amongst them was a direct sin, if used to their brethren the sons of Jacob, was lawful and permitted to be acted against enemies. To which also I add this general caution; that the actions of holy persons, in scripture, are not always good precedents to us Christians, who are to walk by a rule and a greater strictness, with more simplicity and heartiness of pursuit. And amongst them, sanctity and holy living did in very many of its instances increase in new particulars of duty; and the prophets reproved