life was to descend upon him from heaven, and he was to suck life from a tree on earth; himself being but ingrafted into a tree of life, and adopted into the condition of an immortal nature. But he that in the best of his days was but a scion of this tree of life, by his sin was cut off from thence quickly, and planted upon thorns, and his portion was for ever after among the flowers, which to-day spring and look like health and beauty, and in the evening they are sick, and at night are dead, and the oven is their grave: and, as before, even from our first spring from the dust on earth, we might have died, if we had not been preserved by the continual flux of a rare providence; so now that we are reduced to the laws of our own nature," we must needs die." It is natural, and, therefore, necessary: it is become a punishment to us, and therefore it is unavoidable; and God hath bound the evil upon us by bands of natural and inseparable propriety, and by a supervening unalterable decree of heaven; and we are fallen from our privilege, and are returned to the condition of beasts, and buildings, andcommon things: and we see temples defiled unto the ground, and they die by sacrilege; and great empires die by their own plenty and ease, full humours, and factious subjects; and huge buildings fall by their own weight, and the violence of many winters eating and consuming the cement, which is the marrow of their bones; and princes die like the meanest of their servants; and every thing finds a grave and a tomb: and the very tomb itself dies by the bigness of its pompousness and luxury, Phario nutantia poudera saxo, and becomes as friable and uncombined dust, as the ashes of the sinner or the saint that lay under it, and is now forgotten in his bed of darkness. And to this catalogue of mortality man is enrolled with a “statutum est;"" It is appointed for all men to die once, and after death comes judgment:" and if a man can be stronger than nature, or can wrestle with à decree of heaven, or can escape from a divine punishment by his own arts, so that neither the power nor the Providence a Martial. i. 89. 3. of God, nor the laws of nature, nor the bands of eternal predestination can hold him, then he may live beyond the fate and period of flesh, and last longer than a flower: but if all these can hold us and tie us to conditions, then we must lay our heads down upon a turf, and entertain creeping things in the cells and little chambers of our eyes, and dwell with worms till time and death shall be no more. "We must needs die"-that is our sentence: but that is not all. "We are as water spilt on the ground, which cannot be gathered up again." Stay, 1. We are as water, weak, and of no consistence, always descending, abiding in no certain place, unless where we are detained with violence; and every little breath of wind makes us rough and tempestuous, and troubles our faces; every trifling accident discomposes us; and, as the face of the waters wafting in a storm, so wrinkles itself that it makes upon its forehead furrows deep and hollow like a grave; so do our great and little cares and trifles first make the wrinkles of old age, and then they dig a grave for us: and there is in nature nothing so contemptible, but it may meet with us in such circumstances, that it may be too hard for us in our weaknesses; and the sting of a bee is a weapon sharp enough to pierce the finger of a child or the lip of a man; and those creatures which nature hath left without weapons, yet they are armed sufficiently to vex those parts of men, which are left defenceless and obnoxious to a sun-beam, to the roughness of a sour grape, to the unevenness of a gravel-stone, to the dust of a wheel, or the unwholesome breath of a star looking awry upon a sinner. 2. But besides the weaknesses and natural decayings of our bodies, if chances and contingencies be innumerable, then no man can reckon our dangers, and the preternatural causes of our deaths: so that he is a vain person, whose hopes of life are too confidently increased by reason of his health and he is too unreasonably timorous, who thinks his hopes at an end, when he dwells in sickness. For men die without rule, and with and without occasions; and no man suspecting or foreseeing any of death's addresses, and no man in his whole condition is weaker than another. A man in a long consumption is fallen under one of the solemnities and preparations to death; but at the same instant, the most healthful person is as near death, upon a more fatal and a more sudden, but a less discerned cause. There are but few persons upon whose foreheads every man can read the sentence of death, written in the lines of a lingering sickness, but they sometimes hear the passing-bell ring for stronger men, even long before their own knell calls at the house of their mother to open her womb, and make a bed for them. No man is surer of to-morrow than the weakest of his brethren and when Lepidus and Aufidius stumbled at the threshold of the senate, and fell down and died, the blow came from heaven in a cloud; but it struck more suddenly than upon the poor slave that made sport upon the theatre with a premeditated and fore-described death: "Quod quisque vitet, nunquam homini satis Cautum est in horas." There are sicknesses that walk in darkness; and there are exterminating angels, that fly wrapt up in the curtains of immateriality and an uncommunicating nature; whom we cannot see, but we feel their force, and sink under their sword; and from heaven the veil descends that wraps our heads in the fatal sentence. There is no age of man but it hath proper to itself some posterns and outlets for death, besides those infinite and open ports out of which myriads of men and women every day pass into the dark, and the land of forgetfulness. Infancy hath life but in effigy, or like a spark dwelling in a pile of wood: the candle is so newly lighted, that every little shaking of the taper, and every ruder breath of air puts it out, and it dies. Childhood is so tender, impressions of chance, and yet so unwary; so soft to all the and yet so forward to run into them, that God knew there could be no security without the care and vigilance of an angel-keeper: and the eyes of parents and the arms of nurses, the provisions of art, and all the effects of human love and providence are not sufficient to keep one child from horrid mischiefs, from strange and early calamities and deaths, unless a messenger be sent from heaven to stand sentinel, and watch the very playings and sleepings, the eatings and drinkings of the children; and it is a long time before nature makes them capable of help: for there are many deaths, and b Od. ii. 13. 13. very many diseases to which poor babes are exposed; but they have but very few capacities of physic; to show that infancy is as liable to death as old age, and equally exposed to danger, and equally incapable of a remedy; with this only difference, that old age hath diseases incurable by nature, and the diseases of childhood are incurable by art; and both the states are the next heirs of death. 3. But all the middle way the case is altered nature is strong, and art is apt to give ease and remedy, but still there is no security; and there the case is not altered. 1. For there are so many diseases in men that are not understood. 2. So many new ones every year. 3. The old ones are so changed in circumstance, and intermingled with so many collateral complications. 4. The symptoms are oftentimes so alike. 5. Sometimes so hidden and fallacious. 6. Sometimes none at all; as in the most sudden and most dangerous imposthumations. 7. And then, the diseases, in the inward parts of the body, are oftentimes such, to which no application can be made. 8. They are so far off, that the effects of all medicines can no otherwise come to them, than the effect and juices of all meats; that is, not till after two or three alterations and decoctions, which change the very species of the medicament. 9. And, after all this, very many principles in the art of physic are so uncertain, that after they have been believed seven or eight ages, and that upon them much of the practice hath been established, they come to be considered by a witty man, and others established in their stead; by which men must practise, and by which three or four generations of men more (as happens) must live or die. 10. And all this while the men are sick, and they take things that certainly make them sicker for the present, and very uncertainly restore health for the future: that it may appear of what a large extent is human calamity; when God's Providence hath not only made it weak and miserable upon the certain stock of a various nature, and upon the accidents of an infinite contingency; but even from the remedies which are appointed, our dangers and our troubles are certainly increased so that we may well be likened to water; our nature is no stronger, our abode no more certain; if the sluices be opened, "it falls away and runneth apace;" if its current be stopped, it swells and grows troublesome, and spills over with a greater diffusion; if it be made to stand still, it putrifies and all this we do. For, 4. In all the process of our health we are running to our grave: we open our own sluices by viciousness and unworthy actions; we pour in drink, and let out life; we increase diseases, and know not how to bear them; we strangle ourselves with our own intemperance; we suffer the fevers and the inflammations of lust, and we quench our souls with drunkenness: we bury our understandings in loads of meat and surfeits and then we lie down upon our beds, and roar with pain and disquietness of our souls: nay, we kill one another's souls and bodies with violence and folly, with the effects of pride and uncharitableness; we live and die like fools, and bring a new mortality upon ourselves; wars and vexatious cares, and private duels and public disorders, and every thing that is unreasonable, and every thing that is violent : so that now we may add this fourth gate to the grave: besides nature and chance, and the mistakes of art, men die with their own sins, and then enter into the grave in haste and passion, and pull the heavy stone of the monument upon their own heads. And thus we make ourselves like water spilt on the ground; we throw away our lives as if they were unprofitable (and indeed most men make them so); we let our years slip through our fingers like water; and nothing is to be seen, but like a shower of tears upon a spot of ground; there is a grave digged, and a solemn mourning and a great talk in the neighbourhood, and when the days are finished, they shall be, and they shall be remembered no more: and that is like water too,-when it is spilt, "it cannot be gathered up again." There is no redemption from the grave. inter se mortales mutua vivunt: Et, quasi cursores, vitäi lampada tradunt . Men live in their course and by turns; their light burns awhile, and then it burns blue and faint, and men go to converse with spirits, and then they reach the taper to another; and as the hours of yesterday can never return again, so neither can the man whose hours they were, and who lived them over once, he shall never come to live them again, and live them e Lucr. ii. 75. |
