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, insnared 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 dis

| pleased 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 ravening 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.

SECTION I.

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

practised in our whole Life.

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 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 the 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

shall come to us without his affrighting dresses; and that we shall sit down in the grave as we coinpose 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 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.

"d not

2. "He that would die well, must, all the days of his life, lay up against the day of death;' 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 pos

Maximus haud urget, lethi metus

-Inde ruendi

In ferrum mens prona viris, animæque capaces Mortis, et ignavum redituræ parcere vitæ

е

LUCAN. i. 458.

d Qui quotidiè vitæ suæ manum imposuit, non indiget tempore.-SENECA.

e Insere nunc, Melibae, pyros, pone ordine vites.

sessions, 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, unmovable resolution. The same also is 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 arguments 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 and assaults; and so to fortify our heart, that it break not into intolerable sorrows and impatience, and end in wretchedness and infidelity. But this is to be the work of our life, and not to be done at once; but, as God gives us time, by succession, by parts and little periods. For it is very remarkable, that God who giveth plenteously to all creatures; he hath scattered the firmament with stars, as a man sows corn in his fields, in a multitude bigger than the capacities of human order; he hath made so much variety of creatures, and gives us great choice of meats and drinks, although any one of both kinds would have served our needs; and so in all instances of nature; yet in the distribution of our time God seems to be strait-handed, and gives it to us, not as nature gives us rivers, enough to drown us, but drop by drop, minute after minute, so that we never can have two minutes together, but he takes away one when he gives us another. This should teach us to value our time, since God so values it, and by his so small distribution of it, tells us it is the most precious thing we have. Since therefore, in the day of our death, we can have still but the same little portion of this precious time, let us in every minute of our life, I mean, in every discernible portion, lay up such a stock of reason and good works, that they may convey a value to the imperfect and shorter actions of our death-bed; while God rewards the piety of our lives by his gracious acceptation and benediction upon the actions preparatory to our death-bed.

3. He that desires to die well and happily, above all things, must be careful that he do not live a soft, a delicate, and voluptuous life; but a life severe, holy, and under the discipline of the cross, under the conduct of prudence and observation, a life of

warfare and sober counsels, labour and watchfulness. No man wants cause of tears and a daily sorrow. Let every man consider what he feels, and acknowledge his misery; let him confess his sin, and chastise it; let him bear his cross patiently, and his persecutions nobly, and his repentances willingly and constantly; let him pity the evils of all the world, and bear his share of the calamities of his brother; let him long and sigh for the joys of heaven; let him tremble and fear, because he hath deserved the pains of hell; let him commute his eternal fear with a temporal suffering, preventing God's judgment by passing one of his own; let him groan for the labours of his pilgrimage, and the dangers of his warfare; and by that time he hath summed up all these labours, and duties, and contingencies, all the proper causes, instruments, and acts of sorrow, he will find, that for a secular joy and wantonness of spirit there are not left many void spaces of his life. It was St. James's advice, "Be afflicted, and mourn, and weep; let your laughter be turned into mourning, and your joy into weeping:" and Bonaventure, in the Life of Christ, reports that the holy Virgin-mother said to St. Elizabeth, that grace does not descend into the soul of a man but by prayer and affliction. Certain it is, that a mourning spirit and an afflicted body are great instruments of reconciling God to a sinner, and they always dwell at the gates of atonement and restitution. But besides this, a delicate and prosperous life is hugely contrary to the hopes of a blessed eternity. "Woe be to them that are at ease in Sion; "h so it was said of old: and our blessed Lord said, "Woe be to you that laugh, for ye shall weep: but, blessed are they that mourn; for they shall be comforted." k Here or hereafter we must have our portion of sorrows. "He that now goeth on his way weeping, and beareth forth good seed with him, shall doubtless come again with joy, and bring his sheaves with him." And certainly he that sadly considers the portion of Dives, and remembers that the account which Abraham gave him for the unavoidableness of his torment was, because he had his good things in this life, must, in all reason, with trembling run from a course of banquets, and faring deliciously every day, as being a dangerous estate, and a consignation to an evil greater than all danger, the pains and torments of unhappy souls. If either by patience or repentance, by compassion or persecution, by choice or by conformity, by severity or discipline, we allay the festival follies of a soft life, and profess under the cross of Christ, we shall more willingly and more safely enter into our grave; but the death-bed of a voluptuous man upbraids his little and cozening prosperities, and exacts pains made sharper by the passing from soft beds and a softer mind. He that would die holily and happily, must in this world love tears, humility, solitude, and repentance.

SECTION II.

Of daily Examination of our Actions in the whole Course of our Health, preparatory to our Deathbed.

HE that will die well and happily, must dress his soul by a diligent and frequent scrutiny; he must perfectly understand and watch the state of his soul; he must set his house in order, before he be fit to die. And for this there is great reason, and great necessity.

Reasons for a daily Examination.

1. For, if we consider the disorders of every day, the multitude of impertinent words, the great portions of time spent in vanity, the daily omissions of duty, the coldness of our prayers, the indifference of our spirit in holy things, the uncertainty of our secret purposes, our infinite deceptions and hypocrisies, sometimes not known, very often not observed by ourselves, our want of charity, our not knowing in how many degrees of action and purpose every virtue is to be exercised, the secret adherences of pride, and too-forward complacency in our best actions, our failings in all our relations, the niceties of difference between some virtues and some vices, the secret indiscernible passages from lawful to unlawful in the first instances of change, the perpetual mistakings of permissions for duty and licentious practices for permissions, our daily abusing the Liberty that God gives us, our unsuspected sins in the managing a course of life certainly lawful, our little greediness in eating, our surprises in the proportions of our drinkings, our too-great freedoms and fondnesses in lawful loves, our aptness for things sensual, and our deadness and tediousness of spirit in spiritual employments; besides infinite variety of cases of conscience that do occur in the life of every man, and in all intercourses of every life, and that the productions of sin are numerous and increasing, like the families of the northern people, or the genealogies of the first patriarchs of the world; from all this we shall find, that the computations of a man's life are busy as the tables of sines and tangents, and intricate as the accounts of eastern merchants; and therefore it were but reason, we should sum up our accounts at the foot of every page, I mean, that we call ourselves to scrutiny every night, when we compose ourselves to the little images of death.

2. For, if we make but one general account, and never reckon till we die, either we shall only reckon by great sums, and remember nothing but clamorous and crying sins, and never consider concerning particulars, or forget very many; or if we could consider all that we ought, we must needs be confounded with the multitude and variety. But if we observe all the little passages of our life, and reduce them into the order of accounts and accusations, we shall find them multiply so fast, that it will not only appear to be an ease to the accounts of our deathbed, but by the instrument of shame will restrain

the inundation of evils; it being a thing intolerable to human modesty, to see sins increase so fast, and virtues grow up so slow; to see every day stained with the spots of leprosy, or sprinkled with the marks of a lesser evil.

3. It is not intended we should take accounts of our lives only to be thought religious, but that we may see our evil and amend it, that we dash our sins against the stones, that we may go to God, and to a spiritual guide, and search for remedies, and apply them. And indeed no man can well observe his own growth in grace, but by accounting seldomer returns of sin, and a more frequent victory over temptations; concerning which every man makes his observations, according as he makes his inquiries and search after himself. In order to this it was that St. Paul wrote, before receiving the holy sacrament, "Let a man examine himself, and so let him eat." This precept was given in those days, when they communicated every day; and therefore a daily examination also was intended.

4. And it will appear highly fitting, if we remember, that, at the day of judgment, not only the greatest lines of life, but every branch and circumstance of every action, every word and thought, shall be called to scrutiny and severe judgment: insomuch that it was a great truth which one said, Woe be to the most innocent life, if God should search into it without mixtures of mercy. And therefore we are here to follow St. Paul's advice, Judge yourselves, and you shall not be judged of the Lord." The way to prevent God's anger is to be angry with ourselves; and by examining our actions, and condemning the criminal, by being assessors in God's tribunal, at least we shall obtain the favour of the court. As therefore every night we must make our bed the memorial of our grave, so let our evening thoughts be an image of the day of judgment.

66

5. This advice was so reasonable and proper an instrument of virtue, that it was taught even to the scholars of Pythagoras by their master:" "Let not sleep seize upon the regions of your senses, before you have three times recalled the conversation and accidents of the day." Examine what you have committed against the Divine law, what you have omitted of your duty, and in what you have made use of the Divine grace to the purposes of virtue and religion; joining the judge, reason, to the legislative mind or conscience, that God may reign there as a lawgiver and a judge. Then Christ's kingdom is set up in our hearts: then we always live in the eye of our Judge, and live by the measures of reason, religion, and sober counsels. The benefits we shall receive by practising this advice, in order to a blessed death, will also add to the account of reason and fair inducements.

The Benefits of this Exercise.

1. By a daily examination of our actions, we shall the easier cure a great sin, and prevent its arrival to become habitual. For to examine we sup

n Hierocl.