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 a temple. To this all those arguments will minister, which relate the advantages of the state of separation and resurrection. SECTION 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 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 liveth at 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!" said the son of Sirach. But the parts of this exercise help each other. If a man be not incorporated in all his passions to the things of this 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 boasts of will decline into weakness and dishonour; but that very boasting and complacency will make 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. 2. He that would not fear death, must strengthen his spirits 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 valiant man; d and they that are not so, are vicious, and fools, and cowards. All men praise the valiant and honest; and that which the very heathen admired in their noblest examples, is especially patience and contempt 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 to be burnt alive; and all the women did so, to do honour to their husband's funeral, 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 • Εἰ δέ τις ὄλβον ἔχων Μορφᾷ παραμεύσεται ἄλλων, die for Christ, to die for the brethren, to die rather than to 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 instrument, fortified against death; as he that does his duty need 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. 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, consider you will have less need to fear it, by how much the less you do fear it; and so 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 chose to die in a place, where none but 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 a 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 timorously. Courage is the greatest security; for it does most commonly safeguard the man, but always rescues the condition from an intolerable evil. 4. If thou wilt be fearless of death, endeavour to be in love with the felicities of saints and angels, and be once persuaded to believe, that there is a condition of living better than this; that there are creatures more noble than we; that above there is a country better than ours; that the inhabitants know more and know better, and are in places of rest and desire; and first learn to value it, and then learn to purchase it, and death cannot be a formidable thing, which lets us into so much joy and so. Dic, homo, vas cinerum, quid confert flos facierum? d Amittenda fortitudo est, aut sepeliendus dolor.-CICERO. e Hostem cùm fugeret, se Fannius ipse peremit. -- MART. much felicity. And indeed who would not think | finished such a design,h or made an end of the last his condition mended, if he passed from conversing 5. If God should say to us, Cast thyself into the sea, (as Christ did to St. Peter, or as God concerning Jonas,) I have provided for thee a dolphin, or a whale, or a port, a safety or a deliverance, security or a reward, were we not incredulous and pusillanimous persons, if we should tremble to put such a felicity into act, and ourselves into possession? The very duty of resignation and the love of our own interest are good antidotes against fear. In forty or fifty years we find evils enough and arguments enough to make us weary of this life; and to a good man there are very many more reasons to be afraid of life than death, this having in it less of evil and more of advantage. And it was a rare wish of that Roman, that death might come only to wise and excellent persons, and not to fools and cowards; that it might not be a sanctuary for the timorous, but the reward of the virtuous: and indeed they only can make advantage of it. 6. Make no excuses to make thy desires of life seem reasonable; neither cover thy fear with pretences, but suppress it rather with arts of severity and ingenuity. Some are not willing to submit to God's sentence and arrest of death, till they have Beati erimus cùm, corporibus relictis, et cupiditatum et æmulationum erimus expertes, quodque nunc facimus, cùm laxati curis sumus, ut spectare aliquid velimus et visere.TUSCUL. Q. Blindness is odious, and widowhood is sad, and destitution is without comfort, and persecution is full of trouble, and famine is intolerable, and tears are the sad ease of a sadder heart: but these are evils of our life, not of our death. For the dead that die in the Lord, are so far from wanting the commodities of this life, that they do not want life itself. After all this, I do not say it is a sin to be afraid of death: we find the boldest spirit, that discourses of it with confidence, and dares undertake a danger as big as death, yet doth shrink at the horror of it, when it comes dressed in its proper circumstances. And Brutus, who was as bold a Roman to undertake a noble action as any was, since they first reckoned by consuls, yet when Furius came to cut his throat after his defeat by Antony, he ran from it like a girl; and being admonished to die constantly, he swore by his life, that he would shortly endure death. But what do I speak of such imperfect persons? Our blessed Lord was pleased to legitimate fear to us by his agony and prayers in the garden. It is not a sin to be afraid, but it is a great felicity to be without fear; which felicity our dearest Saviour refused to have, because it was agreeable to his purposes to suffer any thing that was contrary to felicity, every thing but sin. But when men will by all means avoid death, they are like those who at any hand resolve to be rich. The case may happen, in which they will blaspheme and dishonour Providence, or do a base action, or curse God and Mors, utinam pavidos vitâ subducere nolles, h Pendent opera interrupta, minæque murorum ingentes. die: but, in all cases, they die miserable and insnar- | the pain of his own folly, and he is like a fool ed, and in no case do they die the less for it. smarting under the whip, which his own viciousness Nature hath left us the key of the churchyard, and twisted for his back; then a man pays the price of custom hath brought cemeteries and charnel-houses his sin, and hath a pure and an unmingled sorrow into cities and churches, places most frequented, in his suffering; and it cannot be alleviated by that we might not carry ourselves strangely in so any circumstances, for the whole affair is a mere certain, so expected, so ordinary, so unavoidable an process of death and sorrow. Sin is in the head, accident. All reluctancy or unwillingness to obey sickness is in the body, and death and an eternity of the Divine decree is but a snare to ourselves, and a pains in the tail; and nothing can make this conload to our spirits, and is either an entire cause, or dition tolerable, unless the miracles of the Divine a great aggravation, of the calamity. Who did not mercy will be pleased to exchange the eternal anger scorn to look upon Xerxes, when he caused three for the temporal. True it is, that, in all sufferings, hundred stripes to be given to the sea, and sent a the cause of it makes it noble or ignoble, honour or chartel of defiance against the mountain Athos ? shame, tolerable or intolerable. For when patience Who did not scorn the proud vanity of Cyrus, when is assaulted by a ruder violence, by a blow from he took so goodly a revenge upon the river Cyndus heaven or earth, from a gracious God or an unjust for his hard passage over it? or did not deride or man, patience looks forth to the doors, which way pity the Thracians, for shooting arrows against she may escape. And if innocence or a cause of heaven when it thunders? To be angry with God,m religion keep the first entrance, then, whether she to quarrel with the Divine providence, by repining escapes at the gates of life or death, there is a good against an unalterable, a natural, an easy sentence, to be received, greater than the evils of a sickness : is an argument of a huge folly, and the parent of a but if sin thrust in that sickness, and that hell stands great trouble; a man is base and foolish to no pur- at the door, then patience turns into fury, and seeing pose," he throws away a vice to his own misery, it impossible to go forth with safety, rolls up and and to no advantages of ease and pleasure. Fear down with a circular and infinite revolution, makes keeps men in bondage all their life, saith St. Paul; its motion not from, but upon, its own centre; it and patience makes him his own man, and lord of doubles the pain, and increases the sorrow, till by his own interest and person. Therefore possess its weight it breaks the spirit, and bursts into the yourselves in patience, with reason and religion, and agonies of infinite and eternal ages. If we had you shall die with ease." 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 sponde, the ribs of a marital bed; and we 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 observe 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. 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; P if they be not the phantasms of hypochondriacal persons, and designs upon the interest 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. SECTION 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 * Quam pellunt lacrymæ, fovent sortem: dura negant cedere mollibus. 1 Siccas si videat genas, duræ cedet hebes sors patientiæ. - Νήπιοι, οἳ Ζηνὶ μενεαίνομεν ἀφρονέοντες.-Iliad. ό. Et cùm nihil imminuat dolores, cur frustrà turpes esse volumus?-SENECA. When men, by vomiting, measure up the drink they | holy living did, in very many of its instances, intook 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 haled 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. crease in new particulars of duty; and the prophets reproved many things, which the law forbad not; and taught many duties, which Moses prescribed not; and as the time of Christ's approach came, so the sermons and revelations too were more evangelical, and like the patterns, which were fully to be exhibited by the Son of God. Amongst which, it is certain, that christian simplicity and godly sincerity are to be accounted: and counterfeiting of sickness is a huge enemy to this: it is an upbraiding the Divine Providence, a jesting with fire, a playing with a thunderbolt, a making the decrees of God to serve the vicious or secular ends of men; it is a tempting of a judgment, a false accusation of God, a forestalling and antedating his anger; it is a cozening of men by making God a party in the fraud: and therefore, if the cozenage returns upon the man's own head, he enters like a fox into his sickness, and perceives himself catched in a trap, or earthed in the intolerable dangers of the grave. 3. Although we must be infinitely careful to prevent it, that sin does not thrust us into a sickness; yet when we are in the house of sorrow, we should do well to take physic against sin, and suppose that it is the cause of the evil; if not by way of natural 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 plaster upon it, till beginning to be free from the malice of the three prevail-casualty and proper effect, yet by a moral influence, ing 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 Cælius 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 of natural or civil deportment. I cannot certainly tell, 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 Hi quicquid biberint, vomitu remetientur tristes, et bilem suam regustantes.-SENECA. and by a just demerit. We can easily see when a t Tantum cura potest et ars doloris: desît fingere Cœlius will often happen, that if we go to inquire into the particular, we shall never find it out; and we may suspect drunkenness, when it may be also a morose delectation in unclean thoughts, or covetousness, or oppression, or a crafty invasion of my neighbour's rights, or my want of charity, or my judging unjustly in my own cause, or my censuring my neighbours, or a secret pride, or a base hypocrisy, or the pursuance of little ends with violence and passion, that may have procured the present messenger of death. Therefore ask no more after any one, but heartily endeavour to reform all: "sin no more, lest a worse thing happen:" for a single search or accusation may be the design of an imperfect repentance; but no man does heartily return to God, but he that decrees against every irregularity; and then only we can be restored to health or life, when we have taken away the causes of sickness and a cursed death. V 4. He that means to have his sickness turn into safety and life, into health and virtue, must make religion the employment of his sickness, and prayer the employment of his religion. For there are certain compendiums or abbreviatures and shortenings of religion, fitted to several states. They, that first gave up their names to Christ, and that turned from paganism to christianity, had an abbreviature fitted for them; they were to renounce their false worshippings, and give up their belief, and vow their obedience unto Christ; and in the very profession of this they were forgiven in baptism. For God hastens to snatch them from the power of the devil, and therefore shortens the passage, and secures the estate. In the case of poverty, God hath reduced this duty of man to an abbreviature of those few graces which they can exercise; such as are patience, contentedness, truth, and diligence; and the rest he accepts in good will, and the charities of the soul, in prayers, and the actions of a cheap religion. And to most men charity is also an abbreviature. And as the love of God shortens the way to the purchase of all virtues; so the expression of this to the poor goes a huge way in the requisites and towards the consummation of an excellent religion. And martyrdom is another abbreviature; and so is every act of an excellent and heroical virtue. But when we are fallen into the state of sickness, and that our understanding is weak and troubled, our bodies sick and useless, our passions turned into fear, and the whole state into suffering, God, in compliance with man's infirmity, hath also turned our religion into such a duty, which a sick man can do most passionately, and a sad man and a timorous can perform effectually, and a dying man can do to many purposes of pardon and mercy; and that is, prayer. For although a sick man is bound to do many acts of virtue of several kinds, yet the most of them are to be done in the way of prayer. Prayer is not only the religion that is proper to a sick man's condition, but it is the manner of doing other graces, which is then left, and in his power. For thus the sick man is to do his repent • "Ορα κακῶς πράσσοντες, μὴ μείζω κακὰ κτησώμεθα. SOPH. ance and his mortifications, his temperance and his chastity, by a fiction of imagination bringing the offers of the virtue to the spirit, and making an action of election: and so our prayers are a direct act of chastity, when they are made in the matter of that grace; just as repentance for our cruelty is an act of the grace of mercy; and repentance for uncleanness is an act of chastity, is a means of its purchase, an act in order to the habit. And though such acts of virtue, which are only in the way of prayer, are ineffective to the entire purchase, and of themselves cannot change the vice into virtue; yet they are good renewings of the grace, and proper exercise of a habit already gotten. The purpose of this discourse is, to represent the excellency of prayer, and its proper advantages, which it hath in the time of sickness. For besides that it moves God to pity, piercing the clouds, and making the heavens, like a pricked eye, to weep over us, and refresh us with showers of pity; it also doth the work of the soul, and expresses the virtue of his whole life in effigy, in pictures and lively representments, so preparing it for a never-ceasing crown, by renewing the actions in the continuation of a never-ceasing, a never-hindered affection. Prayer speaks to God, when the tongue is stiffened with the approachings of death: prayer can dwell in the heart, and be signified by the hand or eye, by a thought or a groan: prayer, of all the actions of religion, is the last alive, and it serves God without circumstances, and exercises material graces by abstraction from matter, and separation, and makes them to be spiritual; and therefore best dresses our bodies for funeral or recovery, for the mercies of restitution or the mercies of the grave. 5. In every sickness, whether it will, or will not, be so in nature and in the event, yet in thy spirit and preparations resolve upon it, and treat thyself accordingly, as if it were a sickness unto death. For many men support their unequal courages by flattery and false hopes; and because sicker men have recovered, believe that they shall do so; but therefore they neglect to adorn their souls, or set their house in order: besides the temporal inconveniences, that often happen by such persuasions, and putting off the evil day, such as are, dying intestate, leaving estates entangled, and some relatives unprovided for; they suffer infinitely in the interest and affairs of their soul, they die carelessly and surprised, their burdens on, and their scruples unremoved, and their cases of conscience not determined, and, like a sheep, without any care taken concerning their precious souls. Some men will never believe, that a villain will betray them, though they receive often advices from suspicious persons and likely accidents, till they are entered into the snare; and then they believe it, when they feel it, and when they cannot return: but so the treason entered, and the man was betrayed by his own folly, placing the snare in the regions and advantages of opportunity. This evil looks like boldness and a confident spirit, but it is the greatest timorousness and cowardice in the world. They are so fearful to die, that they dare not look upon it as possible; and think that |