ver not, our sickness shall the sooner sit down in rest and joy. For recovery by death, as it is easier and better than the recovery by a sickly health, so it is not so long in doing: it suffers not the tediousness of a creeping restitution, nor the inconvenience of surgeons and physicians, watchfulness and care, keepings in and suffering trouble, fears of relapse, and the little relics of a storm.

11. While we hear, or use, or think of, these remedies, part of the sickness is gone away, and all of it is passing. And if, by such instruments, we stand armed and ready dressed beforehand, we shall avoid the mischiefs of amazements and surprise"; while the accidents of sickness are such as were expected, and against which we stood in readiness, with our spirits contracted, instructed, and put upon the defensive.

12. But our patience will be the better secured, if we consider, that it is not violently tempted by the usual arrests of sickness; for patience is, with reason, demanded while the sickness is tolerable, that is, so long as the evil is not too great; but if it be also eligible, and have in it some degrees of good, our patience will have in it the less difficulty and the greater necessity. This, therefore, will be a new stock of consideration: sickness is, in many degrees, eligible, to many men, and to many purposes.

SECTION VI.

Advantages of Sickness.

1. I CONSIDER, one of the greatest felicities of heaven consists in an immunity from sin: then we shall love God without mixtures of malice: then we shall enjoy without envy: then we shall see fuller vessels running over with glory, and crowned with bigger circles; and this we shall behold without spilling from our eyes (those vessels of joy and grief) any sign of anger, trouble, or a repining spirit: our passions shall be pure, our charity without fear, our desire without

m Nulla mihi nova nunc facies inopinave surgit :

Omnia præcepi atque animo mecum ante peregi.—Virgil. lib. vi.

lust, our possessions all our own; and all in the inheritance of Jesus, in the richest soil of God's eternal kingdom. Now half of this reason, which makes heaven so happy by being innocent, is also in the state of sickness, making the sorrows of old age smooth, and the groans of a sick heart apt to be joined to the music of angels: and, though they sound harsh to our untuned ears and discomposed organs; yet those accents must needs be in themselves excellent, which God loves to hear, and esteems them as prayers, and arguments of pity, instruments of mercy and grace, and preparatives to glory.

In sickness, the soul begins to dress herself for immortality. And first, she unties the strings of vanity, that made her upper garment cleave to the world and sit uneasy: first she puts off the light and fantastic summer robe of lust and wanton appetite: and as soon as that cestus, that lascivious girdle, is thrown away, then the reins chasten us, and give us warning in the night; then that, which called us formerly to serve the manliness of the body, and the childishness of the soul, keeps us waking, to divide the hours with the intervals of prayer, and to number the minutes with our penitential groans; then the flesh sits uneasily, and dwells in sorrow; and then the spirit feels itself at ease, freed from the petulant solicitations of those passions, which in health were as busy and as restless as atoms in the sun, always dancing, and always busy, and never sitting down, till a sad night of grief and uneasiness draws the veil, and lets them die alone in secret dishonour.

2. Next to this ; the soul by the help of sickness knocks off the fetters of pride and vainer complacencies. Then she draws the curtains, and stops the light from coming in, and takes the pictures down, those fantastic images of self-love ", and gay remembrances of vain opinion, and popular noises. Then the spirit stoops into the sobrieties of humble thoughts, and feels corruption chiding the forwardness of fancy, and allaying the vapours of conceit and factious opinions. For humility is the soul's grave, into which she enters, not to die, but to meditate and inter some of its troublesome appendages. There she sees the dust, and feels the dishonours of the

n Nunc festinatos nimiùm sibi sentit honores,

Actaque lauriferæ damnat Syllana juventæ.- Lucan. lib. viii.

body, and reads the register of all its sad adherences; and then she lays by all her vain reflections, beating upon her crystal and pure mirror from the fancies of strength and beauty, and little decayed prettinesses of the body. And when, in sickness, we forget all our knotty discourses of philosophy, and a syllogism makes our head ache, and we feel our many and loud talkings served no lasting end of the soul, no purpose that now we must abide by, and that the body is like to descend to the land, where all things are forgotten; then she lays aside all her remembrances of applauses, all her ignorant confidences, and cares only to know "Christ Jesus and him crucified," to know him plainly, and with much heartiness and simplicity. And I cannot think this to be a contemptible advantage. For ever since man tempted himself by his impatient desires of knowing, and being as God, man thinks it the finest thing in the world to know much, and therefore is hugely apt to esteem himself better than his brethren, if he knows some little impertinences, and them imperfectly, and that with infinite uncertainty but God hath been pleased, with a rare art, to prevent the inconveniences apt to arise by this passionate longing after knowledge; even by giving to every man á sufficient opinion of his own understanding: and who is there in the world, that thinks himself to be a fool, or indeed not fit to govern his brother? There are but few men, but they think they are wise enough, and every man believes his own opinion, the soundest; and, if it were otherwise, men would burst themselves with envy, or else become irrecoverable slaves to the talking and disputing man. But when God intended this permission to be an antidote of envy, and a satisfaction and allay to the troublesome appetites of knowing, and made, that this universal opinion, by making men in some proportions equal, should be a keeper out or a great restraint to slavery and tyranny respectively; man (for so he uses to do) hath turned this into bitterness: for when nature had made so just a distribution of understanding, that every man might think he had enough, he is not content with that, but will think, he hath more than his brother: and whereas it might well be employed in restraining slavery, he hath used it to break off the bands of all obedience, and it ends in pride and schisms, in heresies and tyrannies; and it being

a spiritual evil, it grows upon the soul with old age and flattery, with health and the supports of a prosperous fortune. Now, besides the direct operations of the Spirit, and a powerful grace, there is, in nature, left to us no remedy for this evil, but a sharp sickness, or an equal sorrow, and allay of fortune and then we are humble enough to ask counsel of a despised priest, and to think, that even a common sentence, from the mouth of an appointed comforter, streams forth more refreshment than all our own wiser and more reputed discourses: then our understandings and our bodies", peeping through their own breaches, see their shame and their dishonour, their dangerous follies and their huge deceptions; and they go into the clefts of the rock, and every little hand may cover them.

3. Next to these, as the soul is still undressing, she takes off the roughness of her great and little angers and animosities, and receives the oil of mercies and smooth forgiveness, fair interpretations and gentle answers, designs of reconcilement and Christian atonement in their places. For so did the wrestlers in Olympus, they stripped themselves of all their garments, and then anointed their naked bodies with oil, smooth and vigorous; with contracted nerves and enlarged voice they contended vehemently, till they obtained their victory, or their ease; and a crown of olive, or a huge pity, was the reward of their fierce contentions. Some wise men have said, that anger sticks to a man's nature as inseparably as other vices do to the manners of fools, and that anger is never quite cured: but God, that hath found out remedies for all diseases, hath so ordered the circumstances of man, that, in the worser sort of men, anger and great indig→ nation consume and shrivel into little peevishnesses and uneasy accents of sickness, and spend themselves in trifling instances; and, in the better and more sanctified, it goes off in prayers, and alms, and solemn reconcilement. And however the temptations of this state, such I mean, which are proper to it, are little and inconsiderable; the man is apt to Ubi jam validis quassatum est viribus ævi

Corpus, et obtusis ceciderunt viribus artus,

Claudicat ingenium, delirat linguaque mensque.-Lucr. 1. iii.

P Quatenus excidi penitus vitium iræ,

Cætera item nequeunt stultis hærentiaHor. lib. i. sat. 3.

chide a servant too bitterly, and to be discontented with his nurse, or not satisfied with his physician, and he rests uneasily, and (poor man!) nothing can please him: and indeed these little indecencies must be cured and stopped, lest they run into an inconvenience. But sickness is, in this particular, a little image of the state of blessed souls, or of Adam's early morning in paradise, free from the troubles of lust, and violences of anger, and the intricacies of ambition, or the restlessness of covetousness. For though a man may carry all these along with him into his sickness, yet there he will not find them; and in despite of all his own malice, his soul shall find some rest from labouring in the galleys, and baser captivity of sin and if we value those moments of being in the love of God and in the kingdom of grace, which certainly are the beginnings of felicity, we may also remember, that the not sinning actually is one step of innocence; and therefore that state is not intolerable, which, by a sensible trouble, makes it in most instances impossible to commit those great sins, which make death, hell, and horrid damnations. And then let us but add this to it, that God sends sicknesses, but he never causes sin; that God is angry with a sinning person, but never with a man for being sick; that sin causes God to hate us, and sickness causes him to pity us; that all wise men in the world choose trouble rather than dishonour, affliction rather than baseness; and that sickness stops the torrent of sin, and interrupts its violence, and even to the worst men makes it to retreat many degrees. We may reckon sickness amongst good things, as we reckon rhubarb, and aloes, and child-birth, and labour, and obedience, and discipline: these are unpleasant, and yet safe; they are troubles in order to blessings, or they are securities from danger, or the hard choices of a less and a more tolerable evil.

4. Sickness is, in some sense, eligible, because it is the opportunity and the proper scene of exercising some virtues". It is that agony, in which men are tried for a crown. And if we remember what glorious things are spoken of the grace of faith, that it is the life of just men, the restitution of the dead in trespasses and sins, the justification of a sinner, the

4 Nolo quod cupio statim tenere,

Nec victoria mî placet parata.-Petron.