THE RULE AND EXERCISES OF HOLY DYING. CHAPTER I. A GENERAL PREPARATION TOWARDS A HOLY AND BLESSED DEATH, BY WAY OF CONSIDERATION. SECT. I.-Consideration of the Vanity and A MAN is a bubble (said the Greek proverb) which Lucian * represents Πομφόλυξ ὁ ἄνθρωπος. * Char. c. 19. with advantages and its proper circumstances, to this purpose, saying, All the world is a storm, and men rise up in their several generations like bubbles descending a Jove pluvio, from God and the dew of heaven, from a tear and drop of man, from nature and providence: and some of these instantly sink into the deluge of their first parent, and are hidden in a sheet of water, having had no other business in the world but to be born that they might be able to die: others float up and down two or three turns, and suddenly disappear, and give their place to others: and they that live longest upon the face of the waters are in perpetual motion, restless and uneasy, and being crushed with a great drop of a cloud, sink into flatness and a froth; the change not being great, it being hardly possible it should be more a nothing than it was before. So is every man: he is born in vanity and sin; he comes into the world like morning mushrooms, soon thrusting up their heads into the air, and conversing with their kindred of the same production, and as soon as they, turn into dust and forgetfulness some of them without any other interest in the affairs of the world but that they made their parents a little glad, and very sorrowful: others ride longer in the storm, it may be until seven years of vanity be expired, and then peradventure the sun shines hot upon their heads, and they fall into the shades below, into the cover of death and darkness of the grave to hide them. But if the bubble stands the shock of a bigger drop, and outlives the chances of a child, of a careless nurse, of drowning in a pail of water, of being overlaid by a sleepy servant, or such little accidents, then the young man dances like a bubble empty and gay, and shines like a dove's neck, or the image of a rainbow, which hath no substance, and whose very imagery and colors are fantastical; and so he dances out the gayety of his youth, and is all the while in a storm, and endures only because he is not knocked on the head by a drop of bigger rain, or crushed by the pressure of a load of indigested meat, or quenched by the disorder of an ill-placed humor: and to preserve a man alive in the midst of so many chances and hostilities is as great a miracle as to create him; to preserve him from rushing into nothing, and at first to draw him up from nothing, were equally the issues of an Almighty power. And therefore the wise men of the world have contended who shall best fit man's condition with words signifying his vanity and short abode. Homer calls a man a leaf,* the smallest, the weakest piece of a short * I. vi. 146. lived, unsteady plant. Pindar calls him the dream of a shadow.† Another, the dream of the shadow of smoke.‡ But St. James spake by a more + Pyth. viii. 135. See Æsch. ap. Stob. Flor. xcviii. 49. James 4. 14, ἀτμίς. excellent spirit, saying, Our life is but a vapor, viz. drawn from the earth by a celestial influence, made of smoke, or the lighter parts of water, tossed with every wind, moved by the motion of a superior body, without virtue in itself, lifted up on high, or left below, according as it pleases the sun its foster-father. But it is lighter yet. It is but φαινομένη. appearing; a fantastic vapor, an apparition, nothing real: it is not so much as a mist, not the matter of a shower, nor substantial enough to make a cloud; but it is like Cassiopeia's chair, or Pelops's shoulder, or the circles of heaven paivóμeva, for which you cannot have a word that can signify a verier nothing. And yet the expression is one degree more made diminutive: A vapor, and fantastical, or a mere ap πρὸς ὀλίγον. pearance, and this but for a little while neither; the very dream, the phantasm disappears in a small time, like the shadow that departeth, or like a tale that is told, or as a dream when one awaketh. A man is so vain, so unfixed, so perishing a creature, that he cannot long last in the scene of fancy: a man goes off and is forgotten like the dream of a distracted person. The sum of all is this : That thou art a man, than whom there is not in the world any greater instance of heights and declensions, of lights and shadows, of misery and folly, of laughter and tears, of groans and death. Τὸ δὲ κεφάλαιον τῶν λόγων, ἄνθρωπος εἶ, Οὗ μεταβολὴν θᾶττον πρὸς ὕψος, καὶ πάλιν Ταπεινότητα, ζῷον οὐδὲν λαμβάνει. Menand. ap. Plut. Cons. ad Apol. p. 103 d. And because this consideration is of great usefulness and great necessity to many purposes of wisdom and the spirit, all the succession of time, all the changes in nature, all the varieties of light and darkness, the thousand thousands of accidents in the world, and every contingency to every man and to every creature, doth preach our funeral sermon, and calls us to look and see how the old sexton Time throws up the earth, and digs a grave, where we must lay our sins or our sorrows, and sow our bodies, till they rise again in a fair or in an intolerable eternity. Every revolution which the sun makes about the world divides between life and death; and death possesses both those portions by the next morrow, and we are Nihil sibi quisquam de fu dead to all those months which turo debet promittere. Id we have already lived, and we shall never live them over again: and still God makes little peri ods of our age. sun. quoque quod tenetur per manus exit, et ipsam quam premimus horam casus incidit. Volvitur tempus rata quidem lege, sed per obscurum. Sen. Ep. ci. 5. First we change our world, when we come from the womb to feel the warmth of the Then we sleep and enter into the image of death, in which state we are unconcerned in all the changes of the world: and if our mothers or our nurses die, or a wild boar destroy our vineyards, or our king be sick, we regard it not, but during that state are as disinterested as if our eyes were closed with the clay that weeps in the bowels of the earth. At the end of seven years our teeth fall and die before us, representing a formal prologue to the tragedy; and still every seven years it is odds but we shall finish the last scene: and when nature or chance or vice takes our body in pieces, weakening some parts and losing others, we taste the grave and the solemnities of our own funerals, first in those parts that ministered to vice, and next in them that served for ornament: and in a short time even they that served for necessity become useless, and entangled like the wheels of a broken clock. Baldness is but a dressing to our funerals, the proper ornament of mourning, Ut mortem citius venire credas, Scito jam capitis perisse par tem. Petron. Sat. c. 109. and of a person entered very far into the regions |