MEDITATIONS UPON OUR HUMAN CONDITION By John Donne 1 Insultus Morbi Primus; The first alteration, The first grudging of the sickness. Variable, and therefore miserable, condition of Man! This minute I was well, and am ill this minute. I am surprised with a sudden change and alteration to worse, and can impute it to no cause, nor call it by any name. We study health, and we deliberate upon our meats and drink and air and exercises, and we hew and we polish every stone that goes to that building; and so our health is a long and a regular work; But in a minute a canon batters all, overthrows all, demolishes all; a sickness, unprevented for all our diligence, unsuspected for all our curiosity - nay, undeserved, if we consider only disorder - summons us, seizes us, possesses us, destroys us in an instant. O miserable condition of Man! which was not imprinted by God who, as he is immortal himself, had put a coal, a beam of immortality into us, which we might have blown into a flame, but blew it out by our first sin. We beggared ourselves by hearkening after false riches, and infatuated ourselves by hearkening after false knowledge; so that now we do not only die, but die upon the rack, die by the torment of sickness; nor that only, but are pre-afflicted, super-afflicted, with these jealousies and suspicions and apprehensions of sickness before we can call it a sickness. We are not sure we are ill: one hand asks the other by the pulse, and our eye asks our urine, How we do. O multiplied misery! We die, and cannot enjoy death, because we die in this torment of sickness. We are tormented with sickness, and cannot stay till the torment come, but pre-apprehensions and presages prophecy those torments which induce that death before either come; and our dissolution is conceived in these first changes, quickened in the sickness itself, and born in death, which bears date from these first changes. Is this the honour which Man hath by being a little world: That he hath these earthquakes in himself - sudden shakings; these lightnings - sudden flashes; these thunders - sudden noises; these eclipses - sudden obfuscations and darkenings of his senses; these blazing stars - sudden fiery exhalations; these rivers of blood - sudden red waters? Is he a world to himself only, therefore, that he hath enough in himself not only to destroy and execute himself, but to presage that execution upon himself, to assist the sickness, to antedate the sickness, to make the sickness the more irremediable by sad apprehensions, and, as if he would make a fire the more vehement by sprinkling water upon the coals, so to wrap a hot fever in cold melancholy, lest the fever alone should not destroy fast enough without this contribution, nor perfit the work (which is destruction) except we joined an artificial sickness of our own melancholy:- to our natural, our unnatural fever. O perplexed discomposition, O riddling distemper, O miserable condition of Man! 2 Actio Laesa. The strength and the function of the senses and other faculties change and fail. The heavens are not the less constant because they move continually - because they move continually one and the same way. The Earth is not the more constant because it lies still continually - because continually it changes and melts in all parts thereof. Man, who is the noblest part of the Earth, melts so away as if he were a statue not of earth but of snow. We see his own envy melts him, he grows lean with that; he will say another's beauty melts him; but he feels that a fever doth not melt him like snow, but pour him out like lead, like iron, like brass melted in a furnace: It doth not only melt him, but calcine him, reduce him to atoms and to ashes; not to water, but to lime. And how quickly? Sooner than thou canst receive an answer, sooner than thou canst conceive the question. Earth is the centre of my body, Heaven is the centre of my soul; these two are the natural places of those two; but those go not to these two in an equal pace: My body falls down without pushing, my soul does not go up without pulling: Ascension is my soul's pace and measure, but precipitation my body's: And even angels, whose home is Heaven, and who are winged too, yet had a ladder to go to Heaven by steps. The sun who goes so many miles in a minute, the stars of the firmament, which go so very many more, go not so fast as my body to the earth. In the same instant that I feel the first attempt of the disease, I feel the victory; In the twinkling of an eye I can scarce see, instantly the taste is insipid and fatuous, instantly the appetite is dull and desireless, instantly the knees are sinking and strengthless; and, in an instant, sleep, which is the picture, the copy of death, is taken away, that the original, death itself, may succeed, and that so I might have death to the life. It was part of Adam's punishment, In the sweat of thy brows thou shalt eat thy bread: it is multiplied to me: I have earned bread in the sweat of my brows, in the labour of my calling, and I have it; and I sweat again and again, from the brow to the sole of the foot, but I eat no bread, I taste no sustenance. Miserable distribution of Mankind, where one half lacks meat, and the other stomach! 3 Decubitus sequitur tandem. The patient takes his bed. We attribute but one privilege and advantage to Man's body above other moving creatures: that he is not as others, grovelling, but of an erect, of an upright form, naturally built, and disposed to the contemplation of Heaven. Indeed it is a thankful form, and recompenses that soul which gives it with carrying that soul so many foot higher towards Heaven. Other creatures look to the earth; and even that is no unfit object, no unfit contemplation for Man; for thither he must come; but because Man is not to stay there, as other creatures are, Man in his natural form is carried to the contemplation of that place which is his home, Heaven. This is Man's prerogative; but what state hath he in this dignity? A fever can fillip him down, a fever can depose him; a fever can bring that head which yesterday carried a crown of gold five foot towards a crown of glory as low as his own foot today. When God came to breathe into Man the breath of life, he found him flat upon the ground; when he comes to withdraw that breath from him again, he prepares him to it by laying him flat upon his bed. Scarce any prison so close that affords not the prisoner two or three steps! The anchorites that barked themselves up in hollow trees and immured themselves in hollow walls, that perverse man that barrelled himself in a tub, all could stand, or sit, and enjoy some change of posture. A sickbed is a grave, and all that the patient says there is but a varying of his own epitaph. Every night's bed is a type of the grave: At night we tell our servants at what hour we will rise; here we cannot tell ourselves at what day, what week, what month. Here the head lies as low as the foot; the Head of the People as low as they whom those feet trod upon; And that hand that signed pardons is too weak to beg his own, if he might have it for lifting up that hand. Strange fetters to the feet, strange manacles to the hands, when the feet and hands are bound so much the faster by how much the cords are slacker; so much the less able to do their offices by how much more the sinews and ligaments are the looser! In the grave I may speak through the stones, in the voice of my friends, and in the accents of those words which their love may afford my memory; Here I am mine own ghost, and rather affright my beholders than instruct them; they conceive the worst of me now, and yet fear worse; they give me for dead now, and yet wonder how I do when they wake at midnight, and ask how I do tomorrow. Miserable and (though common to all) inhuman posture, where I must practise my lying in the grave by lying still, and not practise my resurrection by rising any more. 4 Medicusque vocatur. The physician is sent for. It is too little to call Man a little world; Except God, Man is a diminutive to nothing. Man consists of more pieces, more parts, than the world, than the world doth, nay than the world is. And if those pieces were extended, and stretched out in Man, as they are in the world, Man would be the giant and the world the dwarf; the world but the map, and the man the world. If all the veins in our bodies were extended to rivers, and all the sinews to veins of mines, and all the muscles that lie upon one another to hills, and all the bones to quarries of stones, and all the other pieces to the proportion of those which correspond to them in the world, the air would be too little for this orb of Man to move in, the firmament would be but enough for this star; for, as the whole world hath nothing to which something in Man doth not answer, so hath Man many pieces of which the whole world hath no representation. Enlarge this meditation upon this great world, Man, so far as to consider the immensity of the creatures this world produces; Our creatures are our thoughts, creatures that are born giants, that reach from east to west, from Earth to Heaven, that do not only bestride all the sea and land, but span the sun and firmament at once. My thoughts reach all, comprehend all. Inexplicable mystery! - I their creator am in a close prison, in a sickbed, any where, and any one of my creatures, my thoughts, is with the sun, and beyond the sun, overtakes the sun, and overgoes the sun in one pace, one step, everywhere. And, then, as the other world produces serpents and vipers, malignant and venomous creatures, and worms and caterpillars that endeavour to devour that world which produces them, and monsters compiled and complicated of divers parents and kinds, so this world, ourselves, produces all these in us in producing diseases and sicknesses of all those sorts, venomous and infectious diseases, feeding and consuming diseases, and manifold and entangled diseases made up of many several ones. And can the other world name so many venomous, so many consuming, so many monstrous creatures as we can diseases of all these kinds? O miserable abundance, O beggarly riches! how much do we lack of having remedies for every disease when as yet we have not names for them? But we have a Hercules against these giants, these monsters - that is, the physician. He musters up all the forces of the other world to succour this, all nature to relieve Man. We have the physician, but we are not the physician. Here we shrink in our proportion, sink in our dignity, in respect of very mean creatures who are physicians to themselves. The hart that is pursued and wounded, they say, knows an herb which, being eaten, throws off the arrow - a strange kind of vomit! The dog that pursues it, though he be subject to sickness, even proverbially, knows his grass that recovers him. And it may be true that the drugger is as near to Man as to other creatures; it may be that obvious and present simples, easy to be had, would cure him; but the apothecary is not so near him, nor the physician so near him, as they two are to other creatures. Man hath not that innate instinct to apply these natural medicines to his present danger, as those inferior creatures have; he is not his own apothecary, his own physician, as they are. Call back, therefore, thy meditation again, and bring it down; what's become of man's great extent and proportion when himself shrinks himself and consumes himself to a handful of dust? What's become of his soaring thoughts, his compassing thoughts, when himself brings himself to the ignorance, to the thoughtlessness of the grave? His diseases are his own, but the physician is not: he hath them at home, but he must send for the physician. 5 Solus adest. The physician comes. As sickness is the greatest misery, so the greatest misery of sickness is solitude. When the infectiousness of the disease deters them who should assist from coming, even the physician dares scarce come. Solitude is a torment which is not threatened in hell itself. Mere vacuity the first agent, God, the first instrument of God, Nature, will not admit; nothing can be utterly empty, but so near a degree towards vacuity as solitude - to be but one - they love not. When I am dead, and my body might infect, they have a remedy, - they may bury me; but when I am but sick, and might infect, they have no remedy but their absence and my solitude. It is an excuse to them that are great, and pretend, and yet are loth to come; it is an inhibition to those who would truly come, because they may be made instruments and pestiducts to the infection of others by their coming. And it is an outlawry, an excommunication, upon the patient, and separates him from all offices, not only of civility, but of working charity. A long sickness will weary friends at last, but a pestilential sickness averts them from the beginning. God himself would admit a figure of society, as there is a plurality of persons in God, though there be but one God; and all his external actions testify a love of society and communion. In Heaven there are orders of angels and armies of martyrs, and in that house many mansions; in Earth, families, cities, churches, colleges, all plural things; and, lest either of these should not be company enough alone, there is an association of both, a communion of saints, which makes the militant and triumphant Church one parish; so that Christ was not out of his dioceses when he was upon the Earth, nor out of his temple when he was in our flesh. God, who saw that all that he made was good, came not so near seeing a defect in any of his works as when he saw that it was not good for man to be alone; therefore he made him a helper; and one that should help him so as to increase the number, and give him her own, and more, society. Angels, who do not propagate nor multiply, were made at the first in an abundant number; and so were stars: But for the things of this world, their blessing was increase; for I think - I need not ask leave to think - that there is no phoenix, nothing singular, nothing alone. Men that inhere upon nature only are so far from thinking that there is anything singular in this world as that they will scarce think that this world itself is singular, but that every planet and every star is another world like this; They find reason to conceive not only a plurality in every species in the world, but a plurality of worlds: So that the abhorrers of solitude are not solitary; for God and Nature and Reason concur against it. Now, a man may counterfeit the plague in a vow, and mistake a disease for religion, by such a retiring and recluding of himself from all men as to do good to no man, to converse with no man. God hath two testaments, two wills; but this is a schedule, and not of his, - a codicil, and not of his - not in the body of his testaments, but interlined and postscribed by others, that the way to the communion of saints should be by such a solitude as excludes all doing of good here. That is a disease of the mind; as the height of an infectious disease of the body is solitude, to be left alone: for this makes an infectious bed equal - nay, worse - than a grave, that though in both I be equally alone, in my bed I know it, and feel it, and shall not in my grave: and this too, that in my bed my soul is still in an infectious body, and shall not in my grave be so. 6 Metuit. The physician is afraid. I observe the physician with the same diligence as he the disease; I see he fears, and I fear with him: I overtake him, I overrun him in his fear, and I go the faster, because he makes his pace slow. I fear the more, because he disguises his fear, and I see it with the more sharpness, because he would not have me see it. He knows that his fear shall not disorder the practise and exercise of his art, but he knows that my fear may disorder the effect and working of his practise. As the ill affections of the spleen complicate and mingle themselves with every infirmity of the body, so doth fear insinuate itself in every action or passion of the mind; and, as the wind in the body will counterfeit any disease, and seem the stone, and seem the gout, so fear will counterfeit any disease of the mind; it shall seem love, a love of having, and it is but a fear, a jealous and suspicious fear of losing; it shall seem valour in despising and undervaluing danger, and it is but fear in an overvaluing of opinion and estimation, and a fear of losing that. A man that is not afraid of a lion is afraid of a cat; not afraid of starving, and yet is afraid of some joint of meat at the table presented to feed him; not afraid of the sound of drums and trumpets and shot and those which they seek to drown, the last cries of men, and is afraid of some particular harmonious instrument; so much afraid as that with any of these the enemy might drive this man, otherwise valiant enough, out of the field. I know not what fear is, nor I know not what it is that I fear now. I fear not the hastening of my death, and yet I do fear the increase of the disease; I should belie Nature if I should deny that I feared this; and if I should say that I feared death I should belie God. My weakness is from Nature, who hath but her measure; my strength is from God, who possesses and distributes infinitely. As, then, every cold air is not a damp, every shivering is not a stupefaction, so every fear is not a fearfulness, every declination is not a running away, every debating is not a resolving, every wish that it were not thus is not a murmuring, nor a dejection though it be thus; but as my physician's fear puts not him from his practise, neither doth mine put me from receiving from God and Man and myself spiritual and civil and moral assistances and consolations. 7 Socios sibi jungier instat. The physician desires to have others joined with him. There is more fear, therefore more cause. If the physician desire help, the burden grows great: There is a growth of the disease then; But there must be an autumn to; But whether an autumn of the disease or me it is not my part to choose: but if it be of me, it is of both; My disease cannot survive me, I may overlive it. Howsoever, his desiring of others argues his candour and his ingenuity. If the danger be great, he justifies his proceedings, and he disguises nothing, that calls in witnesses; And if the danger be not great, he is not ambitious that is so ready to divide the thanks and the honour of that work which he begun alone with others. It diminishes not the dignity of a monarch that he derive part of his care upon others; God hath not made many suns, but he hath made many bodies that receive and give light. The Romans began with one king; they came to two Consuls; they returned, in extremities, to one dictator: whether in one or many, the sovereignty is the same in all states; and the danger is not the more, and the providence is the more, where there are more physicians; as the state is the happier where businesses are carried by more counsels than can be in one breast, how large soever. Diseases themselves hold consultations, and conspire how they may multiply, and join with one another, and exalt one another's force, so; and shall we not call physicians to consultations? Death is in an old man's door, he appears, and tells him so; and death is at a young man's back, and says nothing. Age is a sickness, and Youth is an ambush; and we need so many physicians as may make up a watch, and spy every inconvenience. There is scarce anything that hath not killed somebody; a hair, a feather hath done it; nay, that which is our best antidote against it hath done it; the best cordial hath been deadly poison; men have died of joy, and almost forbidden their friends to weep for them, when they have seen them die laughing. Even that tyrant Dionysius (I think the same, that suffered so much after) who could not die of that sorrow, of that high fall from a king to a wretched private man, died of so poor a joy as to be declared by the people at a theatre that he was a good poet. We say often that a man may live of a little; but, alas, of how much less may a man die! And therefore the more assistants the better; - who comes to a day of hearing in a cause of any importance with one advocate? In our funerals we ourselves have no interest; there we cannot advise, we cannot direct: And though some nations (the Egyptians in particular) built themselves better tombs than houses, because they were to dwell longer in them, yet, amongst ourselves, the greatest man of style whom we have had, The Conqueror, was left, as soon as his soul left him, not only without persons to assist at his grave, but without a grave. Who will keep us then we know not; As long as we can, let us admit as much help as we can; Another and another physician is not another and another indication and symptom of death, but another and another assistant and proctor of life: Nor do they so much feed the imagination with apprehension of danger, as the understanding with comfort; Let not one bring learning, another diligence, another religion, but every one bring all, and, as many ingredients enter into a receipt, so may many men make the receipt. But why do I exercise my meditation so long upon this, of having plentiful help in time of need? Is not my meditation rather to be inclined another way, to condole and commiserate their distress who have none? How many are sicker, perchance, than I, and laid on their woeful straw at home (if that corner be a home) and have no more hope of help, though they die, than of preferment, though they live? nor do no more expect to see a physician then, than to be an officer after; of whom the first that takes knowledge is the sexton that buries them; who buries them in oblivion, too? For they do but fill up the number of the dead in the Bill, but we shall never hear their names till we read them in the Book of Life with our own. How many are sicker, perchance, than I, and thrown into hospitals, where (as a fish left upon the sand must stay the tide) they must stay the physician's hour of visiting, and then can be but visited? How many are sicker, perchance, than all we, and have not this hospital to cover them, not this straw to lie in, to die in, but have their gravestone under them, and breathe out then souls in the ears and in the eyes of passengers, harder than their bed, the flint of the street? that taste of no part of our physic but a sparing diet; to whom ordinary porridge would be julep enough, the refuse of our servants' bezoar enough, and the off-scouring of our kitchen tables cordial enough? O my soul, when thou art not enough awake to bless thy God enough for his plentiful mercy in affording thee many helpers, remember how many lack them, and help them to them, or to those other things which they lack as much as them. 8 Et Rex ipse suum mittit. The King sends his own physician. Still when we return to that meditation, that Man is a world, we find new discoveries. Let him be a world, and himself will be the land, and misery the sea. His misery - for misery is his, his own; of the happinesses of this world he is but tenant, but of misery the freeholder; of happiness he is but the farmer, but the usufructuary, but of misery, the lord, the proprietary - his misery, as the sea, swells above all the hills, and reaches to the remotest parts of this earth, Man; who of himself is but dust, and coagulated and kneaded into earth by tears; his matter is earth, his form, misery. In this world that is Mankind the highest ground, the eminentest hills, are kings; and have they line and lead enough to fathom this sea, and say, My misery is but this deep? Scarce any misery equal to sickness, and they are subject to that equally with their lowest subject. A glass is not the less brittle because a king's face is represented in it, nor a king the less brittle because God is represented in him. They have physicians continually about them, and therefore sicknesses, or the worst of sicknesses, continual fear of it. Are they gods? He that called them so, cannot flatter. They are gods, but sick gods; and God is presented to us under many human affections, as far as infirmities; God is called angry, and sorry, and weary, and heavy; but never a sick God: for then he might die like men, as our gods do. The worst that they could say in reproach and scorn of the gods of the heathen was that perchance they were asleep; but gods that are so sick as that they cannot sleep are in an infirmer condition. A God, and need a physician? A Jupiter and need an Æsculapius? that must have rhubarb to purge his choler, lest he be too angry, and agaric to purge his phlegm, lest he be too drowsy; that as Tertullian says of the Egyptian gods, plants, and herbs, That God was beholden to Man, for growing in his garden, so we must say of these gods, Their eternity (an eternity of three score and ten years) is in the apothecary's shop, and not in the metaphorical deity. But their deity is better expressed in their humility than in their height: when abounding and overflowing, as God, in means of doing good, they descend, as God, to a communication of their abundances with men, according to their necessities, then they are gods. No man is well that understands not, that values not, his being well; that hath not a cheerfulness and a joy in it; and whosoever hath this joy hath a desire to communicate, to propagate that which occasions his happiness and his joy to others; for every man loves witnesses of his happiness; and the best witnesses are experimental witnesses; they who have tasted of that in themselves which makes us happy: It consummates, therefore it perfits the happiness of kings to confer, to transfer, honour and riches and (as they can) health upon those that need them. 9 Medicamina scribunt Upon their consultation, they prescribe. They have seen me, and heard me, arraigned me in these fetters, and received the evidence; I have cut up mine anatomy, dissected myself, and they are gone to read upon me. O how manifold and perplexed a thing, nay, how wanton and various a thing is ruin and destruction! God presented to David three kinds, War, Famine, and Pestilence; Satan left out these, and brought in fires from Heaven and winds from the wilderness. As if there were no ruin but sickness, we see the masters of that art can scarce number nor name all sicknesses; everything that disorders a faculty, and the function of that, is a sickness: The names will not serve them which are given from the place affected - the pleurisy is so; nor from the effect which it works - the falling sickness is so; they cannot have names enow, from what it does, nor where it is, but they must extort names from what it is like, what it resembles, and but in some one thing, or else they would lack names; for the wolf, and the canker, and the polypus are so; and that question, whether there be more names or things, is as perplexed in sicknesses as in anything else; except it be easily resolved upon that side, that there are more sicknesses than names. If ruin were reduced to that one way, that Man could perish no way but by sickness, yet his danger were infinite; and if sickness were reduced to that one way, that there were no sickness but a fever, yet the way were infinite still; for it would overload and oppress any natural disorder, and discompose any artificial memory, to deliver the names of several fevers; how intricate a work, then, have they who are gone to consult which of these sicknesses mine is, and then which of these fevers, and then what it would do, and then how it may be countermined. But even in ill, it is a degree of good when the evil will admit consultation. In many diseases, that which is but an accident, but a symptom of the main disease, is so violent that the physician must attend the cure of that, though he pretermit (so far as to intermit) the cure of the disease itself. Is it not so in states too? Sometimes the insolency of those that are great puts the people into commotions; the great disease - and the greatest danger to the Head - is the insolency of the great ones; and yet, they execute martial law, they come to present executions upon the people, whose commotion was indeed but a symptom, but an accident of the main disease; but this symptom, grown so violent, would allow no time for a consultation. Is it not so in the accidents of the diseases of our mind too? Is it not evidently so in our affections, in our passions? If a choleric man be ready to strike, must I go about to purge his choler, or to break the blow? But where there is room for consultation, things are not desperate. They consult; so there is nothing rashly, inconsiderately done, and then they prescribe, they write, so there is nothing covertly, disguisedly, unavowedly done. In bodily diseases it is not always so; sometimes, as soon as the physician's foot is in the chamber, his knife is in the patient's arm; the disease would not allow a minute's forbearing of blood, nor prescribing of other remedies. In states and matter of government it is so too; they are sometimes surprised with such accidents, as that the magistrate asks not what may be done by law, but does that which must necessarily be done in that case. But it is a degree of good in evil, a degree that carries hope and comfort in it, when we may have recourse to that which is written, and that the proceedings may be apert and ingenuous and candid and avowable, for that gives satisfaction and acquiescence. They who have received my anatomy of myself consult, and end their consultation in prescribing, and in prescribing physic; proper and convenient remedy: for if they should come in again, and chide me for some disorder that had occasioned and induced, or that had hastened and exalted this sickness, or if they should begin to write now rules for my diet and exercise when I were well, this were to antedate or to postdate their consultation, not to give physic. It were rather a vexation than a relief to tell a condemned prisoner, you might have lived if you had done this; and if you can get pardon, you shall do well to take this or this course hereafter. I am glad they know (I have hid nothing from them), glad they consult (they hide nothing from one another), glad they write (they hide nothing from the world), glad that they write and prescribe physic, that there are remedies for the present case. 10 Lente et Serpenti satagunt occurrere Morbo. They find the disease to steal on insensibly, and endeavour to meet with it so. This is Nature's nest of boxes: the heavens contain the Earth, the Earth, cities, cities, men. And all these are concentric; the common centre to them all is decay, ruin; only that is eccentric which was never made; only that place, or garment rather, which we can imagine, but not demonstrate, that light - which is the very emanation of the light of God, in which the saints shall dwell, with which the saints shall be apparelled - only that bends not to this centre, to ruin; that which was not made of nothing is not threatened with this annihilation. All other things are, even angels, even our souls; they move upon the same poles, they bend to the same centre; and if they were not made immortal by preservation, their nature could not keep them from sinking to this centre, annihilation. In all these (the frame of the heavens, the states upon Earth, and men in them, comprehend all) those are the greatest mischiefs which are least discerned; the most insensible in their ways come to be the most sensible in their ends. The heavens have had their dropsy, they drowned the world, and they shall have their fever, and burn the world. Of the dropsy, the flood, the world had a foreknowledge 120 years before it came; and so some made provision against it, and were saved; the fever shall break out in an instant, and consume all; The dropsy did no harm to the heavens, from whence it fell, it did not put out those lights, it did not quench those heats; but the fever, the fire shall burn the furnace itself, annihilate those heavens that breath it out; Though the Dog-star have a pestilent breath, an infectious exhalation, yet because we know when it will rise we clothe ourselves, and we diet ourselves, and we shadow ourselves to a sufficient prevention; but comets and blazing stars, whose effects or significations no man can interrupt or frustrate, no man foresaw: no almanac tells us when a blazing star will break out, the matter is carried up in secret; no astrologer tells us when the effects will be accomplished, for that's a secret of a higher sphere than the other; and that which is most secret is most dangerous. It is so also here in the societies of men, in states and commonwealths. Twenty rebellious drums make not so dangerous a noise as a few whisperers and secret plotters in corners. The canon doth not so much hurt against a wall as a mine under the wall; nor a thousand enemies that threaten so much as a few that take an oath to say nothing. God knew many heavy sins of the people, in the wilderness and after, but still he charges them with that one, with murmuring, murmuring in their hearts secret disobediences, secret repugnances against his declared will; and these are the most deadly, the most pernicious. And it is so too with the diseases of the body; and that is my case. The pulse, the urine, the sweat, all have sworn to say nothing, to give no indication of any dangerous sickness. My forces are not enfeebled, I find no decay in my strength; my provisions are not cut off, I find no abhorring in mine appetite; my counsels are not corrupted or infatuated, I find no false apprehensions to work upon mine understanding; and yet they see that invisibly - and I feel that insensibly - the disease prevails. The disease hath established a kingdom, an empire in me, and will have certain Arcana Imperii, secrets of state, by which it will proceed, and not be bound to declare them. But yet against those secret conspiracies in the state the magistrate hath the rack; and against the insensible diseases physicians have their examiners; and those these employ now. 11 Nobilibusque trahunt, a cincto Corde, venenum, Succis et Gemmis, et quae generosa, Ministrant Ars, et Natura, instillant. They use cordials to keep the venom and malignity of the disease from the heart. Whence can we take a better argument, a clearer demonstration, that all the greatness of this world is built upon opinion of others, and hath in itself no real being, nor power of subsistence, than from the Heart of man? It is always in action and motion, still busy, still pretending to do all, to furnish all the powers and faculties with all that they have; But if an enemy dare rise up against it, it is the soonest endangered, the soonest defeated of any part. The brain will hold out longer than it, and the liver longer than that - they will endure a siege; but an unnatural heat, a rebellious heat, will blow up the heart, like a mine, in a minute. But, howsoever, since the heart hath the birthright and primogeniture, and that it is nature's eldest son in us, the part which is first born to life in man, and that the other parts, as younger brethren and servants in this family, have a dependence upon it, it is reason that the principal care be had of it, though it be not the strongest part; as the eldest is oftentimes not the strongest of the family. And since the brain and liver and heart hold not a triumvirate in Man - a sovereignty equally shed upon them all - for his well-being, as the four elements do for his very being, but the heart alone is in the principality, and in the throne as king, the rest as subjects (though in eminent place and office) must contribute to that, as children to their parents, as all persons to all kinds of superiors, though oftentimes those parents or those superiors be not of stronger parts than themselves that serve and obey them that are weaker; Neither doth this obligation fall upon us by second dictates of nature, by consequences and conclusions arising out of nature, or derived from nature by discourse (as many things bind us even by the law of nature, and yet not by the primary law of nature; as all laws of property in that which we possess are of the law of nature, which law is To give every one his own, and yet in the primary law of nature there was no property, no meum and tuum, but an universal community over all; So the obedience of superiors is of the law of nature, and yet in the primary law of nature there was no superiority, no magistracy); but this contribution of assistance of all to the sovereign, of all parts to the heart, is from the very first dictates of nature; which is, in the first place, to have care of our own preservation, to look first to ourselves; for therefore doth the physician intermit the present care of brain or liver because there is a possibility that they may subsist, though there be not a present and a particular care had of them, but there is no possibility that they can subsist if the heart perish: and so, when we seem to begin with others in such assistances, indeed we do begin with ourselves, and we ourselves are principally in our contemplation; and so all these officious and mutual assistances are but complements towards others, and our true end is ourselves. And this is the reward of the pains of kings: sometimes they need the power of law, to be obeyed; and when they seem to be obeyed voluntarily, they who do it, do it for their own sakes. O how little a thing is all the greatness of man, and through how false glasses doth he make shift to multiply it and magnify it to himself! And yet this is also another misery of this king of man, the heart, which is also applyable to the kings of this world - great men - that the venom and poison of every pestilential disease directs itself to the heart, affects that (pernicious affection), and the malignity of ill men is also directed upon the greatest and the best; and not only greatness, but goodness loses the vigour of being an antidote or cordial against it. And, as the noblest and most generous cordials that nature or art afford, or can prepare, if they be often taken and made familiar, become no cordials, nor have any extraordinary operation, so the greatest cordial of the heart, patience, if it be much exercised, exalts the venom and the malignity of the enemy, and the more we suffer, the more we are insulted upon. When God had made this Earth of nothing, it was but a little help that he had to make other things of this earth: nothing can be nearer nothing than this Earth; and yet how little of this Earth is the greatest man! He thinks he treads upon the earth, that all is under his feet, and the brain that thinks so is but earth; his highest region, the flesh that covers that, is but earth; and even the top of that, that wherein so many Absolons take so much pride, is but a bush growing upon that turf of earth. How little of the world is the earth! and yet that is all that Man hath, or is. How little of a man is the heart, and yet it is all by which he is; and this continually subject not only to foreign poisons conveyed by others, but to intestine poisons bred in ourselves by pestilential sicknesses. O who, if before he had a being he could have sense of this misery, would buy a being here upon these conditions? 12 Spirante Columba Supposita pedibus, Revocantur ad ima vapores. They apply pigeons to draw the vapours from the head. What will not kill a man if a vapour will? How great an elephant how small a mouse destroys! To die by a bullet is the soldier's daily bread; but few men die by hailshot: A man is more worth than to be sold for single money; a life to be valued above a trifle. If this were a violent shaking of the air by thunder or by canon, in that case the air is condensed above the thickness of water, of water baked into ice, almost petrified, almost made stone, and no wonder that kills; but that that which is but a vapour, and a vapour not forced, but breathed, should kill, that our nurse should overlay us, and air that nourishes us should destroy us, but that it is a half atheism to murmur against Nature, who is God's immediate commissioner, who would not think himself miserable to be put into the hands of Nature, who does not only set him up for a mark for others to shoot at, but delights herself to blow him up like a glass, till she see him break, even with her own breath? Nay, if this infectious vapour were sought for, or travelled to, as Pliny hunted after the vapour of Etna, and dared and challenged death, in the form of a vapour, to do his worst, and felt the worst, he died; or if this vapour were met withal in an ambush, and we surprised with it, out of a long-shut well, or out of a new-opened mine, who would lament, who would accuse, when we had nothing to accuse, none to lament against but fortune, who is less than a vapour: But when ourselves are the well that breathes out this exhalation, the oven that spits out this fiery smoke, the mine that spews out this suffocating and strangling damp, who can ever after this aggravate his sorrow by this circumstance, That it was his neighbour, his familiar friend, his brother, that destroyed him, and destroyed him with a whispering and a calumniating breath, when we ourselves do it to ourselves by the same means, kill ourselves with our own vapours? Or if these occasions of this self-destruction had any contribution from our own wills, any assistance from our own intentions, nay, from our own errors, we might divide the rebuke, and chide ourselves as much as them. Fevers upon wilful distempers of drink and surfeits, consumptions upon intemperances and licentiousness, madness upon misplacing or overbending our natural faculties, proceed from ourselves, and so as that ourselves are in the plot, and we are not only passive but active, too, to our own destruction; But what have I done, either to breed or to breathe these vapours? They tell me it is my melancholy - did I infuse, did I drink in melancholy into myself? It is my thoughtfulness - was I not made to think? It is my study - doth not my calling call for that? I have done nothing wilfully, perversely, toward it, yet must suffer in it, die by it; There are too many examples of men that have been their own executioners, and that have made hard shift to be so; some have always had poison about them, in a hollow ring upon their finger, and some in their pen that they used to write with: some have beat out their brains at the wall of their prison, and some have eat the fire out of their chimneys: and one is said to have come nearer our case than so, to have strangled himself, though his hands were bound, by crushing his throat between his knees; But I do nothing upon myself, and yet am mine own executioner. And we have heard of death upon small occasions, and by scornful instruments: a pin, a comb, a hair pulled hath gangrened and killed; But when I have said a vapour, if I were asked again what is a vapour, I could not tell, it is so insensible a thing; so near nothing is that that reduces us to nothing. But extend this vapour, rarefy it, from so narrow a room as our natural bodies to any politic body, to a state. That which is fume in us is, in a state, rumour, and these vapours in us, which we consider here pestilent and infectious fumes, are, in a state, infectious rumours, detracting and dishonourable calumnies, libels. The heart in that body is the king; and the brain his counsel; and the whole magistracy, that ties all together, is the sinews, which proceed from thence; and the life of all is honour, and just respect, and due reverence; and therefore, when these vapours, these venomous rumours, are directed against these noble parts, the whole body suffers. But yet, for all their privileges, they are not privileged from our misery; that as the vapours most pernicious to us arise in our own bodies, so do the most dishonourable rumours, and those that wound a state most arise at home. What ill air that I could have met in the street, what channel, what shambles, what dunghill, what vault, could have hurt me so much as these home-bred vapours? What fugitive, what alms-man of any foreign state, can do so much harm as a detractor, a libeller, a scornful jester at home? For, as they that write of poisons and of creatures naturally disposed to the ruin of Man do as well mention the flea as the viper, because the flea, though he kill none, he does all the harm he can, so even these libellous and licentious jesters utter the venom they have; though sometimes virtue, and always power, be a good pigeon to draw this vapour from the head, and from doing any deadly harm there. 13 Ingeniumque malum, numeroso stigmate, fassus Pellitur ad pectus, Morbique Suburbia, Morbus. The sickness declares the infection and malignity thereof by spots. We say that the world is made of sea and land, as though they were equal; but we know that there is more sea in the western than in the eastern hemisphere: We say that the firmament is full of stars, as though it were equally full; but we know that there are more stars under the northern than under the southern pole. We say the elements of man are misery and happiness, as though he had an equal proportion of both, and the days of man vicissitudinary, as though he had as many good days as ill, and that he lived under a perpetual equinoctial night and day equal, good and ill fortune in the same measure. But it is far from that; he drinks misery, and he tastes happiness; he mows misery, and he gleans happiness; he journeys in misery, he does but walk in happiness; and which is worst, his misery is positive and dogmatical, his happiness is but disputable and problematical; All men call misery Misery, but happiness changes the name by the taste of man. In this accident that befalls me now, that this sickness declares itself by spots to be a malignant and pestilential disease, if there be a comfort in the declaration, That thereby the physicians see more clearly what to do, there may be as much discomfort in this, That the malignity may be so great as that all that they can do shall do nothing. That an enemy declares himself, then, when he is able to subsist, and to pursue, and to achieve his ends, is no great comfort. In intestine conspiracies, voluntary confessions do more good than confessions upon the rack; in these infections, when Nature herself confesses, and cries out by these outward declarations which she is able to put forth of herself, they minister comfort; but when all is by strength of cordials, it is but a confession upon the rack, by which, though we come to know the malice of that man, yet we do not know whether there be not as much malice in his heart then as before his confession; we are sure of his treason, but not of his repentance; sure of him, but not of his 'complices. It is a faint comfort to know the worst when the worst is remediless; and a weaker than that to know much ill, and not to know that that is the worst. A woman is comforted with the birth of her son, her body is eased of a burthen; but if she could prophetically read his history, how ill a man, perchance how ill a son, he would prove, she should receive a greater burthen into her mind. Scarce any purchase that is not clogged with secret encumbrances; scarce any happiness that hath not in it so much of the nature of false and base money as that the alloy is more than the metal. Nay, is it not so, (at least much towards it) even in the exercise of virtues? I must be poor, and want, before I can exercise the virtue of gratitude; miserable, and in torment, before I can exercise the virtue of patience; How deep do we dig, and for how coarse gold? And what other touchstone have we of our gold but comparison? Whether we be as happy as others, or as ourselves at other times; O poor step toward being well, when these spots do only tell us that we are worse than we were sure of before. 14 Idque notant Criticis, Medici evenisse Diebus. The physicians observe these accidents to have fallen upon the critical days. I would not make Man worse than he is, nor his condition more miserable than it is. But could I though I would? As a man cannot flatter God, nor overpraise him, so a man cannot injure Man, nor undervalue him. Thus much must necessarily be presented to his remembrance, that those false happinesses which he hath in this world have their times and their seasons and their critical days, and they are judged and denominated according to the times when they befall us. What poor elements are our happinesses made of, if time - time which we can scarce consider to be anything - be an essential part of our happiness! All things are done in some place; but if we consider place to be no more but the next hollow superficies of the air, alas, how thin and fluid a thing is air, and how thin a film is a superficies, and a superficies of air! All things are done in time too; but if we consider time to be but the measure of motion, and howsoever it may seem to have three stations - past, present, and future - yet the first and last of these are not (one is not now, and the other is not yet), and that which you call present is not now the same that it was when you began to call it so in this line (before you sound that word present or that monosyllable now the Present and the Now is past), if this imaginary half nothing, time, be of the essence of our happinesses, how can they be thought durable? Time is not so; How can they be thought to be? Time is not so; not so, considered in any of the parts thereof. If we consider eternity, into that time never entered; eternity is not an everlasting flux of time; but time is a short parenthesis in a long period; and eternity had been the same as it is though time had never been; If we consider not eternity, but perpetuity, not that which had no time to begin in, but which shall outlive time, and be when time shall be no more, what a minute is the life of the durablest creature compared to that! And what a minute is Man's life in respect of the sun's, or of a tree! and yet how little of our life is occasion, opportunity, to receive good in; and how little of that occasion do we apprehend and lay hold of! How busy and perplexed a cobweb is the happiness of Man here, that must be made up with a watchfulness to lay hold upon occasion, which is but a little piece of that which is nothing, time! And yet the best things are nothing without that. Honours, pleasures, possessions, presented to us out of time, in our decrepit and distasted and unapprehensive age, lose their office, and lose their name; They are not honours to us that shall never appear, nor come abroad into the eyes of the people, to receive honour from them who give it: Nor pleasures to us who have lost our sense to taste them; nor possessions to us who are departing from the possession of them. Youth is their critical day; that judges them, that denominates them, that inanimates and informs them, and makes them honours and pleasures and possessions; and when they come in an unapprehensive age, they come as a cordial when the bell rings out as a pardon when the head is off. We rejoice in the comfort of fire, but does any man cleave to it at midsummer; We are glad of the freshness and coolness of a vault, but does any man keep his Christmas there; or are the pleasures of the spring acceptable in autumn? If happiness be in the season, or in the climate, how much happier then are birds than men, who can change the climate, and accompany and enjoy the same season ever. 15 Interea insomnes noctes Ego duco, Diesque. I sleep not day nor night. Natural men have conceived a twofold use of sleep: That it is a refreshing of the body in this life; That it is a preparing of the soul for the next; That it is a feast, and it is the grace at that feast; That it is our recreation and cheers us, and it is our catechism and instructs us; we lie down in a hope that we shall rise the stronger; and we lie down in a knowledge that we may rise no more. Sleep is an opiate which gives us rest, but such an opiate as, perchance, being under it, we shall wake no more. But though natural men, who have induced secondary and figurative considerations, have found out this second, this emblematical use of sleep, that it should be a representation of death, God, who wrought and perfected his work before Nature began (for Nature was but his apprentice, to learn in the first seven days, and now is his foreman, and works next under him), God, I say, intended sleep only for the refreshing of man by bodily rest, and not for a figure of death, for he intended not death itself then. But Man having induced death upon himself, God hath taken Man's creature, death, into his hand, and mended it; and whereas it hath in itself a fearful form and aspect, so that Man is afraid of his own creature, God presents it to him in a familiar, in an assiduous, in an agreeable and acceptable form, in sleep, that so when he awakes from sleep and says to himself, Shall I be no otherwise when I am dead than I was even now when I was asleep, he may be ashamed of his waking dreams and of his melancholic fancying-out a horrid and an affrightful figure of that death which is so like sleep. As, then, we need sleep to live out our threescore and ten years, so we need death to live that life which we cannot outlive. And as death being our enemy, God allows us to defend ourselves against it (for we victual ourselves against death twice every day, as often as we eat); so, God having so sweetened death unto us as he hath in sleep, we put ourselves into our enemy's hands once every day, - so far as sleep is death, and sleep is as much death as meat is life. This, then, is the misery of my sickness, That death, as it is produced from me and is mine own creature, is now before mine eyes; but in that form in which God hath mollified it to us and made it acceptable, in sleep, I cannot see it. How many prisoners, who have even hollowed themselves their graves upon that earth on which they have lain long under heavy fetters, yet at this hour are asleep, though they be yet working upon their own graves by their own weight! He that hath seen his friend die today, or knows he shall see it tomorrow, yet will sink into a sleep between. I cannot; and oh, if I be entering now into eternity, where there shall be no more distinction of hours, why is it all my business now to tell clocks? why is none of the heaviness of my heart dispensed into mine eyelids, that they might fall as my heart doth? And why, since I have lost my delight in all objects, cannot I discontinue the faculty of seeing them by closing mine eyes in sleep? But why rather, being entering into that presence where I shall wake continually and never sleep more, do I not interpret my continual waking here to be a parasceve and a preparation to that? 16 Et properare meum clamant, e Turre propinqua, Obstreperae Campanae aliorum in funere, funus. From the bells of the church adjoining, I am daily remembered of my burial in the funerals of others. We have a convenient author who writ a Discourse of Bells when he was prisoner in Turkey. How would he have enlarged himself if he had been my fellow prisoner in this sickbed, so near to that steeple which never ceases no more than the harmony of the spheres, but is more heard. When the Turks took Constantinople, they melted the bells into ordnance; I have heard both bells and ordnance, but never been so much affected with those as with these bells. I have lain near a steeple in which there are said to be more than thirty bells; and near another where there is one so big as that the clapper is said to weigh more than six hundred pound, yet never so affected as here. Here the bells can scarce solemnise the funeral of any person but that I knew him, or knew that he was my neighbour: we dwelt in houses near to one another before, but now he is gone into that house into which I must follow him. There is a way of correcting the children of great persons, that other children are corrected in their behalf and in their names, and this works upon them who indeed had more deserved it. And when these bells tell me that now one and now another is buried, must not I acknowledge that they have the correction due to me, and paid the debt that I owe? There is a story of a bell in a monastery which, when any of the house was sick to death, rung always voluntarily, and they knew the inevitableness of the danger by that. It rung once when no man was sick; but the next day one of the house fell from the steeple and died, and the bell held the reputation of a prophet still. If these bells that warn to a funeral now were appropriated to none, may not I, by the hour of the funeral, supply? How many men that stand at an execution, if they would ask For what dies that man, should hear their own faults condemned, and see themselves executed by attorney? We scarce hear of any man preferred but we think of ourselves that we might very well have been that man; Why might not I have been that man that is carried to his grave now? Could I fit myself to stand or sit in any man's place, and not to lie in any man's grave? I may lack much of the good parts of the meanest, but I lack nothing of the mortality of the weakest; They may have acquired better abilities than I, but I was born to as many infirmities as they. To be an incumbent by lying down in a grave, to be a doctor by teaching mortification by example - by dying - though I may have seniors, others may be elder than I, yet I have proceeded apace in a good university and gone a great way in a little time by the furtherance of a vehement fever; and whomsoever these bells bring to the ground today, if he and I had been compared yesterday, perchance I should have been thought likelier to come to this preferment then than he. God hath kept the power of death in his own hands, lest any man should bribe death. If man knew the gain of death, the ease of death, he would solicit, he would provoke death to assist him, by any hand which he might use. But as when men see many of their own professions preferred, it ministers a hope that that may light upon them; so when these hourly bells tell me of so many funerals of men like me, it presents, if not a desire that it may, yet a comfort whensoever mine shall come. 17 Nunc lento sonitu dicunt, Morieris. Now, this bell tolling softly for another says to me, Thou must die. Perchance he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill as that he knows not it tolls for him; And perchance I may think myself so much better than I am as that they who are about me, and see my state, may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that. The church is catholic, universal, so are all her actions; All that she does belongs to all. When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to that Head which is my Head too, and engraffed into that body whereof I am a member. And when she buries a man, that action concerns me: All mankind is of one Author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated. God employs several translators: some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation; and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that Library where every book shall lie open to one another: As, therefore, the bell that rings to a sermon calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come; so this bell calls us all: but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness. There was a contention as far as a suit (in which both piety and dignity, religion and estimation were mingled) which of the religious orders should ring to prayers first in the morning; and it was determined that they should ring first that rose earliest. If we understand aright the dignity of this bell that tolls for our evening prayer, we would be glad to make it ours by rising early, in that application that it might be ours as well as his whose indeed it is. The bell doth toll for him that thinks it doth; and though it intermit again, yet from that minute that that occasion wrought upon him, he is united to God. Who casts not up his eye to the sun when it rises? but who takes off his eye from a comet when that breaks out? Who bends not his ear to any bell which upon any occasion rings? but who can remove it from that bell which is passing a piece of himself out of this world? No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls - It tolls for thee. Neither can we call this a begging of misery or a borrowing of misery - as though we were not miserable enough of ourselves, but must fetch in more from the next house - in taking upon us the misery of our neighbours. Truly it were an excusable covetousness if we did; for affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it. No man hath affliction enough that is not matured and ripened by it, and made fit for God by that affliction. If a man carry treasure in bullion, or in a wedge of gold, and have none coined into current monies, his treasure will not defray him as he travels. Tribulation is treasure in the nature of it, but it is not current money in the use of it, except we get nearer and nearer our home, Heaven, by it. Another man may be sick, too, and sick to death, and this affliction may lie in his bowels, as gold in a mine, and be of no use to him; but this bell that tells me of his affliction digs out and applies that gold to me if, by this consideration of another's danger, I take mine own into contemplation, and so secure myself, by making my recourse to my God, who is our only security. At inde 18 Mortuus es, Sonitu celeri, pulsuque agitato. The bell rings out and tells me, in him, that I am dead. The bell rings out; the pulse thereof is changed; the tolling was a faint and intermitting pulse upon one side; this stronger, and argues more and better life. His soul is gone out; and, as a man who had a lease of 1000 years after the expiration of a short one, or an inheritance after the life of a man in a consumption, he is now entered into the possession of his better estate. His soul is gone; whither? Who saw it come in, or who saw it go out? Nobody; yet everybody is sure he had one, and hath none. If I will ask mere philosophers what the soul is, I shall find, amongst them that will tell me, it is nothing but the temperament and harmony and just and equal composition of the elements in the body, which produces all those faculties which we ascribe to the soul; and so, in itself is nothing, no separable substance that overlives the body. They see the soul is nothing else in other creatures, and they affect an impious humility to think as low of man. But if my soul were no more than the soul of a beast, I could not think so; that soul that can reflect upon itself, consider itself, is more than so. If I will ask not mere philosophers, but mixed men, philosophical divines, how the soul, being a separate substance, enters into Man, I shall find some that will tell me that it is by generation and procreation from parents, because they think it hard to charge the soul with the guiltiness of original sin if the soul were infused into a body in which it must necessarily grow foul and contract original sin whether it will or no; and I shall find some that will tell me that it is by immediate infusion from God, because they think it hard to maintain an immortality in such a soul as should be begotten and derived with the body from mortal parents. If I will ask not a few men, but almost whole bodies, whole churches, what becomes of the souls of the righteous at the departing thereof from the body, I shall be told by some that they attend an expiation, a purification, in a place of torment; by some, that they attend the fruition of the sight of God in a place of rest, but yet but of expectation; By some, that they pass to an immediate possession of the presence of God. Saint Augustine studied the nature of the soul as much as anything but the salvation of the soul; and he sent an express messenger to Saint Jerome to consult of some things concerning the soul: But he satisfies himself with this: Let the departure of my soul to salvation be evident to my faith, and I care the less how dark the entrance of my soul into my body be to my reason. It is the going out more than the coming in that concerns us. This soul, this bell tells me, is gone out; Whither? Who shall tell me that? I know not who it is; much less what he was; The condition of the man and the course of his life, which should tell me whither he is gone, I know not. I was not there in his sickness, nor at his death; I saw not his way nor his end, nor can ask them who did, thereby to conclude or argue whither he is gone. But yet I have one nearer me than all these - mine own charity; I ask that; and that tells me He is gone to everlasting rest and joy and glory: I owe him a good opinion; it is but thankful charity in me, because I received benefit and instruction from him when his bell tolled: and I, being made the fitter to pray by that disposition wherein I was assisted by his occasion, did pray for him; and I pray not without faith; so I do charitably, so I do faithfully believe that that soul is gone to everlasting rest and joy and glory. But for the body, how poor a wretched thing is that? we cannot express it so fast as it grows worse and worse. That body which scarce three minutes since was such a house as that that soul, which made but one step from thence to Heaven, was scarce thoroughly content to leave that for Heaven: that body hath lost the name of a dwelling-house, because none dwells in it, and is making haste to lose the name of a body, and dissolve to putrefaction. Who would not be affected to see a clear and sweet river in the morning grow a kennel of muddy land-water by noon, and condemned to the saltness of the sea by night? And how lame a picture, how faint a representation, is that of the precipitation of man's body to dissolution! Now all the parts built up and knit by a lovely soul, now but a statue of clay, and now these limbs melted off as if that clay were but snow; and now the whole house is but a handful of sand, so much dust, and but a peck of rubbish, so much bone. If he who, as this bell tells me is gone now, were some excellent artificer, who comes to him for a clock or for a garment now? or for counsel, if he were a lawyer? If a magistrate, for justice? Man, before he hath his immortal soul, hath a soul of sense, and a soul of vegetation before that: This immortal soul did not forbid other souls to be in us before, but when this soul departs, it carries all with it; no more vegetation, no more sense: such a mother-in-law is the Earth in respect of our natural mother; in her womb we grew; and when she was delivered of us, we were planted in some place, in some calling, in the world; In the womb of the Earth we diminish, and when she is delivered of us, our grave opened for another, we are not transplanted, but transported, our dust blown away with profane dust with every wind. 19 Oceano tandem emenso, aspicienda resurgit Terra; vident, justis, medici, jam cocta mederi se posse, indiciis. At last the physicians, after a long and stormy voyage, see land; They have so good signs of the concoction of the disease as that they may safely proceed to purge. 19 All this while the physicians themselves have been patients, patiently attending when they should see any land in this sea, any earth, any cloud, any indication of concoction in these waters. Any disorder of mine, any pretermission of theirs, exalts the disease, accelerates the rages of it; no diligence accelerates the concoction, the maturity of the disease; they must stay till the season of the sickness come, and till it be ripened of itself, and then they may put-to their hand to gather it before it fall off, but they cannot hasten the ripening. Why should we look for it in a disease, which is the disorder, the discord, the irregularity, the commotion and rebellion of the body? It were scarce a disease if it could be ordered and made obedient to our times. Why should we look for that in disorder, in a disease, when we cannot have it in Nature, who is so regular and so pregnant, so forward to bring her work to perfection and to light? Yet we cannot awake the July flowers in January, nor retard the flowers of the spring to autumn. We cannot bid the fruits come in May, nor the leaves to stick on in December. A woman that is weak cannot put off her ninth month to a tenth for her delivery, and say she will stay till she be stronger; nor a queen cannot hasten it to a seventh, that she may be ready for some other pleasure. Nature (if we look for durable and vigorous effects) will not admit preventions nor anticipations nor obligations upon her; for they are pre-contracts, and she will be left to her liberty. Nature would not be spurred, nor forced to mend her pace; nor Power - the Power of Man; Greatness loves not that kind of violence neither. There are of them that will give, that will do justice, that will pardon, but they have their own seasons for all these, and he that knows not them shall starve before that gift come, and ruin before the justice, and die before the pardon save him: some tree bears no fruit except much dung be laid about it; and justice comes not from some till they be richly manured: some trees require much visiting, much watering, much labour; and some men give not their fruits but upon importunity; some trees require incision and pruning and lopping; some men must be intimidated and syndicated with commissions before they will deliver the fruits of justice; some trees require the early and the often access of the sun; some men open not but upon the favours and letters of Court mediation; some trees must be housed and kept within doors; some men lock up not only their liberality but their justice and their compassion till the solicitation of a wife or a son or a friend or a servant turn the key. Reward is the season of one man and importunity of another; fear the season of one man and favour of another; friendship the season of one man and natural affection of another; and he that knows not their seasons, nor cannot stay them, must lose the fruits; As Nature will not, so Power and Greatness will not be put to change their seasons; and shall we look for this indulgence in a disease, or think to shake it off before it be ripe? All this while, therefore, we are but upon a defensive war, and that is but a doubtful state; especially where they who are besieged do know the best of their defences and do not know the worst of their enemy's power; when they cannot mend their works within, and the enemy can increase his numbers without. O how many far more miserable, and far more worthy to be less miserable, than I are besieged with this sickness and lack their sentinels, their physicians, to watch, and lack their munition, their cordials, to defend, and perish before the enemy's weakness might invite them to sally, before the disease show any declination or admit any way of working upon itself! In me the siege is so far slackened as that we may come to fight, and so die in the field (if I die) and not in a prison. 20 Id agunt. Upon these indications of digested matter they proceed to purge. Though counsel seem rather to consist of spiritual parts than action, yet action is the spirit and the soul of counsel. Counsels are not always determined in resolutions; we cannot always say This was concluded; Actions are always determined in effects; we can say This was done. Then have laws their reverence and their majesty when we see the judge upon the bench executing them. Then have counsels of war their impressions and their operations when we see the seal of an army set to them. It was an ancient way of celebrating the memory of such as deserved well of the state to afford them that kind of statuary representation which was then called Hermes; which was the head and shoulders of a man, standing upon a cube; but those shoulders were without arms and hands. All together it figured a constant supporter of the state by his counsel: But in this hieroglyphic, which they made without hands, they pass their consideration no farther but that the counsellor should be without hands so far as not to reach out his hand to foreign temptations of bribes, in matters of counsel, and that it was not necessary that the head should employ his own hand; that the same men should serve in the execution which assisted in the counsel; but that there should not belong hands to every head, action to every counsel, was never intended, so much as in figure and representation. For, as matrimony is scarce to be called matrimony where there is a resolution against the fruits of matrimony, against the having of children, so counsels are not counsels, but illusions, where there is from the beginning no purpose to execute the determinations of those counsels. The arts and sciences are most properly referred to the head; that is their proper element and sphere; but yet the art of proving, logic, and the art of persuading, rhetoric, are deduced to the hand, and that expressed by a hand contracted into a fist, and this by a hand enlarged and expanded; and evermore the power of man and the power of God himself is expressed so, All things are in his hand; neither is God so often presented to us by names that carry our consideration upon counsel, as upon execution of counsel; he is oftener called the Lord of Hosts than by all other names that may be referred to the other signification. Hereby, therefore, we take into our meditation the slippery condition of Man, whose happiness, in any kind, the defect of any one thing conducing to that happiness may ruin; but it must have all the pieces to make it up. Without counsel I had not got thus far; without action and practise I should go no farther towards health. But what is the present necessary action? - purging: a withdrawing, a violating of Nature, a farther weakening: O dear price! and O strange way of addition, to do it by subtractions; of restoring Nature to violate Nature; of providing strength by increasing weakness! Was I not sick before? And is it a question of comfort to be asked now Did your physic make you sick? Was that it that my physic promised, to make me sick? This is another step upon which we may stand and see farther into the misery of man, the time, the season of his misery; It must be done now: O over-cunning, over-watchful, over-diligent, and over-sociable misery of man, that seldom comes alone, but then when it may accompany other miseries, and so put one another into the higher exaltation and better heart! I am ground even to an attenuation, and must proceed to evacuation, all ways to exinanition and annihilation. 21 Atque annuit Ille, Qui, per eos, clamat, Linquas jam, Lazare, lectum. God prospers their practise, and he, by them, calls Lazarus out of his tomb, me out of my bed. If man had been left alone in this world at first, shall I think that he would not have fallen? If there had been no woman, would not man have served to have been his own tempter? When I see him now, subject to infinite weaknesses, fall into infinite sin without any foreign temptations, shall I think he would have had none if he had been alone? God saw that Man needed a helper if he should be well; but to make woman ill the Devil saw that there needed no third. When God and we were alone in Adam, that was not enough; when the Devil and we were alone in Eve, it was enough. O what a giant is Man when he fights against himself, and what a dwarf when he needs or exercises his own assistance for himself! I cannot rise out of my bed till the physician enable me, nay, I cannot tell that I am able to rise till he tell me so. I do nothing, I know nothing of myself: how little and how impotent a piece of the world is any man alone! and how much less a piece of himself is that man! So little, as that when it falls out (as it falls out in some cases) that more misery and more oppression would be an ease to a man, he cannot give himself that miserable addition of more misery; a man that is pressed to death, and might be eased by more weights, cannot lay those more weights upon himself: He can sin alone, and suffer alone, but not repent, not be absolved, without another. Another tells me, I may rise; and I do so. But is every raising a preferment? or is every present preferment a station? I am readier to fall to the earth now I am up than I was when I lay in the bed: O perverse way, irregular motion of Man; even rising itself is the way to ruin. How many men are raised, and then do not fill the place they are raised to? No corner of any place can be empty; there can be no vacuity; If that man do not fill the place, other men will; complaints of his insufficiency will fill it; Nay, such an abhorring is there in Nature of vacuity that if there be but an imagination of not filling in any man, that which is but imagination neither will fill it, that is, rumour and voice, and it will be given out (upon no ground but imagination, and no man knows whose imagination) that he is corrupt in his place, or insufficient in his place, and another prepared to succeed him in his place. A man rises, sometimes, and stands not, because he doth not, or is not, believed to fill his place; and sometimes he stands not because he overfills his place: He may bring so much virtue, so much justice, so much integrity to the place as shall spoil the place, burthen the place; his integrity may be a libel upon his predecessor, and cast an infamy upon him, and a burthen upon his successor to proceed by example, and to bring the place itself to an undervalue, and the market to an uncertainty. I am up, and I seem to stand, and I go round; and I am a new argument of the new philosophy That the Earth moves round; why may I not believe that the whole Earth moves in a round motion, though that seem to me to stand, whenas I seem to stand to my company, and yet am carried in a giddy and circular motion as I stand? Man hath no centre but misery; there and only there he is fixed and sure to find himself. How little soever he be raised, he moves and moves in a circle, giddily; and, as in the heavens there are but a few circles that go about the whole world, but many epicircles and other lesser circles, but yet circles, so of those men which are raised and put into circles, few of them move from place to place and pass through many and beneficial places, but fall into little circles, and, within a step or two, are at their end, and not so well as they were in the centre from which they were raised. Every thing serves to exemplify, to illustrate Man's misery. But I need go no farther than myself: for a long time I was not able to rise; At last, I must be raised by others; and now I am up, I am ready to sink lower than before. 22 Sit morbi fomes tibi cura; The physicians consider the root and occasion, the embers, and coals, and fuel of the disease, and seek to purge or correct that. How ruinous a farm hath man taken in taking himself! How ready is the house every day to fall down, and how is all the ground overspread with weeds, all the body with diseases! where not only every turf, but every stone bears weeds; not only every muscle of the flesh, but every bone of the body hath some infirmity; every little flint upon the face of this soil hath some infectious weed, every tooth in our head such a pain as a constant man is afraid of, and yet ashamed of that fear, of that sense of the pain. How dear and how often a rent doth Man pay for this farm! he pays twice a day, in double meals, and how little time he hath to raise his rent! How many holidays to call him from his labour! Every day is half-holiday, half spent in sleep. What reparations and subsidies and contributions he is put to besides his rent! What medicines besides his diet! and what inmates he is fain to take in besides his own family, what infectious diseases from other men! Adam might have had Paradise for dressing and keeping it; and then his rent was not improved to such a labour as would have made his brow sweat; and yet he gave it over; how far greater a rent do we pay for this farm, this body, who pay ourselves, who pay the farm itself, and cannot live upon it! Neither is our labour at an end when we have cut down some weed as soon as it sprung up, corrected some violent and dangerous accident of a disease which would have destroyed speedily; nor when we have pulled up that weed from the very root, recovered entirely and soundly from that particular disease; but the whole ground is of an ill nature, the whole soil ill disposed; there are inclinations, there is a propenseness to diseases in the body, out of which, without any other disorder, diseases will grow, and so we are put to a continual labour upon this farm, to a continual study of the whole complexion and constitution of our body. In the distempers and diseases of soils, sourness, dryness, weeping, any kind of barrenness, the remedy and the physic is, for a great part, sometimes in themselves; sometimes the very situation relieves them; the hanger of a hill will purge and vent his own malignant moisture; and the burning of the upper turf of some ground (as health from cauterizing) puts a new and a vigorous youth into that soil, and there rises a kind of Phoenix out of the ashes, a fruitfulness out of that which was barren before, and by that which is the barrennest of all, ashes. And where the ground cannot give itself physic, yet it receives physic from other grounds, from other soils, which are not the worse for having contributed that help to them, from marl in other hills, or from slimy sand in other shores: grounds help themselves, or hurt not other grounds from whence they receive help. But I have taken a farm at this hard rent, and upon those heavy covenants, that it can afford itself no help; (no part of my body, if it were cut off, would cure another part; in some cases it might preserve a sound part, but in no case recover an infected) and, if my body may have any physic, any medicine from another body - one man from the flesh of another man (as by Mummy, or any such composition) - it must be from a man that is dead, and not as in other soils which are never the worse for contributing their marl or their fat slime to my ground. There is nothing in the same man to help man, nothing in Mankind to help one another (in this sort, by way of physic) but that he who ministers the help is in as ill case as he that receives it would have been if he had not had it; for he from whose body the physic comes is dead. When, therefore, I took this farm, undertook this body, I undertook to drain not a marsh, but a moat, where there was not water mingled to offend, but all was water; I undertook to perfume dung, where no one part, but all was equally unsavoury; I undertook to make such a thing wholesome as was not poison by any manifest quality, intense heat, or cold, but poison in the whole substance, and in the specific form of it. To cure the sharp accidents of diseases is a great work; to cure the disease itself is a greater; but to cure the body, the root, the occasion of diseases, is a work reserved for the great Physician, which he doth never any other way but by glorifying these bodies in the next world. 23 Metusque, relabi. They warn me of the fearful danger of relapsing. It is not in Man's body, as it is in the city, that when the bell hath rung to cover your fire and rake up the embers, you may lie down and sleep without fear. Though you have by physic and diet raked up the embers of your disease, still there is a fear of a relapse; and the greater danger is in that. Even in pleasures and in pains there is a propriety, a Meum and Tuum; and a man is most affected with that pleasure which is his, his by former enjoying and experience, and most intimidated with those pains which are his, his by a woeful sense of them in former afflictions. A covetous person, who hath preoccupated all his senses, filled all his capacities, with the delight of gathering, wonders how any man can have any taste of any pleasure in any openness or liberality; So also in bodily pains, in a fit of the stone the patient wonders why any man should call the gout a pain: And he that hath felt neither, but the toothache, is as much afraid of a fit of that as either of the other of either of the other. Diseases which we never felt in ourselves come but to a compassion of others that have endured them; Nay, compassion itself comes to no great degree if we have not felt in some proportion in ourselves that which we lament and condole in another. But when we have had those torments in their exaltation ourselves, we tremble at a relapse. When we must pant through all those fiery heats and sail though all those overflowing sweats, when we must watch through all those long nights and mourn through all those long days (days and nights so long as that Nature herself shall seem to be perverted, and to have put the longest day and the longest night, which should be six months asunder, into one natural unnatural day), when we must stand at the same bar, expect the return of physicians from their consultations, and not be sure of the same verdict in any good indications, when we must go the same way over again, and not see the same issue, this is a state, a condition, a calamity, in respect of which any other sickness were a convalescence, and any greater, less. It adds to the affliction that relapses are (and for the most part justly) imputed to ourselves, as occasioned by some disorder in us; and so we are not only passive, but active in our own ruin; we do not only stand under a falling house, but pull it down upon us; and we are not only executed (that implies guiltiness), but we are executioners (that implies dishonour), and executioners of ourselves (and that implies impiety). And we fall from that comfort which we might have in our first sickness, from that meditation - alas, how generally miserable is Man, and how subject to diseases, (for in that it is some degree of comfort that we are but in the state common to all) - we fall, I say, to this discomfort and self-accusing and self- condemning; Alas, how unprovident, and in that how unthankful to God and his instruments, am I in making so ill use of so great benefits, in destroying so soon so long a work, in relapsing, by my disorder, to that from which they had delivered me; and so my meditation is fearfully transferred from the body to the mind, and from the consideration of the sickness to that sin, that sinful carelessness, by which I have occasioned my relapse. And amongst the many weights that aggravate a relapse, this also is one, that a relapse proceeds with a more violent dispatch and more irremediably because it finds the country weakened and depopulated before. Upon a sickness which as yet appears not we can scarce fix a fear, because we know not what to fear; but as fear is the busiest and irksomest affection, so is a relapse (which is still ready to come) into that which is but newly gone the nearest object, the most immediate exercise, of that affection of fear. Text Prepared for Studio Recording with James Fox (completed 6th May 1995; prepared by William Wallace)