SECTION VI.

Advantages of Sickness.

1. I CONSIDER One of the great felicities of heaven consists in an immunity from sin: then we shall love God without mixtures of malice: then we shall enjoy without envy; then we shall see fuller vessels running over with glory, and crowned with bigger circles: and this we shall behold without spilling from our eyes (those vessels of joy and grief) any sign of anger, trouble, or a repining spirit: our passions shall be pure, our charity without fear, our desire without lust, our possessions all our own; and all in the inheritance of Jesus, in the richest soil of God's eternal kingdom. Now half of this reason, which makes heaven so happy by being innocent, is also in the state of sickness, making the sorrows of old age smooth, and the groans of a sick heart apt to be joined to the music of angels; and, though they sound harsh to our untuned ears and discomposed organs, yet those accents must needs be in themselves excellent, which God loves to hear, and esteems them as prayers, and arguments of pity, instruments of mercy and grace, and preparatives to glory.

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

2. Next to this; the soul, by the help of sickness, knocks off the fetters of pride and vainer complacencies. Then she draws the curtains, and stops the light from coming in, and takes the pictures down, those fantastic images of self

love and gay remembrances of vain opinion, and popular noises. Then the spirit stoops into the sobrieties of humble thoughts, and feels corruption chiding the forwardness of fancy, and allaying the vapours of conceit and factious opinions. For humility is the soul's grave, into which she enters, not to die, but to meditate and inter some of its troublesome appendages. There she sees the dust, and feels the dishonours of the body, and reads the register of all its sad adherences; and then she lays by all her vain reflections, beating upon her crystal and pure mirror from the fancies of strength and beauty, and little decayed prettinesses of the body. And when, in sickness, we forget all our knotty discourses of philosophy, and a syllogism makes our head ache, and we feel our many and loud talkings served no lasting end of the soul, no purpose that now we must abide by, and that the body is like to descend to the land, where all things are forgotten; then she lays aside all her remembrances of applauses, all her ignorant confidences, and cares only to know "Christ Jesus and him crucified," to know him plainly, and with much heartiness and simplicity. And I cannot think this to be a contemptible advantage. For ever since man tempted himself by his impatient desires of knowing, and being as God, man thinks it the finest thing in the world to know much, and therefore is hugely apt to esteem himself better than his brethren, if he knows some little impertinences, and them imperfectly, and that with infinite uncertainty; but God hath been pleased with a rare art, to prevent the inconveniences apt to arise by this passionate longing after knowledge; even by giving to every man a sufficient opinion of his own understanding: and who is there in the world, that thinks himself to be a fool, or indeed not fit to govern his brother? There are but few men, but they think they are wise enough, and every man believes his own opinion the soundest; and, if it were otherwise, men would burst themselves with envy, or else become irrecoverable slaves to the talking and disputing man. But when God intended this permission to be an antidote of envy, and a satisfaction and allay to the troublesome appetites of knowing, and made, that this universal opinion, by making men in some proportions equal, should be a keeper out or a great restraint to slavery and tyranny respectively; man (for so he uses to do) hath turned this into bitterness: for when nature had made so just a distri

bution of understanding, that every man might think he had enough, he is not content with that, but will think he hath more than his brother; and whereas it might be well employed in restraining slavery, he hath used it to break off the bands of all obedience, and it ends in pride and schisms, in heresies and tyrannies; and it being a spiritual evil, it grows upon the soul with old age and flattery, with health and the supports of a prosperous fortune. Now, besides the direct operations of the Spirit and a powerful grace, there is, in nature, left to us no remedy for this evil but a sharp sickness, or an equal sorrow, and allay of fortune and then we are humble enough to ask counsel of a despised priest, and to think, that even a common sentence, from the mouth of an appointed comforter, streams forth more refreshment than all our own wiser and more reputed discourses: then our understandings and our bodies, peeping through their own breaches, see their shame and their dishonour, their dangerous follies and their huge deceptions; and they go into the clefts of the rock, and every little hand may cover them.

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

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

tues.

4. Sickness is, in some sense, eligible, because it is the opportunity and the proper scene of exercising some virIt is that agony in which men are tried for a crown. And if we remember what glorious things are spoken of the grace of faith, that it is the life of just men, the restitution of the dead in trespasses and sins, the justification of a sinner, the support of the weak, the confidence of the strong, the magazine of promises, and the title to very glorious rewards; we may easily imagine, that it must have in it a work and a difficulty, in some proportion answer

able to so great effects. But when we are bidden to believe strange propositions, we are put upon it when we cannot judge, and those propositions have possessed our discerning faculties, and have made a party there, and are become domestic, before they come to be disputed; and then the articles of faith are so few, and are made so credible, and, in their event and in their object, are so useful and gaining upon the affections, that he were a prodigy of man, and would be so esteemed, that should, in all our present circumstances, disbelieve any point of faith: and all is well as long as the sun shines, and the fair breath of heaven gently wafts us to our own purposes. But if you will try the excellency, and feel the work of faith, place the man in a persecution, let him ride in a storm, let his bones be broken with sorrow, and his eyelids loosened with sickness, let his bread be dipped in tears, and all the daughters of music be brought low; let God commence a quarrel against him, and be bitter in the accents of his anger or his discipline; then God tries your faith. Can you then trust his goodness; and believe him to be a father, when you groan under his rod? Can you rely upon all the strange propositions of Scripture, and be content to perish, if they be not true? Can you receive comfort in the discourses of death and heaven, of immortality and the resurrection, of the death of Christ and conforming to his sufferings? Truth is, there are but two great periods in which faith demonstrates itself to be a powerful and mighty grace and they are persecution and the approaches of death for the passive part, and a temptation for the active. In the days of pleasure and the night of pain, faith is to fight her agonisticon, to contend for mastery and faith overcomes all alluring and fond temptations to sin, and faith overcomes all our weaknesses and faintings in our troubles. By the faith of the promises we learn to despise the world, choosing those objects which faith discovers; and, by expectation of the same promises, we are com forted in all our sorrows, and enabled to look through and see beyond the cloud: but the vigour of it is pressed and called forth, when all our fine discourses come to be reduced to practice. For in our health and clearer days it is easy to talk of putting trust in God; we readily trust him for life, when we are in health; for provisions, when we have fair revenues; and for deliverance, when we are