Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions; Together with Death's Duel
and earth, between thee and us, they who have the commission, and charge
to guide us in all our ways,[110] they who hastened Lot,[111] and in
him, us, from places of danger and temptation, they who are appointed to
instruct and govern us in the church here,[112] they who are sent to
punish the disobedient and refractory,[113] that they are to be mowers
and harvestmen[114] after we are grown up in one field, the church, at
the day of judgment, they that are to carry our souls whither they
carried Lazarus,[115] they who attended at the several gates of the new
Jerusalem,[116] to admit us there; all these who administer to thy
servants, from the first to their last, are angels, angels in the
plural, in every service angels associated with angels. The power of a
single angel we see in that one, who in one night destroyed almost two
hundred thousand in Sennacherib's army,[117] yet thou often employest
many; as we know the power of salvation is abundantly in any one
evangelist, and yet thou hast afforded us four. Thy Son proclaims of
himself that _the Spirit hath anointed him to preach the Gospel_,[118]
yet he hath given others _for the perfecting of the saints in the work
of the ministry_.[119] Thou hast made him _Bishop of our souls_,[120]
but there are others bishops too. He gave the Holy Ghost,[121] and
others gave it also. Thy way, O my God (and, O my God, thou lovest to
walk in thine own ways, for they are large), thy way from the beginning,
is multiplication of thy helps; and therefore it were a degree of
ingratitude not to accept this mercy of affording me many helps for my
bodily health, as a type and earnest of thy gracious purpose now and
ever to afford me the same assistances. That for thy great help, thy
word, I may seek that not from comers nor conventicles nor schismatical
singularities, but from the association and communion of thy Catholic
church, and those persons whom thou hast always furnished that church
withal: and that I may associate thy word with thy sacrament, thy seal
with thy patent; and in that sacrament associate the sign with the thing
signified, the bread with the body of thy Son, so as I may be sure to
have received both, and to be made thereby (as thy blessed servant
Augustine says) the ark, and the monument, and the tomb of thy most
blessed Son, that he, and all the merits of his death, may, by that
receiving, be buried in me, to my quickening in this world, and my
immortal establishing in the next.
VII. PRAYER.
O eternal and most gracious God, who gavest to thy servants in the
wilderness thy manna, bread so conditioned, qualified so, as that to
every man manna tasted like that which that man liked best, I humbly
beseech thee to make this correction, which I acknowledge to be part of
my daily bread, to taste so to me, not as I would but as thou wouldst
have it taste, and to conform my taste, and make it agreeable to thy
will. Thou wouldst have thy corrections taste of humiliation, but thou
wouldst have them taste of consolation too; taste of danger, but taste
of assurance too. As therefore thou hast imprinted in all thine elements
of which our bodies consist two manifest qualities, so that as thy fire
dries, so it heats too; and as thy water moists, so it cools too; so, O
Lord, in these corrections which are the elements of our regeneration,
by which our souls are made thine, imprint thy two qualities, those two
operations, that, as they scourge us, they may scourge us into the way
to thee; that when they have showed us that we are nothing in ourselves,
they may also show us, that thou art all things unto us. When therefore
in this particular circumstance, O Lord (but none of thy judgments are
circumstances, they are all of all substance of thy good purpose upon
us), when in this particular, that he whom thou hast sent to assist me,
desires assistants to him, thou hast let me see in how few hours thou
canst throw me beyond the help of man, let me by the same light see that
no vehemence of sickness, no temptation of Satan, no guiltiness of sin,
no prison of death, not this first, this sick bed, not the other prison,
the close and dark grave, can remove me from the determined and good
purpose which thou hast sealed concerning me. Let me think no degree of
this thy correction casual, or without signification; but yet when I
have read it in that language, as a correction, let me translate it into
another, and read it as a mercy; and which of these is the original, and
which is the translation; whether thy mercy or thy correction were thy
primary and original intention in this sickness, I cannot conclude,
though death conclude me; for as it must necessarily appear to be a
correction, so I can have no greater argument of thy mercy, than to die
in thee and by that death to be united to him who died for me.
FOOTNOTES:
[99] 2 Sam. xviii. 25.
[100] So all but our translation takes it; even Buxdor and Schindler.
[101] 2 Tim. iv. 11.
[102] Exod. xviii. 13.
[103] Num. xi. 16.
[104] Heb. i. 6.
[105] Matt. xxvi. 53.
[106] Matt. xxv. 31.
[107] Luke, ii. 13, 14.
[108] John, xx. 12.
[109] Gen. xxviii. 12.
[110] Psalm xci. 11.
[111] Gen. xix. 15.
[112] Rev. i. 20.
[113] Rev. viii. 2.
[114] Matt. xiii. 39.
[115] Luke, xvi. 22.
[116] Rev. xxi. 12.
[117] 2 Kings, xix. 35.
[118] Luke, iv. 18.
[119] Eph. iv. 12.
[120] 1 Pet. ii. 25.
[121] John, xx. 22.
VIII. ET REX IPSE SUUM MITTIT.
_The King sends his own physician._
VIII. MEDITATION.
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 happiness
even 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 sickness, 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 agarick 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 threescore 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 perfects the happiness of
kings, to confer, to transfer, honour and riches, and (as they can)
health, upon those that need them.
VIII. EXPOSTULATION.
My God, my God, I have a warning from the wise man, that _when a rich
man speaketh every man holdeth his tongue, and, look, what he saith,
they extol it to the clouds; but if a poor man speak, they say, What
fellow is this? And if he stumble, they will help to overthrow
him._[122] Therefore may my words be undervalued and my errors
aggravated, if I offer to speak of kings; but not by thee, O my God,
because I speak of them as they are in thee, and of thee as thou art in
them. Certainly those men prepare a way of speaking negligently or
irreverently of thee, that give themselves that liberty in speaking of
thy vicegerents, kings; for thou who gavest Augustus the empire, gavest
it to Nero too; and as Vespasian had it from thee, so had Julian. Though
kings deface in themselves thy first image in their own soul, thou
givest no man leave to deface thy second image, imprinted indelibly in
their power. But thou knowest, O God, that if I should be slack in
celebrating thy mercies to me exhibited by that royal instrument, my
sovereign, to many other faults that touch upon allegiance I should add
the worst of all, ingratitude, which constitutes an ill man; and faults
which are defects in any particular function are not so great as those
that destroy our humanity. It is not so ill to be an ill subject as to
be an ill man; for he hath an universal illness, ready to flow and pour
out itself into any mould, any form, and to spend itself in any
function. As therefore thy Son did upon the coin, I look upon the king,
and I ask whose image and whose inscription he hath, and he hath thine;
and I give unto thee that which is thine; I recommend his happiness to
thee in all my sacrifices of thanks, for that which he enjoys, and in
all my prayers for the continuance and enlargement of them. But let me
stop, my God, and consider; will not this look like a piece of art and
cunning, to convey into the world an opinion that I were more particular
in his care than other men? and that herein, in a show of humility and
thankfulness, I magnify myself more than there is cause? But let not
that jealousy stop me, O God, but let me go forward in celebrating thy
mercy exhibited by him. This which he doth now, in assisting so my
bodily health, I know is common to me with many: many, many have tasted
of that expression of his graciousness. Where he can give health by his
own hands he doth, and to more than any of his predecessors have done:
therefore hath God reserved one disease for him, that he only might cure
it, though perchance not only by one title and interest, nor only as one
king. To those that need it not, in that kind, and so cannot have it by
his own hand, he sends a donative of health in sending his physician.
The holy king St. Louis, in France, and our Maud, is celebrated for
that, that personally they visited hospitals, and assisted in the cure
even of loathsome diseases. And when that religious Empress Placilla,
the wife of Theodosius, was told that she diminished herself too much in
those personal assistances and might do enough in sending relief, she
said she would send in that capacity as a Christian, as a fellow-member
of the body of thy Son, with them. So thy servant David applies himself
to his people, so he incorporates himself in his people, by calling them