Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions; Together with Death's Duel

evenings and mornings made days in the creation, and there is no mention of nights; my sadnesses for sins are evenings, but they determine not in night, but deliver me over to the day, the day of a conscience dejected, but then rectified, accused, but then acquitted, by thee, by him who speaks thy word, and who is thy word, thy Son. From this day, the crisis and examination of my conscience, breaks out my third day, my day of preparing and fitting myself for a more especial receiving of thy Son in his institution of the Sacrament; in which day, though there be many dark passages and slippery steps to them who will entangle and endanger themselves in unnecessary disputations, yet there are light hours enough for any man to go his whole journey intended by thee, to know that that bread and wine is not more really assimilated to my body, and to my blood, than the body and blood of thy Son is communicated to me in that action, and participation of that bread and that wine. And having, O my God, walked with thee these three days, the day of thy visitation, the day of my conscience, the day of preparing for this seal of reconciliation, I am the less afraid of the clouds or storms of my fourth day, the day of my dissolution and transmigration from hence. Nothing deserves the name of happiness that makes the remembrance of death bitter; and, _O death, how bitter is the remembrance of thee, to a man that lives at rest in his possessions, the man that hath nothing to vex him, yea unto him that is able to receive meat!_[212] Therefore hast thou, O my God, made this sickness, in which I am not able to receive meat, my fasting day, my eve to this great festival, my dissolution. And this day of death shall deliver me over to my fifth day, the day of my resurrection; for how long a day soever thou make that day in the grave, yet there is no day between that and the resurrection. Then we shall all be invested, reapparelled in our own bodies; but they who have made just use of their former days be super-invested with glory; whereas the others, condemned to their old clothes, their sinful bodies, shall have nothing added but immortality to torment. And this day of awaking me, and reinvesting my soul in my body, and my body in the body of Christ, shall present me, body and soul, to my sixth day, the day of judgment, which is truly, and most literally, the critical, the decretory day; both because all judgment shall be manifested to me then, and I shall assist in judging the world then, and because then, that judgment shall declare to me, and possess me of my seventh day, my everlasting Sabbath in thy rest, thy glory, thy joy, thy sight, thyself; and where I shall live as long without reckoning any more days after, as thy Son and thy Holy Spirit lived with thee, before you three made any days in the creation. XIV. PRAYER. O eternal and most gracious God, who, though thou didst permit darkness to be before light in the creation, yet in the making of light didst so multiply that light, as that it enlightened not the day only, but the night too; though thou have suffered some dimness, some clouds of sadness and disconsolateness to shed themselves upon my soul, I humbly bless and thankfully glorify thy holy name, that thou hast afforded me the light of thy Spirit, against which the prince of darkness cannot prevail, nor hinder his illumination of our darkest nights, of our saddest thoughts. Even the visitation of thy most blessed Spirit upon the blessed Virgin, is called an overshadowing. There was the presence of the Holy Ghost, the fountain of all light, and yet an overshadowing; nay, except there were some light, there could be no shadow. Let thy merciful providence so govern all in this sickness, that I never fall into utter darkness, ignorance of thee, or inconsideration of myself; and let those shadows which do fall upon me, faintnesses of spirit, and condemnations of myself, be overcome by the power of thine irresistible light, the God of consolation; that when those shadows have done their office upon me, to let me see, that of myself I should fall into irrecoverable darkness, thy Spirit may do his office upon those shadows, and disperse them, and establish me in so bright a day here, as may be a critical day to me, a day wherein and whereby I may give thy judgment upon myself, and that the words of thy Son, spoken to his apostles, may reflect upon me, _Behold I am with you always, even to the end of the world_.[213] FOOTNOTES: [194] Dan. vii. 22. [195] Matt. xx. 6. [196] Matt. vi. 34. [197] Gal. iv. 10. [198] Col. ii. 16. [199] 2 Cor. vi. 2. [200] Rev. vi. 17. [201] Eph. vi. 11. [202] 3 John, 2. [203] Heb. i. 2. [204] 1 Thes. v. 8. [205] Matt. xxiii. 30. [206] Matt. xxii. 15. [207] Matt. xxii. 23. [208] Matt. xxii. 36. [209] Matt. xxii. 46. [210] Gen. xxxii. 26. [211] 2 Pet. iii. 8. [212] Ecclus. xli. 1. XV. INTEREA INSOMNES NOCTES EGO DUCO, DIESQUE. _I sleep not day nor night._ XV. MEDITATION. 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 melancholy 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 to-day, or knows he shall see it to-morrow, 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 eye-lids, 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? XV. EXPOSTULATION. My God, my God, I know (for thou hast said it) that _he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep_:[214] but shall not that Israel, over whom thou watchest, sleep? I know (for thou hast said it) that there are men whose damnation sleepeth not;[215] but shall not they to whom thou art salvation sleep? or wilt thou take from them that evidence, and that testimony that they are thy Israel, or thou their salvation? _Thou givest thy beloved sleep_:[216] shall I lack that seal of thy love? _You shall lie down, and none shall make you afraid_:[217] shall I be outlawed from that protection? Jonah slept in one dangerous storm,[218] and thy blessed Son in another;[219] shall I have no use, no benefit, no application of those great examples? _Lord, if he sleep, he shall do well_,[220] say thy Son's disciples to him of Lazarus; and shall there be no room for that argument in me? or shall I be open to the contrary? If I sleep not, shall I not be well in their sense? Let me not, O my God, take this too precisely, too literally; _There is that neither day nor night seeth sleep with his eyes_,[221] says thy wise servant Solomon; and whether he speak that of worldly men, or of men that seek wisdom, whether in justification or condemnation of their watchfulness, we cannot tell: we can tell that there are men that cannot sleep till they have done mischief,[222] and then they can; and we can tell that the rich man cannot sleep, because his abundance will not let him.[223] The tares were sown when the husbandmen were asleep[224]; and the elders thought it a probable excuse, a credible lie, that the watchmen which kept the sepulchre should say, that the body of thy Son was stolen away when they were asleep.[225] Since thy blessed Son rebuked his disciples for sleeping, shall I murmur because I do not sleep? If Samson had slept any longer in Gaza, he had been taken;[226] and when he did sleep longer with Delilah,[227] he was taken. Sleep is as often taken for natural death in thy Scriptures, as for natural rest. Nay, sometimes sleep hath so heavy a sense, as to be taken for sin itself,[228] as well as for the punishment of sin, death.[229] Much comfort is not in much sleep, when the most fearful and most irrevocable malediction is presented by thee in a perpetual sleep. _I will make their feasts, and I will make them drunk, and they shall sleep a perpetual sleep, and not wake._[230] I must therefore, O my God, look farther than into the very act of sleeping before I misinterpret my waking; for since I find thy whole hand light, shall any finger of that hand seem heavy? Since the whole sickness is thy physic, shall any accident in it be my poison by my murmuring? The name of watchmen belongs to our profession; thy prophets are not only seers, endued with a power of seeing, able to see, but watchmen evermore in the act of seeing. And therefore give me leave, O my blessed God, to invert the words of thy Son's spouse: she said, _I sleep, but my heart waketh_;[231] I say, I wake, but my heart sleepeth: my body is in a sick weariness, but my soul in a peaceful rest with thee; and as our eyes in our health see not the air that is next them, nor the fire, nor the spheres, nor stop upon any thing till they come to stars, so my eyes that are open, see nothing of this world, but pass through all that, and fix themselves upon thy peace, and joy, and glory above. Almost as soon as thy apostle had said, _Let us not sleep_,[232] lest we should be too