Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions; Together with Death's Duel
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.
XXIII. EXPOSTULATION.
My God, my God, my God, thou mighty Father, who hast been my physician;
thou glorious Son, who hast been my physic; thou blessed Spirit, who
hast prepared and applied all to me, shall I alone be able to overthrow
the work of all you, and relapse into those spiritual sicknesses from
which infinite mercies have withdrawn me? Though thou, O my God, have
filled my measure with mercy, yet my measure was not so large as that of
thy whole people, the nation, the numerous and glorious nation of
Israel; and yet how often, how often did they fall into relapses! And
then, where is my assurance? How easily thou passedst over many other
sins in them, and how vehemently thou insistedst in those into which
they so often relapsed; those were their murmurings against thee, in
thine instruments and ministers, and their turnings upon other gods, and
embracing the idolatries of their neighbours. O my God, how slippery a
way, to how irrecoverable a bottom, is murmuring; and how near thyself
he comes, that murmurs at him who comes from thee! The magistrate is the
garment in which thou apparelest thyself, and he that shoots at the
clothes cannot say he meant no ill to the man: thy people were fearful
examples of that, for how often did their murmuring against thy
ministers end in a departing from thee! When they would have other
officers, they would have other gods; and still to-day's murmuring was
to-morrow's idolatry; as their murmuring induced idolatry, and they
relapsed often into both, I have found in myself, O my God (O my God,
thou hast found it in me, and thy finding it hast showed it to me) such
a transmigration of sin, as makes me afraid of relapsing too. The soul
of sin (for we have made sin immortal, and it must have a soul), the
soul of sin is disobedience to thee; and when one sin hath been dead in
me, that soul hath passed into another sin. Our youth dies, and the sins
of our youth with it; some sins die a violent death, and some a natural;
poverty, penury, imprisonment, banishment, kill some sins in us, and
some die of age; many ways we become unable to do that sin, but still
the soul lives and passes into another sin; and that that was
licentiousness grows ambition, and that comes to indevotion and
spiritual coldness: we have three lives in our state of sin, and where
the sins of youth expire, those of our middle years enter, and those of
our age after them. This transmigration of sin found in myself, makes me
afraid, O my God, of a relapse; but the occasion of my fear is more
pregnant than so, for I have had, I have multiplied relapses already.
Why, O my God, is a relapse so odious to thee? Not so much their
murmuring and their idolatry, as their relapsing into those sins, seems
to affect thee in thy disobedient people. _They limited the holy One of
Israel_,[331] as thou complainest of them: that was a murmuring; but
before thou chargest them with the fault itself, in the same place thou
chargest them with the iterating, the redoubling of that fault before
the fault was named; _How oft did they provoke me in the wilderness, and
grieve me in the desert?_ That which brings thee to that exasperation
against them, as to say, that thou wouldst break thine own oath rather
than leave them unpunished (_They shall not see the land which I sware
unto their fathers_) was because _they had tempted thee ten times_,[332]
infinitely; upon that thou threatenest with that vehemency, _If you do
in any wise go back, know for a certainty God will no more drive out any
of these nations from before you; but they shall be snares and traps
unto you, and scourges in your sides, and thorns in your eyes, till ye
perish_.[333] No tongue but thine own, O my God, can express thine
indignation against a nation relapsing to idolatry. Idolatry in any
nation is deadly, but when the disease is complicated with a relapse (a
knowledge and a profession of a former recovery), it is desperate; and
thine anger works, not only where the evidence is pregnant and without
exception (so thou sayest when it is said, that certain men in a city
have withdrawn others to idolatry, and that inquiry is made, and it is
found true; the city, and the inhabitants, and the cattle are to be
destroyed),[334] but where there is but a suspicion, a rumour, of such a
relapse to idolatry, thine anger is awakened, and thine indignation
stirred. In the government of thy servant Joshua, there was a voice,
that Reuben and Gad, with those of Manasseh, had built a new altar.[335]
Israel doth not send one to inquire, but the whole congregation gathered
to go up to war against them,[336] and there went a prince of every
tribe; and they object to them, not so much their present declination to
idolatry, as their relapse: _Is the iniquity of Peor too little for
us?_[337] an idolatry formerly committed, and punished with the
slaughter of twenty-four thousand delinquents. At last Reuben and Gad
satisfy them, that that altar was not built for idolatry, but built as a
pattern of theirs, that they might thereby profess themselves to be of
the same profession that they were, and so the army returned without
blood. Even where it comes not so far as to an actual relapse into
idolatry, thou, O my God, becomest sensible of it; though thou, who
seest the heart all the way, preventest all dangerous effects where
there was no ill meaning, however there were occasion of suspicious
rumours given to thine Israel of relapsing. So odious to thee, and so
aggravating a weight upon sin is a relapse. But, O my God, why is it so?
so odious? It must be so, because he that hath sinned and then repented,
hath weighed God and the devil in a balance; he hath heard God and the
devil plead, and after hearing given judgment on that side to which he
adheres by his subsequent practice;[338] if he return to his sin, he
decrees for Satan, he prefers sin before grace, and Satan before God;
and in contempt of God, declares the precedency for his adversary; and a
contempt wounds deeper than an injury, a relapse deeper than a
blasphemy. And when thou hast told me that a relapse is more odious to
thee, need I ask why it is more dangerous, more pernicious to me? Is
there any other measure of the greatness of my danger, than the
greatness of thy displeasure? How fitly and how fearfully hast thou
expressed my case in a storm at sea, if I relapse; _They mount up to
heaven, and they go down again to the depth_![339] My sickness brought
me to thee in repentance, and my relapse hath cast me farther from thee.
_The end of that man shall be worse than the beginning_,[340] says thy
Word, thy Son; my beginning was sickness, punishment for sin: but _a
worse thing may follow_,[341] says he also, if I sin again; not only
death, which is an end worse than sickness, which was the beginning, but
hell, which is a beginning worse than that end. Thy great servant
denied thy Son,[342] and he denied him again, but all before repentance;
here was no relapse. O, if thou hadst ever readmitted Adam into
Paradise, how abstinently would he have walked by that tree! And would
not the angels that fell have fixed themselves upon thee, if thou hadst
once readmitted them to thy sight? They never relapsed; if I do, must
not my case be as desperate? Not so desperate; for _as thy majesty, so
is thy mercy_,[343] both infinite; and thou, who hast commanded me to
pardon my brother seventy-seven times, hast limited thyself to no
number. If death were ill in itself, thou wouldst never have raised any
dead man to life again, because that man must necessarily die again. If
thy mercy in pardoning did so far aggravate a relapse, as that there
were no more mercy after it, our case were the worse for that former
mercy; for who is not under even a necessity of sinning whilst he is
here, if we place this necessity in our own infirmity, and not in thy
decree? But I speak not this, O my God, as preparing a way to my relapse
out of presumption, but to preclude all accesses of desperation, though
out of infirmity I should relapse.
XXIII. PRAYER.
O eternal and most gracious God, who, though thou beest ever infinite,
yet enlargest thyself by the number of our prayers, and takest our often
petitions to thee to be an addition to thy glory and thy greatness, as
ever upon all occasions, so now, O my God, I come to thy majesty with
two prayers, two supplications. I have meditated upon the jealousy which
thou hast of thine own honour, and considered that nothing comes nearer
a violating of that honour, nearer to the nature of a scorn to thee,
than to sue out thy pardon, and receive the seals of reconciliation to
thee, and then return to that sin for which I needed and had thy pardon
before. I know that this comes too near to a making thy holy ordinances,
thy word, thy sacraments, thy seals, thy grace, instruments of my
spiritual fornications. Since therefore thy correction hath brought me
to such a participation of thyself (thyself, O my God, cannot be
parted), to such an entire possession of thee, as that I durst deliver
myself over to thee this minute, if this minute thou wouldst accept my
dissolution, preserve me, O my God, the God of constancy and
perseverance, in this state, from all relapses into those sins which
have induced thy former judgments upon me. But because, by too
lamentable experience, I know how slippery my customs of sin have made
my ways of sin, I presume to add this petition too, that if my infirmity
overtake me, thou forsake me not. Say to my soul, _My son, thou hast
sinned, do so no more_;[344] but say also, that though I do, thy spirit
of remorse and compunction shall never depart from me. Thy holy apostle,
St. Paul, was shipwrecked thrice,[345] and yet still saved. Though the
rocks and the sands, the heights and the shallows, the prosperity and
the adversity of this world, do diversely threaten me, though mine own
leaks endanger me, yet, O God, let me never put myself aboard with
Hymenæus, nor _make shipwreck of faith and a good conscience_,[346] and
then thy long-lived, thy everlasting mercy, will visit me, though that
which I most earnestly pray against, should fall upon me, a relapse into
those sins which I have truly repented, and thou hast fully pardoned.
FOOTNOTES:
[331] Psalm lxxviii. 41.
[332] Numb. xiv. 22, 23.
[333] Josh. xxiii. 12, 13.
[334] Deut. xiii. 12-16.
[335] Josh. xxii. 11, 12.
[336] Josh. xxii. 11, 12.
[337] Josh. xxii. 17.
[338] Tertullian.
[339] Psalm cvii. 26.
[340] Matt. xii. 45.
[341] John, v. 14.
[342] Mark, xiv. 70.
[343] Ecclus. ii. 18.
[344] Ecclus. i. 21.
[345] 2 Cor. xi. 25.
[346] 1 Tim. i. 19.
_DEATH'S DUEL,_
_OR, A CONSOLATION TO THE SOUL
AGAINST THE DYING LIFE AND LIVING
DEATH OF THE BODY._
_DELIVERED IN A SERMON AT WHITEHALL, BEFORE
THE KING'S MAJESTY, IN THE BEGINNING
OF LENT, 1630._
_BY THAT LATE LEARNED AND REVEREND DIVINE,
JOHN DONNE, DR. IN DIVINITY, AND DEAN
OF ST. PAUL'S, LONDON._
_BEING HIS LAST SERMON, AND CALLED BY HIS