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serve, or as they please; and once it shall come to pass, that concerning every one of us, it shall be told in the neighbourhood that we are dead. This we are apt to think a sad story; but therefore let us help it with a sadder. For we therefore need not be much troubled that we shall die; because we are not here in ease, nor do we dwell in a fair condition, but our days are full of sorrow and anguish, dishonoured and made unhappy with many sins, with a frail and a foolish spirit, entangled with difficult cases of conscience, ensnared with passions, amazed with fears, full of cares, divided with curiosities and contradictory interests, made airy and impertinent with vanities, abused with ignorance and prodigious errors, made ridiculous with a thousand wickednesses, worn away with labours, loaden with diseases, daily vexed with dangers and temptations, and in love with misery; we are weakened with delights, afflicted with want, with the evils of myself and of all my family, and with the sadnessess of all my friends and of all good men, even of the whole church; and therefore methinks we need not be troubled that God is pleased to put an end to all these troubles, and to let them sit down in a natural period, which, if we please, may be to us the beginning of a better life. When the prince of Persia wept because his army should all die in the revolution of an age, Artabanus told him, that they should all meet with evils so many, and so great, that every man of them should wish himself dead long before that. Indeed, it were a sad thing to be cut of the stone, and we that

are in health tremble to think of it; but the man that is wearied with the disease, looks upon that sharpness as upon his cure and remedy and as none need to have a tooth drawn, so none could well endure it but he that hath felt the pain of it in his head. So is our life so full of evils, that therefore death is no evil to them that have felt the smart of this, or hope for the joys of a better.

2. But as it helps to ease a certain sorrow, as a fire draws out fire; and a nail drives forth a nail; so it instructs us in a present duty, that is, that we should not be so fond of a perpetual storm, nor doat upon the transient gauds and gilded thorns of this world. They are not worth a passion, nor worth a sigh nor a groan, nor of the price of one night's watching: and therefore they are mistaken and miserable persons, who, since Adam planted thorns round about paradise, áre more in love with the hedge than with the fruits of the garden-sottish admirers of things that hurt them, of sweet poisons, gilded daggers, and silken halters. Tell them they have lost a bounteous friend, a rich purchase, a fair farm, a wealthy donative, and you dissolve their patience; it is an evil bigger than their spirit can bear; it brings sickness and death; they can neither eat nor sleep with such a sorrow. But if you represent to them the evils of a vicious habit, and the dangers of a state of sin; if you tell them they have displeased God, and interrupted their hopes of heaven it may be they will be so civil as to hear it patiently, and to treat you kindly, and first to com

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mend, and then forget your story; because they prefer this world, with all its sorrows, before the pure unmingled felicities of heaven. But it is strange that any man should be so passionately in love with the thorns which grow on his own ground, that he should wear them for amulets, and knit them in his shirt, and prefer them before a kingdom and immortality. No man loves this world the better for his being poor; but men that love it because they have great possessions, love it because it is troublesome and chargeable, full of noise and temptation, because it is unsafe and ungoverned, flattered and abused: and he that considers the troubles of an over long garment, and of a crammed stomach, a trailing gown and a loaden table, may justly understand that all that for which men are so passionate is their hurt, and their objection, that which a temperate man would avoid, and a wise man cannot love.

He that is no fool, but can consider wisely, if he be in love with this world, we need not despair but that a witty man might reconcile him with tortures, and make him think charitably of the rack, and be brought to dwell with vipers and dragons, and entertain his guests with the shricks of mandrakes, cats, and screechowls, with the filing of iron, and the harshness of rending of silk, or to admire the harmony that is made by an herd of evening wolves, when they miss their draught of blood in their midnight revels. The groans of a man in a fit of the stone are worse than all these; and the distractions of a troubled conscience are worse

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