Prose

Prose Letters

Madam (‘I will have leave to speak like a lover’)

Madam,

I will have leave to speak like a lover; I am not altogether one, for though I love more than any yet, my love hath not the same mark and end with others. How charitably you deal with us of these parts, that at this time of the year (when the sun forsakes us) you come to us and suffer us not (out of your mercy) to taste the bitterness of a winter; but, madam, you owe me this relief because in all that part of this summer which I spent in your presence, you doubled the heat, and I loved under the rage of a hot sun and your eyes. That heart which you melted then no winter shall freeze, but it shall ever keep that equal temper which you gave it, [10] soft enough to receive your impressions and hard enough to retain them. It must not taste to you as a negligence or carelessness that I have not visited your lady in these days of your being here; I call it rather a devout humility that I thus ask leave, and be content to believe from him that can as impossibly lie to you as hate you, that by commandment I am suddenly thrown out of the town; so daily and diversely are we tempested that are not our own. At my return (which therefore I will hasten) I will be bold to kiss that fair virtuous hand which doth much in receiving this letter and may do easily much more in sending another to him [20] whose best honour is that he is your lieutenant of himself.

Anonim

‘I send to you now that I may know how I do’

I send to you now that I may know how I do because upon your opinion of me all I depend; for though I be troubled with the extremity of such a sickness as deserves at least pity if not love, yet I were as good to send to a conjurer for good fortune as to a physician for health. Indeed I am oppressed with such a sadness as I am glad of nothing but that I am it: if it had pleased you to have nourished and brought up so much love in your breast as you have done grief, perchance I should have had as much love in your service as I have done grief; yet I should account even sorrow good payment if by mine yours were lessened: [10] now I vene and purge my body with physic when my desperate mind is sick as they batter city walls when the citizens are stubborn: but by all this labour of my pen my mind is no more comforted than a condemned prisoner would be to see his chamber swept and made clean. Only you know whether ever I shall be better, and only you can tell me (for you are my destiny) whether I were best to die now, or endeavour to live and keep the great honour of being

your servant

To the Right Worshipful Sir George More, Knight
(‘If a very respective fear of your displeasure’)

Sir,

If a very respective fear of your displeasure, and a doubt that my lord, whom I know ought of your worthiness to love you much, would be so compassionate with you as to add his anger to yours, did not so much increase my sickness, as that I cannot stir, I had taken the boldness to have done the office of this letter by waiting upon you myself, to have given you truth and clearness of this matter between your daughter and me; and to show to you plainly the limits of our fault, by which I know your wisdom will proportion the punishment. So long since, as at her being at York House, this had foundation: and so much then of [10] promise and contract built upon it, as without violence to conscience might not be shaken. At her lying in town this last parliament, I found means to see her twice or thrice: We both knew the obligations that lay upon us, and we adventured equally, and about three weeks before Christmas we married. And as at the doing, there were not used above five persons, of which I protest to you by my salvation, there was not one that had any dependence or relation to you, so in all the passage of it did I forbear to use any such person, who by furthering of it might violate any trust or duty towards you. The reasons why I did not fore-acquaint [20] you with it (to deal with the same plainness that I have used), were these: I knew my present estate less than fit for her; I knew (yet I knew not why) that I stood not right in your opinion; I knew that to have given any intimation of it, had been to impossibilitate the whole matter. And then having those honest purposes in our hearts, and those fetters in our consciences, methinks we should be pardoned if our fault be but this, that we did not by fore-revealing of it, consent to our hindrance and torment. Sir, I acknowledge my fault to be so great as I dare scarce offer any other prayer to you in mine own behalf than this, to believe this [30] truth, that I neither had dishonest end nor means. But for her, whom I tender much more than my fortunes, or life (else I would I might neither joy in this life, nor enjoy the next), I humbly beg of you that she may not, to her danger, feel the terror of your sudden anger. I know this letter shall find you full of passion, but I know no passion can alter your reason and wisdom, to which I adventure to command these particulars: that it is irremediably done; that if you incense my lord, you destroy her and me; that it is easy to give us happiness; and that my endeavours and industry, if it please you to prosper them, may soon make me somewhat [40] worthier of her. If any take the advantage of your displeasure against me, and fill you with ill thoughts of me, my comfort is that you know, that faith and thanks are due to them only, that speak when their informations might do good, which now it cannot work towards any party. For my excuse, I can say nothing except I knew what were said to you. Sir, I have truly told you this matter, and I humbly beseech you, so to deal in it as the persuasions of nature, reason, wisdom, and Christianity shall [50] inform you, and to accept the vows of one whom you may now raise or scatter, which are, that as all my love is directed unchangeably upon her, so all my labours shall concur to her contentment, and to show my humble obedience to yourself.

From my lodging by the

Savoy. 20 February [1602]

Yours in all duty and humbleness,

J. Donne

Sir (‘I write not to you out of mine poor library’)

A.v[uestra] Merced.

Sir,

I write not to you out of mine poor library where to cast mine eye upon good authors kindles or refreshes sometimes meditations not unfit to communicate to near friends, nor from the highway where I am contracted and inverted into myself, which are my two ordinary forges of letters to you. But I write from the fireside in my parlour, and in the noise of three gamesome children, and by the side of her whom, because I have transplanted into a wretched fortune, I must labour to disguise that from her by all such honest devices as giving her my company [10] and discourse; therefore, I steal from her all the time which I give this letter, and it is therefore that I take so short a list and gallop so fast over it. I have not been out of my house since I received your packet. As I have much quenched my senses and disused my body from pleasure and so tried how I can endure to be my own grave, so I try now how I can suffer a prison. And since it is but to build one wall more about our soul, she is still in her own centre, how many circumferences soever fortune or our own perverseness cast about her. I would I could as well entreat her to go out, as she knows whither to go. But if I melt [20] into a melancholy whilest I write, I shall be taken in the manner, and I sit by one too tender towards these impressions, and it is so much our duty to avoid all occasions of giving them sad apprehensions as St Hierome accuses Adam of no other fault in eating the apple but that he did it ne contristaretur delicias suas. I am not careful what I write because the enclosed letters may dignify this ill favoured bark, and they need not grudge so coarse a countenance because they are now to accompany themselves; my man fetched them, and therefore I can say no more of them than themselves say. Mistress Meauly entreated me by her letter to hasten hers, as I think, for by my troth I cannot read it. [30] My Lady was dispatching in so much haste for Twicknam, as she gave no word to a letter which I sent with yours; of Sir Tho[mas] Bartlet I can say nothing, nor of the plague, though your letter bid me, but that he diminishes, the other increases, but in what proportion I am not clear. To them at Hammersmith and Mistress Herbert I will do your command. If I have been good in hope or can promise any little offices in the future, probably it is comfortable, for I am the worst present man in the world; yet the instant, though it be nothing, joins times together, and therefore this unprofitableness, since I have been, and will [40] still endeavour to be so, shall not interrupt me now from being

Your servant and lover

J. Donne.

To Sir H[enry] Good[y]ere
(‘Every Tuesday I make account’)

Sir,

Every Tuesday I make account, that I turn a great hourglass and consider that a week’s life is run out since I writ. But if I ask myself what I have done in the last watch, or would do in the next, I can say nothing; if I say that I have passed it without hurting any, so may the spider in my window. The primitive monks were excusable in their retirings and enclosures of themselves, for even of them every one cultivated his own garden and orchard, that is, his soul and body, by meditation and manufactures; and they ought the world no more since they consumed none of her sweetness nor begot others to burden [10] her. But for me, if I were able to husband all my time so thriftily as not only not to wound my soul in any minute by actual sin, but not to rob and cozen her by giving any part to pleasure or business, but bestow it all upon her in meditation, yet even in that I should wound her more and contract another guiltiness, as the eagle were very unnatural if because she is able to do it, she should perch a whole day upon a tree, staring in contemplation of the majesty and glory of the sun, and let her young eaglets starve in the nest. Two of the most precious things which [20] God hath afforded us here for the agony and exercise of our sense and spirit, which are a thirst and inhiation after the next life, and a frequency of prayer and meditation in this, are often envenomed and putrefied, and stray into a corrupt disease. For as God doth thus occasion, and positively concur to evil, that when a man is purposed to do a great sin, God infuses some good thoughts which make him choose a less sin or leave out some circumstance which aggravated that, so the devil doth not only suffer but provoke us to some things naturally good, upon condition that we shall omit some other more necessary and [30] more obligatory. And this is his greatest subtlety; because herein we have the deceitful comfort of having done well, and can very hardly spy our error because it is but an insensible omission and no accusing act. With the first of these I have often suspected myself to be overtaken, which is, with a desire of the next life; which though I know it is not merely out of a weariness of this, because I had the same desires when I went with the tide and enjoyed fairer hopes than now, yet I doubt worldly encumbrances have increased it. I would not that death should take me asleep. I would not have him merely seize me, and only declare [40] me to be dead, but win me, and overcome me. When I must shipwreck, I would do it in a sea where mine impotency might have some excuse, not in a sullen weedy lake where I could not have so much as exercise for my swimming. Therefore, I would fain do something, but that I cannot tell what is no wonder. For to choose is to do, but to be no part of any body is to be nothing. At most, the greatest persons are but great wens and excrescences, men of wit and delightful conversation, but as moles for ornament, except they be so incorporated into the body of the world, that they contribute something to the sustentation of the whole. This I made account that I begun early [50] when I understood the study of our laws, but was diverted by the worst voluptuousness, which is an hydroptic, immoderate desire of human learning and languages, beautiful ornaments to great fortunes, but mine needed an occupation and a course, which I thought I entered well into when I submitted myself to such a service as I thought might employ those poor advantages, which I had. And there I stumbled too, yet I would try again, for to this hour I am nothing, or so little that I am scarce subject and argument good enough for one of mine own letters. Yet I fear that doth not ever proceed from a good root, that I am so [60] well content to be less, that is, dead. You, sir, are far enough from these descents, your virtue keeps you secure, and your natural disposition to mirth will preserve you; but lose none of these holds. A slip is often as dangerous as a bruise, and though you cannot fall to my lowness, yet in a much less distraction you may meet my sadness; for he is no safer which falls from an high tower into the leads than he which falls from thence to the ground. Make, therefore, to yourself some mark, and go towards it allegrement. Though I be in such a planetary and erratic fortune that I can do nothing constantly, yet you may [70] find some constancy in my constant advising you to it.

Your hearty, true friend

J. Donne

To Sir H[enry] G[oodyere]
(‘It should be no interruption to your pleasures’)

Sir,

It should be no interruption to your pleasures to hear me often say that I love you, and that you are as much my meditation as myself: I often compare not you and me, but the sphere in which your resolutions are and my wheel, both, I hope, concentric to God, for methinks the new astronomy is thus applyable well, that we which are a little earth should rather move towards God, than that He which is fulfilling, and can come no whither, should move towards us.

To your life full of variety, nothing is old, nor new to mine. [10] And as to that life, all stickings and hesitations seem stupid and stony, so to this, all fluid slipperinesses and transitory migrations seem giddy and feathery. In that life one is ever in the porch or postern, going in or out, never within his house, himself. It is a garment made of remnants, a life ravelled out into ends, a line discontinued, and a number of small wretched points, useless, because they concur not: a life built of past and future, not proposing any constant present. They have more pleasures than we, but not more pleasure; they joy more often, we longer; and no man but of so much understanding as may [20] deliver him from being a fool would change with a madman, which had a better proportion of wit in his often lucidis.

You know, they which dwell farthest from the sun, if in any convenient distance, have longer days, better appetites, better digestion, better growth, and longer life. And all these advantages have their minds who are well removed from the scorchings, and dazzlings, and exhalings of the world’s glory; but neither of our lives are in such extremes, for you living at court without ambition, which would burn you, or envy which would divest others, live in the sun, not in the fire, and I which [30] live in the country without stupefying, am not in darkness, but in shadow, which is not no light, but a pallid, waterish, and diluted one. As all shadows are of one colour if you respect the body from which they are cast (for our shadows upon clay will be dirty, and in a garden, green and flowery), so all retirings into a shadowy life are alike from all causes, and alike subject to the barbarousness and insipid dullness of the country; only the employment, and that upon which you cast and bestow your pleasure, business or books, gives it the tincture and beauty. But, truly, wheresoever we are, if we can but tell ourselves truly [40] what and where we would be, we may make any state and place such. For we are so composed that if abundance or glory scorch and melt us, we have an earthly cave, our bodies, to go into by consideration, and cool ourselves; and if we be frozen and contracted with lower and dark fortunes, we have within us a torch, a soul, lighter and warmer than any without. We are therefore our own umbrellas, and our own sun.

These, sir, are the salads and onions of Michin, sent to you with as wholesome affection as your other friends send melons and quelques choses from court and London. If I present you not as good diet as they, I would yet say grace to theirs, and bid [50] much good do it you. I send you, with this, a letter, which I sent to the countess. It is not my use nor duty to do so. But for your having of it, there were but two consents, and I am sure you have mine, and you are sure you have hers. I also writ to her ladyship for the verses she showed in the garden, which I did not only to extort them, nor only to keep my promise of writing, for that I had done in the other letter, and perchance she has forgotten the promise, nor only because I think my letters just good enough for a progress, but because I would write apace to her, while it is possible to express that which I [60] yet know of her, for by this growth I see how soon she will be ineffable.

Devotions upon Emergent Occasions

1. Meditation

Variable, and therefore miserable condition of man! This minute I was well, and am ill this minute. I am surprised with a sudden change and alteration to worse, and can impute it to no cause, nor call it by any name. We study health, and we deliberate upon our meats, and drink, and air, and exercises, and we hew and we polish every stone that goes to that building; and so our health is a long and a regular work, but in a minute a canon batters all, overthrows all, demolishes all; a sickness unprevented for all our diligence, unsuspected for all our curiosity, nay, undeserved, if we consider only disorder, summons [10] us, seizes us, possesses us, destroys us in an instant. O miserable condition of man, which was not imprinted by God, who as He is immortal Himself, had put a coal, a beam of immortality into us, which we might have blown into a flame, but blew it out by our first sin; we beggared ourselves by hearkening after false riches, and infatuated ourselves by hearkening after false knowledge. So that now, we do not only die, but die upon the rack, die by the torment of sickness; nor that only, but are pre-afflicted, super-afflicted with these jealousies and suspicions [20] and apprehensions of sickness, before we can call it a sickness. We are not sure we are ill; one hand asks the other by the pulse, and our eye asks our own urine how we do. O multiplied misery! We die, and cannot enjoy death, because we die in this torment of sickness; we are tormented with sickness, and cannot stay till the torment come, but pre-apprehensions and presages prophesy those torments, which induce that death before either come; and our dissolution is conceived in these first changes, quickened in the sickness itself, and born in death, which bears date from these first changes. Is this the honour [30] which man hath by being a little world, that he hath these earthquakes in himself, sudden shakings; these lightnings, sudden flashes; these thunders, sudden noises; these eclipses, sudden offuscations and darkenings of his senses; these blazing stars, sudden fiery exhalations; these rivers of blood, sudden red waters? Is he a world to himself only, therefore, that he hath enough in himself, not only to destroy and execute himself, but to presage that execution upon himself, to assist the sickness, to antedate the sickness, to make the sickness the more irremediable by sad apprehensions; and, as if he would [40] make a fire the more vehement by sprinkling water upon the coals, so to wrap a hot fever in cold melancholy, lest the fever alone should not destroy fast enough without this contribution, nor perfect the work (which is destruction) except we joined an artificial sickness of our own melancholy, to our natural, our unnatural fever. O perplexed discomposition, O riddling distemper, O miserable condition of man!

4. Meditation

It is too little to call man a little world; except God, man is a diminutive to nothing. Man consists of more pieces, more parts, than the world, than the world doeth, nay, than the world is. And if those pieces were extended and stretched out in man, as they are in the world, man would be the giant and the world the dwarf, the world but the map, and the man the world. If all the veins in our bodies were extended to rivers, and all the sinews to veins of mines, and all the muscles that lie upon one another, to hills, and all the bones to quarries of stones, and all the other pieces to the proportion of those which [10] correspond to them in the world, the air would be too little for this orb of man to move in, the firmament would be but enough for this star; for as the whole world hath nothing to which something in man doth not answer, so hath man many pieces of which the whole world hath no representation. Enlarge this meditation upon this great world, man, so far as to consider the immensity of the creatures this world produces. Our creatures are our thoughts, creatures that are born giants that reach from east to west, from earth to heaven, that do not only bestride all the sea and land, but span the sun and firmament at [20] once; my thoughts reach all, comprehend all. Inexplicable mystery; I their creator am in a close prison, in a sick bed, any where, and any one of my creatures, my thoughts, is with the sun, and beyond the sun, overtakes the sun, and overgoes the sun in one pace, one step, everywhere. And then, as the other world produces serpents and vipers, malignant and venomous creatures, and worms and caterpillars that endeavour to devour that world which produces them, and monsters compiled and complicated of divers parents and kinds, so this world, our selves produces all these in us, in producing diseases and sicknesses [30] of all those sorts, venomous and infectious diseases, feeding and consuming diseases, and manifold and entangled diseases, made up of many several ones. And can the other world name so many venomous, so many consuming, so many monstrous creatures, as we can diseases of all these kinds? O miserable abundance! O beggarly riches! How much do we lack of having remedies for every disease when as yet we have not names for them? But we have a Hercules against the giants, these monsters, that is, the physician; he musters up all the forces of the other world to succour this, all nature to relieve [40] man. We have the physician, but we are not the physician. Here we shrink in our proportion, sink in our dignity, in respect of very mean creatures, who are physicians to themselves. The hart that is pursued and wounded, they say, knows an herb, which being eaten throws off the arrow, a strange kind of vomit. The dog that pursues it, though he be subject to sickness, even proverbially, knows his grass that recovers him. And it may be true that the drugger is as near to man as to other creatures. It may be that obvious and present simples, easy to [50] be had, would cure him; but the apothecary is not so near him, nor the physician so near him, as they two are to other creatures; man hath not that innate instinct to apply those natural medicines to his present danger, as those inferior creatures have; he is not his own apothecary, his own physician, as they are. Call back, therefore, thy meditation again, and bring it down; what’s become of man’s great extent and proportion, when himself shrinks himself and consumes himself to a handful of dust? What’s become of his soaring thoughts, his compassing thoughts, when himself brings himself to the ignorance, [60] to the thoughtlessness, of the grave? His diseases are his own, but the physician is not; he hath them at home, but he must send for the physician.

17. Meditation

Perchance he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill, as that he knows not it tolls for him; and perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about me and see my state may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that. The church is catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does belongs to all. When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me, for that child is thereby connected to that head which is my head too, and engrafted into that body, whereof I am a member. And when she buries a man, that action concerns [10] me; all mankind is of one author, and is one volume: when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language, and every chapter must be so translated. God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice, but God’s hand is in every translation, and His hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another. As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come, so this bell calls us all; but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this [20] sickness. There was a contention as far as a suit (in which both piety and dignity, religion and estimation, were mingled), which of the religious orders should ring to prayers first in the morning, and it was determined that they should ring first that rose earliest. If we understand aright the dignity of this bell that tolls for our evening prayer, we would be glad to make it ours by rising early in that application, that it might be ours as well as his, whose indeed it is. The bell doth toll for him that thinks it doth; and though it intermit again, yet from that minute that that occasion wrought upon him, he is united to God. Who [30] casts not up his eye to the sun when it rises? But who takes off his eye from a comet when that breaks out? Who bends not his ear to any bell, which upon any occasion rings? But who can remove it from that bell, which is passing a piece of himself out of this world? No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were. Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore, never send to know for whom the bell [40] tolls, it tolls for thee. Neither can we call this a begging of misery, or a borrowing of misery, as though we were not miserable enough of ourselves, but must fetch in more from the next house in taking upon us the misery of our neighbours. Truly, it were an excusable covetousness if we did, for affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it. No man hath affliction enough that is not matured and ripened by it, and made fit for God by that affliction. If a man carry treasure in bullion, or in a wedge of gold, and have none coined into current monies, his treasure will not defray him as he travels. [50] Tribulation is treasure in the nature of it, but it is not current money in the use of it, except we get nearer and nearer our home, heaven, by it. Another man may be sick too, and sick to death, and this affliction may lie in his bowels, as gold in a mine, and be of no use to him; but this bell that tells me of his affliction digs out and applies that gold to me, if by this consideration of another’s danger I take mine own into contemplation, and so secure myself, by making my recourse to my God, who is our only security.

19. Expostulation

My God, my God, Thou art a direct God, may I not say a literal God, a God that wouldest be understood literally and according to the plain sense of all that Thou sayest? But Thou art also (Lord, I intend it to Thy glory, and let no profane misinterpreter abuse it to Thy diminution), Thou art a figurative, a metaphorical God too: a God in whose words there is such a height of figures, such voyages, such peregrinations to such remote and precious metaphors, such extensions, such spreadings, such curtains of allegories, such third heavens of hyperboles, so harmonious [10] elocutions, so retired and so reserved expressions, so commanding persuasions, so persuading commandments, such sinews even in Thy milk, and such things in Thy words, as all profane authors seem of the seed of the serpent that creeps, Thou art the Dove that flies. O, what words but Thine can express the inexpressible texture and composition of Thy word, in which, to one man that argument that binds his faith to believe that to be the word of God, is the reverent simplicity of the Word, and to another the majesty of the word, and in which two men, equally pious, may meet, and one wonder that all [20] should not understand it, and the other, as much, that any man should. So, Lord, Thou givest us the same earth to labour on and to lie in, a house and a grave, of the same earth; so Lord, Thou givest us the same word for our satisfaction, and for our inquisition, for our instruction, and for our admiration too. For there are places that Thy servants Hierome and Augustine would scarce believe (when they grew warm by mutual letters) of one another, that they understood them, and yet both Hierome and Augustine call upon persons whom they knew to be far weaker than they thought one another (old women and young maids) to read Thy Scriptures, without confining them to [30] these or those places. Neither art Thou thus a figurative, a metaphorical God in Thy word only, but in Thy works too. The style of Thy works, the phrase of Thine actions, is metaphorical. The institution of Thy whole worship in the old law was a continual allegory; types and figures overspread all, and figures flowed into figures, and poured themselves out into farther figures; circumcision carried a figure of baptism, and baptism carries a figure of that purity which we shall have in perfection in the New Jerusalem. Neither didst Thou speak and work in this language only in the time of Thy prophets; but since Thou spokest in Thy Son, it is [40] so too. How often, how much more often, doth Thy Son call Himself a way, and a light, and a gate, and a vine, and bread, than the Son of God or of man? How much oft’ner doth He exhibit a metaphorical Christ than a real, a literal? This hath occasioned Thine ancient servants, whose delight it was to write after Thy copy, to proceed the same way in their expositions of the Scriptures, and in their composing both of public liturgies and of private prayers to Thee, to make their accesses to Thee in such a kind of language as Thou wast pleased to speak to them, in a figurative, in a metaphorical language, in which manner I am [50] bold to call the comfort which I receive now in this sickness, in the indication of the concoction and maturity thereof, in certain clouds and residences, which the physicians observe, a discovering of land from sea after a long and tempestuous voyage …

Death’s Duel, Selections

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 Majesty’s household, the Doctor’s own Funeral Sermon

To the Reader

This sermon was, by sacred authority, styled the author’s own funeral sermon, most fitly, whether we respect the time or matter. It was preached not many days before his death, as if, having done this, there remained nothing for him to do but to die; and the matter is of death – the occasion and subject of all funeral sermons. It hath been observed of this reverend man, that his faculty in preaching continually increased, and that, as he exceeded others at first, so at last he exceeded himself. This is his last sermon; I will not say it is therefore his best, because [10] all his were excellent. Yet thus much: a dying man’s words, if they concern ourselves, do usually make the deepest impression, as being spoken most feelingly, and with least affectation. Now, whom doth it concern to learn both the danger and benefit of death? Death is every man’s enemy, and intends hurt to all, though to many he be occasion of greatest good. This enemy we must all combat dying, whom he living did almost conquer, having discovered the utmost of his power, the utmost of his cruelty. May we make such use of this and other the like preparatives, that neither death, whensoever it shall come, may [20] seem terrible, nor life tedious, how long soever it shall last.

PSALM 68, verse 20, in fine. And unto God (the Lord) belong the issues of death (i.e. from death).

Buildings stand by the benefit of their foundations that sustain and support them, and of their buttresses that comprehend and embrace them, and of their contignations that knit and unite them: The foundations suffer them not to sink, the buttresses suffer them not to swerve, and the contignation and knitting suffers them not to cleave; the body of our building is in the former part of this verse: it is this, He that is our God is the God of salvation; ad salutes, of salvation in the plural, so it is in the original; the God that gives us spiritual and temporal [10] salvation too. But of this building, the foundation, the buttresses, the contignations, are in this part of the verse which constitutes our text, and in the three divers acceptations of the words amongst our expositors. Unto God the Lord belong the issues from death, for first, the foundation of this building (that our God is the God of all salvation) is laid in this, that unto this God the Lord belong the issues of death; that is, it is in His power to give us an issue and deliverance even then when we are brought to the jaws and teeth of death, and to the lips of that whirlpool, the grave. And so in this acceptation, this exitus mortis, this issue of death is liberatio à morte, a deliverance [20] from death, and this is the most obvious and most ordinary acceptation of these words, and that upon which our translation lays hold, the issues from death. And then, secondly, the buttresses that comprehend and settle this building, that He that is our God is the God of all salvation, are thus raised; unto God the Lord belong the issues of death, that is, the disposition and manner of our death; what kind of issue and transmigration we shall have out of this world, whether prepared or sudden, whether violent or natural, whether in our perfect senses or shaken and disordered by sickness, there is no condemnation [30] to be argued out of that, no judgement to be made upon that, for howsoever they die, precious in His sight is the death of His saints, and with Him are the issues of death; the ways of our departing out of this life are in His hands. And so in this sense of the words, this exitus mortis, the issues of death, is liberatio in morte, a deliverance in death; not that God will deliver us from dying, but that He will have a care of us in the hour of death, of what kind soever our passage be. And in this sense and acceptation of the words, the natural frame and contexture doth well and pregnantly administer unto us. And then, [40] lastly, the contignation and knitting of this building, that He that is our God is the God of all salvations, consists in this, unto this God the Lord belong the issues of death; that is, that this God the Lord having united and knit both natures in one, and being God, having also come into this world in our flesh, He could have no other means to save us, He could have no other issue out of this world, nor return to His former glory, but by death. And so in this sense, this exitus mortis, this issue of death, is liberatio per mortem, a deliverance by death, by the [50] death of this God, our Lord Christ Jesus. …

It was prophesied before, said they, and it is performed now, Christ is risen without seeing corruption. Now, this which is so singularly peculiar to Him, that His flesh should not see corruption, at His second coming, His coming to judgement, shall extend to all that are then alive; their home shall not see corruption, because, as the apostle says, and says as a secret, as a mystery, Behold I show you a mystery, we shall not all sleep (that is, not continue in the state of the dead in the grave), but we shall all be changed in an instant, we shall have a dissolution, [60] and in the same instant a redintegration, a recompacting of body and soul, and that shall be truly a death and truly a resurrection, but no sleeping in corruption; but for us that die now and sleep in the state of the dead, we must all pass this posthume death, this death after death, nay, this death after burial, this dissolution after dissolution, this death of corruption and putrefaction, of vermiculation and incineration, of dissolution and dispersion in and from the grave, when these bodies that have been the children of royal parents and the parents of royal children, must say with Job, Corruption, thou [70] art my father, and to the worm, Thou art my mother and my sister. Miserable riddle, when the same worm must be my mother, and my sister, and myself! Miserable incest, when I must be married to my mother and my sister, and be both father and mother to my own mother and sister, beget and bear that worm which is all that miserable penury; when my mouth shall be filled with dust, and the worm shall feed, and feed sweetly [Job 24:20] upon me; when the ambitious man shall have no satisfaction if the poorest alive tread upon him, nor the poorest receive any contentment in being made equal to princes, for [80] they shall be equal but in dust. … Truly the consideration of this posthume death, this death after burial, that after God (with whom are the issues of death) hath delivered me from the death of the womb, by bringing me into the world, and from the manifold deaths of the world, by laying me in the grave, I must die again in an incineration of this flesh, and in a dispersion of that dust. That that monarch, who spread over many nations alive, must in his dust lie in a corner of that sheet of lead, and there but so long as that lead will last; and that private and retired man, that thought himself his own for ever, and never came forth, must in his dust of the grave be published, [90] and (such are the revolutions of the grave) be mingled with the dust of every highway and of every dunghill, and swallowed in every puddle and pond, this is the most inglorious and contemptible vilification, the most deadly and peremptory nullification of man, that we can consider. …

There we leave you in that blessed dependency, to hang upon Him that hangs upon the cross, there bathe in His tears, there suck at His wounds, and lie down in peace in His grave, till he vouchsafe you a resurrection, and an ascension into that [100] kingdom which He hath prepared for you with the inestimable price of His incorruptible blood. Amen.