The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living and Dying I. A GENERAL PREPARATION TOWARD A HOLY AND BLESSED DEATH, BY WAY OF CONSIDERATION Section I Consideration of the Vanity and Shortness of Man’s Life A man is a bubble (said the Greek proverb), which Lucian represents with advantages, to this purpose, saying all the world is a storm, and men rise up in their several generations like bubbles descending from God and the dew of heaven, from a tear and drop of man, from nature and providence. And some of these instantly sink into the deluge of their first parent, and are hidden in a sheet of water, having had no other business in the world, but to be born, that they might be able to die. Others float up and down two or three turns, and suddenly disappear, and give their place to others. And they who live the longest upon the face of the waters are in perpetual motion, restless and uneasy, and being crushed with a great drop of a cloud, sink into flatness and a froth; the change not being great, it being hardly possible it should be more a nothing than it was before. So is every man: he is born in vanity and sin; he comes into the world like morning mushrooms, soon thrusting up their heads into the air, and conversing with their kindred of the same production, and as soon they turn into dust and forgetfulness; some of them without any other interest in the affairs of the world, but that they made their parents a little glad, and very sorrowful. Others ride longer in the storm; it may be until seven years of vanity are expired, and then peradventure the sun shines hot upon their heads, and they fall into the shades below, into the darkness of the grave. But if the bubble stands the shock of a bigger drop, and outlives the chances of a child, then the young man dances like a bubble, empty and gay, and shines like the image of a rainbow, which has no substance, and whose very imagery and colors are fantastical; and so he dances out of the gaiety of his youth, and is all the while in a storm, and endures, only because he is not knocked on the head by a drop of bigger rain, or crushed by the pressure of a load of indigested meat, or quenched by the disorder of an ill-placed humor. And to preserve a man alive in the midst of so many chances and hostilities, is as great a miracle as to create him; to preserve him from rushing into nothing, were equally the issues of an Almighty power. Therefore the wise men of the world have contended who shall best fit man’s condition with words, signifying his vanity and short abode. Homer calls a man a leaf, the smallest, the weakest piece of a short-lived, unsteady plant. Pindar calls him the dream of a shadow; another, the dream of the shadow of smoke. But St. James spoke by a more excellent spirit, saying, “Our life is but a vapor” (James 4:14), namely, drawn from the earth by a celestial influence, made of smoke, or the lighter parts of water; tossed with every wind, moved by the motion of a superior body; without virtue in itself, lifted up on high, or left below, according as it pleases the sun its foster-father. But it is lighter yet. It is but appearing; a fantastic vapor, an apparition, nothing real. It is not so much as a mist, not the matter of a shower, or substantial enough to make a cloud. You cannot have a word that can signify a truer nothing. And yet the expression is made one degree more diminutive: a vapor, phantasm, or a mere appearance, and this but for a little while; the very dream, the phantasm disappears in a small time, like the shadow that departs, or like a tale that is told, or as a dream when one awakes. A man is so vain, so unfixed, so perishing a creature that he cannot long last in the scene of fancy. A man goes off, and is forgotten like the dream of a distracted person. The sum of all is this: you are a man, than whom there is not in the world any greater instance of lights and shadows, of misery and folly, of laughter and tears, of groans and death. And because this consideration is of great usefulness to many purposes of wisdom—all the succession of time, all the changes in nature, all the varieties of light and darkness, the thousand thousands of accidents in the world, and every contingency to every man—to every creature our funeral sermon does preach, and calls us to look and see how the old sexton Time throws up the earth, and digs a grave where we must lay our sins or our sorrows, and sow our bodies, till they rise again in a fair or in an intolerable eternity. Every revolution that the sun makes about the world, divides between life and death; and death possesses both those portions by the next day; and we are dead to all those months that we have already lived, and we shall never live them over again. And still God makes little periods of our age. First we change our world, when we come from the womb to feel the warmth of the sun. Then we sleep and enter into the image of death, in which state we are unconcerned with all the changes of the world. And if our mothers or our nurses die, or a wild boar destroys our vineyards, or our king is sick, we regard it not; but during that state, we are as if our eyes were closed with the clay that weeps in the heart of the earth. At the end of seven years, our teeth fall and die before us, representing a formal prologue to the tragedy; and still every seven years it is odds but we shall finish the last scene. And when nature, or chance, or vice takes our body in pieces, weakening some parts and loosing others, we taste the grave and the solemnities of our own funerals, first in those parts that ministered to vice, and next in those that served for ornament; and in a short time even those that served necessity become useless, and entangled like the wheels of a broken clock. Baldness is but a dressing to our funerals, the proper ornament of mourning, and of a person entered very far into the regions of death. And we have many more of the same signification: grey hairs, rotten teeth, dim eyes, trembling joints, short breath, stiff limbs, wrinkled skin, short memory, decayed appetite. Every day’s necessity calls for a reparation of that portion which death fed on all night, when we lay in his lap, and slept in his outer chambers. The very spirits of a man prey upon the daily portion of bread and flesh, and every meal is a rescue from one death, and lays up for another. And while we think a thought we die; and the clock strikes, and reckons on our portion of eternity. We form our words with the breath of our nostrils; we have the less to live upon for every word we speak. Thus nature calls us to meditate on death by those things that are the instruments of acting it. And God, by all the variety of his providence, makes us see death everywhere, in all variety of circumstances, and dressed up for all the fancies and the expectation of every single person. Nature has given us one harvest every year, but death has two: the spring and autumn send throngs of men and women to graveyards; and all summer long men are recovering from their evils of the spring, till the dog days come, and then the Sirian star makes the summer deadly; and the fruits of autumn are laid up for all the year’s provision, and the man who gathers them eats and indulges, and dies and needs them not, and he is laid up for eternity; and he who escapes till winter, only stays for another opportunity, which the distempers of that quarter minister to him with great variety. Thus death reigns in all the portions of our time. The autumn with its fruits provides disorders for us, and the winter’s cold turns them into sharp diseases, and the spring brings flowers to strew our hearse, and the summer gives green turf and brambles to hind upon our graves. Fevers and excess, cold and chills, are the four quarters of the year, and all minister to death; and you can go nowhere but you tread upon a dead man’s bones. The wild fellow in Petronious, who escaped upon a broken table from the furies of a shipwreck, as he was sunning himself upon the rocky shore, espied a man rolling upon his floating bed of waves, ballasted with sand in the folds of his garment, and carried by his civil enemy the sea toward the shore to find a grave. And it cast him into some sad thoughts; that, peradventure, this man’s wife, in some part of the continent, safe and warm, was looking for the good man’s return next month; or, it might be, his son knew nothing of the tempest; or his father was thinking of that affectionate kiss which still was warm upon the good old man’s cheek ever since he took a kind farewell, and he was weeping with joy to think how blessed he should be when his beloved boy returned into the circle of his father’s arms. These are the thoughts of mortals; this is the end and sum of all their designs. A dark night and an ill guide, a boisterous sea and a broken cable, a hard rock and a rough wind dashed in pieces the fortune of a whole family; and they who shall weep loudest for the accident, are not yet entered into the storm, and yet have suffered shipwreck. Then, looking upon the carcass, he knew it, and found it to be the master of the ship, who the day before cast up the accounts of his patrimony and his trade, and named the day when he thought to be at home. See how the man swims who was so angry two days since; his passions are becalmed with the storm, his accounts cast up, his cares at an end, his voyage done, and his gains are the strange events of death which, whether they be good or evil, the men who are alive seldom trouble themselves. But seas alone do not break our vessels in pieces; everywhere we may be shipwrecked. A valiant general, when he is to reap the harvest of his crowns and triumphs, fights unsuccessfully, or falls into a fever with joy and wine, and changes his laurel into cypress, his triumphal chariot to a hearse; dying the night before he was appointed to perish in the drunkenness of his festival joys. It was a sad arrest of the feasts of the French court, when their king (Henry II) was killed really by the sportive image of a fight. And many brides have died under the hands of maidens dressing them for uneasy joys. Some have been paying their vows, and giving thanks for a prosperous return to their own houses, and the roof has descended upon their heads, and turned their loud religion into the deeper silence of a grave. And how many teeming-mothers have rejoiced over their swelling wombs, and pleased themselves in becoming the channels of blessing to a family; and the midwife has quickly bound their heads and feet, and carried them forth to burial? Or else the birthday of an heir has seen the coffin of the father brought into the house, and the divided mother has been forced to travail twice, with a painful birth, and a sadder death. There is no state, no occasion, no circumstance of our life, but it has been soured by some sad instance of a dying friend. A friendly meeting often ends in some sad mischance, and makes an eternal parting. And when the poet Eschylus was sitting under the walls of his house, an eagle hovering over his bald head mistook it for a stone, and let fall his oyster, hoping there to break the shell, but pierced the poor man’s skull. Death meets us everywhere, and is procured by every instrument, and in all chances, and enters in at many doors: by violence and secret influence; by the aspect of a star and the damp of a mist; by the emissions of a cloud, and the meeting of a vapor; by the fall of a chariot and the stumbling at a stone; by a full meal or an empty stomach; by watching at the wine or by watching at prayers; by the sun or the moon; by a heat or a cold; by sleepless nights or sleeping days; by water frozen into the hardness and sharpness of a dagger, or water thawed into the floods of a river; by a hair or a raisin; by violent motion or sitting still; by God’s mercy or God’s anger; by everything in providence, and everything in manners; by everything in nature and everything in chance. We take pains to heap up things useful to our life, and get our death in the purchase; and the person is snatched away, and the goods remain. And all this is the law and constitution of nature; it is a punishment to our sins, the unalterable event of providence, and the decree of heaven. The chains that confine us to this condition are strong as destiny, and immutable as the eternal laws of God. I have conversed with some men who rejoiced in the death or calamity of others, and accounted it as a judgment upon them for being against them; but within the revolution of a few months, the same men met with a more uneasy and unpleasant death. When I saw this, I wept, and was afraid; for I knew that it must be so with all men; for we also shall die, and end our quarrels and contentions by passing to a final sentence. Section II The Consideration Reduced to Practice It will be very material to our noblest purposes, if we represent this scene of change and sorrow a little more dressed up in circumstances, for so we shall be more apt to practice those rules, the doctrine of which is consequent to this consideration. It is a mighty change that is made by the death of every person, and it is visible to us who are alive. Reckon but from the sprightliness of youth, and the fair cheeks and full eyes of childhood; from the vigorousness and strong flexure of the joints of five and twenty; to the hollowness and dead paleness, the loathsomeness and horror of a three days burial, and we shall perceive the distance to be very great and very strange. But so have I seen a rose newly springing from the clefts of its hood, and at first it was fair as the morning, and full with the dew of heaven, as a lamb’s fleece; but when a ruder breath had forced open its virgin modesty, and dismantled its unripe retirements, it began to put on darkness, and decline to softness and the symptoms of a sickly age. It bowed the head, and broke its stalk, and at night, having lost some of its leaves and all its beauty, it fell into the portion of weeds. The same is the portion of every man and every woman; the heritage of worms and serpents, rottenness and cold dishonor, and our beauty so changed, that our acquaintance quickly knows us not; and that change is mingled with so much horror, that those who six hours ago tended upon us, either with charitable or ambitious services, cannot without some regret stay in the room alone where the body lies stripped of its life and honor. I have read of a fair young German gentleman, who, living, often refused to be pictured, but put off the importunity of his friends’ desire, by giving way that after a few days’ burial they might send a painter to his vault, and, if they saw cause for it, draw the image of his death unto the life. They did so, and found his face half eaten, and his midriff and backbone full of serpents; and so he stands pictured among his armed ancestors. So does the fairest beauty change, and it will be as bad with you and me; and then, what servants shall we have to wait upon us in the grave? What friends to visit us? What officious people to cleanse away the moist and unwholesome cloud reflected upon our faces from the sides of the weeping vaults, which are the longest weepers for our funeral? Rules and Considerations Regarding the Shortness of Life This discourse will be useful, if we consider and practice the following rules and considerations: 1. All the rich and all the covetous men in the world will perceive, and all the world will perceive for them, that it is but an ill recompense for their cares, that by this time all that shall be left will be this, that the neighbors shall say he died a rich man. And yet his wealth will not profit him in the grave, but hugely swell the sad account. And he who kills the Lord’s people with unjust or ambitious wars, shall have this character, that he threw away all the days of his life; that one year might be reckoned with his name, and computed by his reign or consulship. And many men, by great labors and affronts, many indignities and crimes, labor only for a pompous epitaph and a loud title upon their marble; while those, into whose possessions their heirs or kindred are entered, are forgotten, and lie as unregarded as their ashes, and without consequence or relation, as the turf upon the face of their graves. A man may read a sermon, the best that ever man preached, if he shall but enter into the sepulchers of kings. Where our kings have been crowned, their ancestors lie interred, and they must walk over their forefather’s head to take his crown. There is an acre sown with royal seed, the copy of the greatest change, from rich to naked, from ceiled roofs to arched coffins, from living like gods to die like men. There is enough to cool the flames of lust, to abate the heights of pride, to appease the itch of covetous desires, to sully and dash out the dissembling colors of a lustful, artificial, and imaginary beauty. There the warlike and the peaceful, the fortunate and the miserable, the beloved and the despised princes mingle their dust, and pay down their symbol of mortality, and tell all the world that, when we die, our ashes shall be equal to kings, and our accounts easier, and our pains for our crowns shall be less. To my apprehension it is a sad record which is left by Athenaeus concerning Ninus, the great Assyrian monarch, whose life and death is summed up in these words: Ninus, the Assyrian, had an ocean of gold, and other riches more than the sand in the Caspian Sea. He was most valiant to eat and drink, and having mingled his wines, he threw the rest upon the stones. This man is dead: behold his sepulcher, and now hear where Ninus is. Sometime I was Ninus, and drew the breath of a living man, but now am nothing but clay. I have nothing but what I did eat, and what I served to myself in lust. That was and is all my portion. The wealth with which I was [esteemed] blessed, my enemies meeting together shall bear away. I am gone to hell; and when I went there, I neither carried gold, nor horse, nor silver chariot. I who wore a miter am now a little heap of dust. I know not anything that can better represent the evil condition of a wicked man. From the greatest secular dignity to dust and ashes his nature bears him; and from there to hell his sins carry him, and there he shall be forever under the dominion of chains and devils, wrath and an intolerable calamity. This is the reward of an unsanctified condition, and greatness ill gotten or ill administered. 2. Let no man extend his thoughts, or let his hopes wander toward far distant events. This day is mine and yours, but “we know not what we shall be tomorrow”; and every morning creeps out of a dark cloud, leaving behind it an ignorance and silence deep as midnight, and undiscerned as are the phantoms that make a child smile. So we cannot discern what comes hereafter, unless we had a light from heaven brighter than the vision of an angel, even the spirit of prophecy. Without revelation we cannot tell whether we shall eat tomorrow, or whether an infection shall choke us. And it is written, in the unrevealed folds of divine predestination, that many who are this day alive shall tomorrow be laid upon the cold earth, and the women shall weep over their shroud, and dress them for their funeral. Whatever is disposed to happen, by the order of natural causes, or civil counsels, may be rescinded by a peculiar decree of providence, or be prevented by the death of the interested persons; who, while their hopes are full, and the work brought forward, and the sickle put into the harvest, even then if they put forth their hand to an event that stands but at the door, at that door their body may be carried forth to burial, before the expectation shall enter into fruition. 3. As our hopes must be confined, so must our designs. Let us not project long designs; the work of our soul is cut short, sweet, and plain, and fitted to the small portions of our shorter life. And as we must not trouble our inquiry, so neither must we intricate our labor and purposes, with what we shall never enjoy. This rule does not forbid us to plant orchards that shall feed our nephews with their fruit. For by such provisions we do charity to our relatives. But such projects are reproved as discompose our present duty by long and future designs; such as, by casting our labors to events at a distance, make us less remember our death standing at the door. It is fit for a man to work for his day’s wages, or to contrive for the hire of a week, or to lay a train to make provisions for such a time as is within our eye, and in our duty, and within the usual periods of man’s life; for whatsoever is necessary is also prudent. But while we plot and busy ourselves in the toils of an ambitious war, or the levies of a great estate; night enters in upon us, and tells the entire world how like fools we lived, and how miserably we died. Consider how imprudent a person he is who disposes of ten years to come, when he is not lord of tomorrow. 4. Though we must not look so far off, and pry abroad, yet we must be busy near at hand; we must, with all arts of the spirit, seize upon the present, because it passes from us while we speak, and because in it all our certainty consists. We must take our waters as out of a torrent and sudden shower, which will quickly cease dropping from above, and quickly cease running in our channels here below. This instant will never return again, and yet it may be this instant will declare or secure a whole eternity. The old Greeks and Romans taught us the prudence of this rule; but Christianity teaches us the religion of it. They so seized upon the present, that they would lose nothing of the day’s pleasure: “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we shall die.” That was their philosophy; and at their solemn feasts they would talk of death to heighten the present drinking, as knowing the drink that was poured upon their graves would be cold and without relish. Christianity turns this into religion. For he who by a present and a constant holiness secures the present, and makes it useful to his noblest purposes, turns his condition to his best advantage, by making his unavoidable fate become his necessary religion. 5. Since we stay not here, being people but of a day’s abode, and our age is like that of a fly, and contemporary with a gourd; we must look somewhere else for an abiding city, a place in another country to fix our house in, whose walls and foundation is God, where we must find rest, or else be restless forever. For whatsoever ease we can have or fancy here is shortly to be changed into sadness or tediousness; it goes away too soon, like the periods of our life, or stays too long, like the sorrows of a sinner. Its own weariness, or a contrary disturbance, is its load; or it is eased by its revolution into vanity and forgetfulness. And where either there is sorrow or an end of joy, there can be no true felicity; which, because it must be had in some period of our duration, we must carry up our affections to the mansions prepared for us above, where eternity is the measure, felicity is the state, angels are the company, the Lamb is the light, and God is the portion and inheritance. Section III Rules and Spiritual Parts of Lengthening Our Days 1. In the accounts of a man’s life we do not reckon that portion of days in which we were shut up in the prison of the womb; we tell our years from the day of our birth. And the same reason that makes our reckoning to stay so long, says also that then it begins too soon. For then we are indebted to others to make the account for us. For we know not of a long time, whether we are alive or not, having but some little approaches and symptoms of life. To feed, and sleep, and move a little—and imperfectly—is the state of an unborn child; and when he is born, he does no more for a good while. And what is it that shall make him be esteemed to live the life of a man? And when shall that account begin? For we should loathe having the accounts of our age taken by the measures of a beast. And fools and distracted persons are reckoned as civilly dead; they are no parts of the commonwealth, nor subject to laws, but secured by them in charity, and kept from violence as a man keeps his ox. And a third part of our life is spent before we enter into a higher order, into the state of a man. 2. Neither must we think that the life of a man begins when he can feed himself, or walk alone; when he can fight, or beget his own; for so he is contemporary with a camel or a cow. But he is first a man when he comes to a steady use of reason, according to his proportion; and when that is, all the world of men cannot tell precisely. Some are called at age at fourteen, some at twenty-one, some never; but all men late enough, for the life of a man comes upon him slowly and insensibly. But as when the sun approaches toward the gates of the morning, he first opens a little eye of heaven and sends away the spirits of darkness, and gives light to a woodcock, and calls up the lark to mattens; and by and by gilds the fringes of a cloud, and peeps over the eastern hills, thrusting out his golden horns, like those which decked the brow of Moses, when he was forced to wear a veil, because he had seen the face of God. And still while a man tells the story, the sun gets up higher, till he shows a fair face and a full light, and then he shines one whole day, under a cloud often, and sometimes weeping great and little showers, and sets quickly. So is a man’s reason and his life. He first begins to perceive himself to see or taste, making little reflections upon his actions of sense, and can discourse of flies and dogs, shells and play, horses and liberty. But when he is strong enough to enter into arts, and little institutions, he is at first entertained with trifles and impertinent things, not because he needs them, but because his understanding is no larger; and little images of things are laid before him, like a cock-boat to a whale, only to play with it. But before a man comes to be wise, he is half dead with gouts and consumptions, with inflammations and aches, with sore eyes and a worn-out body. So that if we must not reckon the life of a man but by the accounts of his reason, it is long before his soul be dressed; and he is not to be called a man without a wise and an adorned soul, a soul at least furnished with what is necessary to his well-being. But by that time his soul is thus furnished, his body is decayed; and then you can hardly reckon him to be alive, when his body is possessed by so many degrees of death. 3. But there is yet another arrest. At first he lacks strength of body, and then he lacks the use of reason, and when that is come, it is ten to one but he stops by the impediments of vice, and lacks the strengths of the spirit. And now let us consider what that thing is which we call years of discretion. The young man has passed his tutors, and arrived at the bondage of a despicable spirit; he has run from discipline, and is let loose to passion. The man by this time has wit enough to choose his vice, to court his mistress, to talk confidently, ignorantly, and perpetually; to despise his betters, to deny nothing to his appetite, to do things of which when he is indeed a man he must forever be ashamed. For this is all the discretion that most men show in the first stage of their manhood: they can discern good from evil; and they prove their skill by leaving all that is good, and wallowing in the evils of folly and an unbridled appetite. By this time the young man has contracted vicious habits, and is a beast in manners, and therefore it will not be fitting to reckon this the beginning of his life. He is a fool in his understanding, and that is a sad death; and he is dead in trespasses and sins, and that is a sadder. So he has no life but a natural one, the life of a beast or a tree; in all other capacities he is dead. He neither has the intellectual nor the spiritual life, neither the life of a man nor of a Christian; and this sad truth lasts too long. For old age seizes upon most men while they still retain the minds of boys, doing actions from principles of great folly and a mighty ignorance, admiring things useless and hurtful, and filling up all the dimensions of their abode with empty affairs, being at leisure to attend no virtue. They cannot pray, because they are busy, and because they are passionate. They cannot communicate, because they have quarrels and intrigues of perplexed causes; and therefore they cannot attend to the things of God; little considering that they must find a time to die in; that when death comes, they must be at leisure for that. Such men are like sailors loosing from a port, and tossed immediately with a perpetual tempest, lasting till their cordage crack, and either they sink, or return back again to the same place. They did not make a voyage, though they were long at sea. The business and impertinent affairs of most men steal all their time, and they are restless in a foolish motion. But this is not the progress of a man; he is no further advanced in the course of life, though he reckon many years; for still his soul is childish, and trifling like an untaught boy. Means of Lengthening Our Days If the parts of this sad complaint find their remedy, we have by the same means cured the evils and the vanity of a short life. Therefore, 1. Be infinitely curious that you do not set back your life in the accounts of God by the intermingling criminal actions or contracting vicious habits. There are some vices that carry a sword in their hand, and cut a man off before his time. There is a sword of the Lord, and there is a sword of a man, and there is a sword of the devil. Lust or rage, ambition or revenge, is a sword of Satan put into the hands of a man. These are the destroying angels; sin is the Apollyon, the destroyer that has gone out, not from the Lord but from the tempter; and we hug the poison, and twist willingly with the vipers, till they bring us into the regions of an irrecoverable sorrow. We use to reckon persons as good as dead, if they have lost their limbs and their teeth, and are confined to a hospital, and converse with none but surgeons and physicians, mourners and divines, those dressers of bodies and souls for funeral. But it is worse when the soul, the principle of life, is employed wholly in the offices of death. And that man was worse than dead of whom Seneca tells, that being a rich fool, when he was lifted up from the baths, and set into a soft couch, asked his slaves, “Do I now sit?” The beast was so drowned in sensuality, and the death of his soul, that whether he did sit or not, he was to believe another. Idleness and every vice is as much of death as a long disease is, or the expense of ten years. “She who lives in pleasures is dead while she lives,” says the apostle; and it is the style of the Spirit concerning wicked persons, “They are dead in trespasses and sins” (Eph. 2:1). For as every sensual pleasure, and every day of idleness and useless living, lops off a little branch from our short lives, so every deadly sin and every habitual vice quite destroys us; but innocence leaves us in our natural portions, and perfect period. We lose nothing of our life, if we lose nothing of our soul’s health; and therefore he who would live a full age must avoid a sin, as he would decline the regions of death and the dishonors of the grave. 2. If we would have our life lengthened, let us begin with haste to live in the accounts of reason and religion, and then we shall have no reason to complain that our abode on earth is so short. Many men find it long enough, and indeed it is so to all senses. But when we spend in waste what God has given us in plenty, when we sacrifice our youth to folly, our manhood to lust and rage, our old age to covetousness and irreligion, not beginning to live till we are to die, designing that time to virtue, which indeed is infirm to everything and profitable to nothing, then we make our lives short, and lust runs away with all the vigorous part of it, and pride and animosity steal the manly portion, and craftiness and interest possess old age; we spend as if we had too much time, and knew not what to do with it. We fear everything, like weak and silly mortals, and desire strangely and greedily, as if we were immortal. We complain our life is short, and yet we throw away much of it, and are weary of many of its parts. We complain the day is long, and the night is long, and we want company, and seek out arts to drive the time away, and then weep because it is gone too soon. Our life is too short to serve the ambition of a haughty prince, or a usurping rebel; our time too little to purchase great wealth, to satisfy the pride of a boastful fool, to trample upon all the enemies of our just or unjust interest. Taking Account of Our Lives But for the obtaining of virtue, for the actions of religion, God gives us time sufficient; if we make the outgoings of the morning and evening, that is, our infancy and old age, to be taken into the computations of a man; which we may see in the following particulars: 1. If our childhood, being first consecrated by a forward baptism, be seconded by a holy education and a complying obedience; if our youth be chaste and temperate, modest and industrious, proceeding through a prudent and sober manhood to a religious old age; then we have lived our whole duration, and shall never die, but be changed in a just time to a better and an immortal life. 2. If, besides the ordinary returns of our prayers, periodical and festival solemnities, and our seldom communions, we would allow to religion and the studies of wisdom those great shares that are trifled away upon vain sorrow, foolish mirth, troublesome ambition, busy covetousness, watchful lust, impertinent love affairs, and balls, reveling, and banquets, all that which was spent viciously and all that time that lay fallow and without employment, our life would quickly amount to a great sum. It is a vast work that any man may do, if he never should be idle. And it is a huge way that a man may go in virtue, if he never should go out of his way. And he who perpetually reads good books, if his parts be answerable, will have a huge stock of knowledge. It is so in all things else. Strive not to forget your time, and suffer none of it to pass undiscerned; and then measure your life, and tell me how you find the measure of its continuance. However, the time we live is worth the money we pay for it; and therefore it is not to be thrown away. 3. When vicious men are dying, and seared with the alarming truths of an evil conscience, they would give the entire world for a year, for a month. Indeed, we read of some that called out with amazement, “Truce but till the morning”; and if a year, or some few months were given, those men think they could do miracles in it. And let us a while suppose what Dives would have done, if he had been loosed from the pains of hell, and permitted to live on earth one year. Would all the pleasures of the world have kept him one hour from the temple? Would he not perpetually have been under the hands of priests, or at the feet of the doctors, or by Moses’ chair, or attending as near the altar as he could get, or relieving poor Lazarus, or praying to God, and crucifying all his sins? I have read of a melancholic person who saw hell but in a dream or vision, and the amazement was such, that he would have chosen ten times to die rather than feel again so much horror; and it cannot be supposed but that such a person would spend a year in such holiness, that the religion of a few months would equal the devotion of many years. Let us but compute the proportions. If we should spend all our years of reason so as such a person would spend that one, can it be thought that life would be short and trifling in which we had performed such a religion, served God with so much holiness, mortified sin with such great labor, purchased virtue at such a rate and so rare an industry? It must be that such a man must die when he ought to die, and be like ripe and pleasant fruit falling from a fair tree, and gathered into baskets for the planter’s use. He who has done all his business, and is born again to a glorious hope by the seed of a divine Spirit, can never die too soon, nor live too long. Xerxes wept sadly when he saw his army of 2,300,000 men, because he considered that within a hundred years all that army would be dust and ashes. And yet, as Seneca well observes, he was the man who would bring them to their graves; and he consumed all that army in two years, for whom he feared after a hundred. Just so do we all. We complain that within thirty or forty years, a little more, or a great deal less, we shall descend again into the depths of our mother, and that our life is too short for any great employment; and yet we throw away thirty-five years of our forty, and the remaining five we divide between art and nature, civility and custom, necessity and convenience, prudent counsels and religion. But the portion of the last is little and contemptible, and yet that little is all that we can prudently account of our lives. We bring that fate and that death near us, of whose approach we are so sadly apprehensive. 4. In taking the accounts of your life, do not reckon by great distances, and by the periods of pleasure, or the satisfactions of your hopes, or the stating of your desires; but let every day and hour pass with observation. He who reckons he has lived but so many harvests, thinks they come not often enough, and that they go away too soon. Some lose the day with longing for the night, and the night in waiting for the day. Hope and fanciful expectations spend much of our lives; and, while with passion we look for a coronation, or the death of an enemy, or a day of joy, passing from fancy to possession without any intermediate notices; we throw away a precious year, and use it but as the burden of our time, fit to be pared off and thrown away; that we may come at those little pleasures which first steal our hearts, and then steal our lives. 5. A strict course of piety is the way to prolong our lives in the natural sense, and to add to the number of our years; and sin is sometimes by natural causality, very often by the anger of God, and the divine judgment, a cause of sudden and untimely death. Concerning which I shall add nothing but only the observation of Epiphanius, that for 3,332 years, there was not one example of a son who died before his father, but the course of nature was kept—that he who was first born did first die (I speak of natural death, and therefore Abel cannot be opposed to this observation)—till Terah, the father of Abraham, taught the people a new religion, to make images of clay and worship them.* Concerning him it was first remarked that “Haran died before his father Terah in the land of his nativity” (Gen. 11:28). God, by an unheard-of judgment, punished his new-invented crime by the untimely death of his son. 6. But if I shall describe a living man, a man who has that life that distinguishes him from a fool or a bird, that which gives him a capacity next to angels; we shall find that even a good man lives not long, because it is long before he is born to this life, and longer yet before he has a man’s growth. “He who can look upon death, and see its face with the same countenance with which he hears its story; who can endure all the labors of his life with his soul supporting his body; who can equally despise riches when he has them, and when he has them not; who does nothing for opinion sake, but everything for conscience, being as curious of his thoughts as of his acting in markets and theaters, and is as much in awe of himself as of a whole assembly; he who knows God looks on, and who contrives his secret affairs as in the presence of God and his holy angels; who loves his country, and obeys his prince, and desires and endeavors nothing more than that he may do honor to God”; this person may reckon his life to be the life of a man, because these are such things which fools and children, and birds and beasts cannot have; these are therefore the actions of life, because they are the seeds of immortality. That day in which we have done some excellent thing, we may as truly reckon to be added to our lives, as were the fifteen years to the days of Hezekiah. *We learn from Joshua 24:2 that the progenitors of Abraham, and particularly Terah, served other gods in Ur of the Chaldees, but there appears to be no proof that he was the introducer of idolatry and image-worship in that country.