The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living and Dying III. OF THE STATE OF SICKNESS, AND THE TEMPTATIONS INCIDENT TO IT, WITH THEIR PROPER REMEDIES Introduction Of the State of Sickness If Adam had stood, he would not always have lived in this world; for this world was not a place capable of affording a dwelling to all those myriads of men and women which should have been born in all the generations of eternal ages, for so it must have been if man had not died at all. It is therefore certain man would have changed his abode: for so did Enoch, and so did Elijah, and so shall the entire world that shall be alive at the Day of Judgment. They shall not die, but they shall change their place and their abode, their duration and their state, and all this without death. Section I Of the First Temptation Proper to the State of Sickness: Impatience Men who are in health are severe exactors of patience at the hands of those who are sick. It will be therefore necessary that we truly understand to what duties and actions the patience of a sick man ought to extend. 1. Sighs and groans, sorrow and prayers, humble complaints and dolorous expressions, are the sad accents of a sick man’s language. For it is not to be expected that a sick man should act a part of patience with a countenance like an orator. 2. Therefore silence and not complaining are no parts of a sick man’s duty, they are not necessary parts of patience. Abel’s blood had a voice, and cried to God; and humility has a voice, and cries so loud to God that it pierces the clouds; and so has every sorrow and every sickness. And when a man cries out, and complains but according to his pain, it cannot be any part of a culpable impatience. 3. Some men’s senses are so subtle, and their perceptions so quick that the same load is double upon them to what it is to another person. And therefore, comparing the expressions of the one with the silence of the other, a different judgment cannot be made concerning their patience. 4. Nature, in some cases, has made crying out to be an entertainment of the Spirit, and an abatement or diversion of the pain. For so did the old champions, when they threw their fatal nets that they might load their enemy with the snares and weights of death; they groaned aloud, and sent forth the anguish of their spirits into the eyes and heart of the man that stood against them. So it is in the endurance of some sharp pains, the complaints and shrieking, the sharp groans and the tender accents send forth the afflicted spirits, and force a way, that they may ease their oppression and their load; that when they have spent some of their sorrows by a burst forth, they may return better able to fortify the heart. Nothing of this is a certain sign, much less an action or part of impatience; and when our blessed Savior suffered his last and sharpest pang of sorrow, he cried out with a loud voice, and resolved to die, and did so. Section II Parts of Patience 1. That we may secure our patience, we must take care that our complaints be without despair. Despair sins against the reputation of God’s goodness, and the efficacy of all our old experience. By despair we destroy the greatest comfort of our sorrows, and turn our sickness into the state of devils and perishing souls. No affliction is greater than despair; for that it is which makes hellfire, and turns a natural evil into an intolerable one; it hinders prayer, and fills up the intervals of sickness with a worse torture; it makes all spiritual arts useless, and the office of spiritual comforters and guides to be impertinent. Against this, hope is to be opposed. And its proper acts, as it relates to the exercise of patience, are a) praying to God for help, b) sending for the guides of souls, and c) using all holy exercises proper to that state which whoever does has not the impatience of despair. 2. Our complaints in sickness must be without murmur. Murmur sins against God’s providence and government. By it we grow rude and, like the fallen angels, displeased at God’s supremacy. Against this is opposed that part of patience, by which a man resigns himself into the hands of God, saying, with old Eli, “It is the Lord, let him do what he will” (1 Sam. 3:18); and, “Your will be done in earth, as it is in heaven” (Matt. 6:10). So the admiring of God’s justice and wisdom does also fit the sick person for receiving God’s mercy, and secures him the more in the grace of God. 3. Our complaints in sickness must be without peevishness. This sins against civility, and that necessary decency which must be used toward the ministers and assistants. By peevishness we increase our own sorrows, and are troublesome to them that stand there to ease ours. Against this are opposed easiness of persuasion and aptness to take counsel. The acts of this part of patience are a) to obey our physicians, b) to not to be ungentle and uneasy to the ministers and nurses that attend us; but to take their kind offices as sweetly as we can, and to bear their indiscretions contentedly and without agitation within, or angry words without. Section III Remedies against Impatience, by Way of Exercise 1. The fittest means to enable us to esteem sickness tolerable is to remember that which indeed makes it so; and that is, that God does minister proper aids and supports to every one of his servants whom he visits with his rod. He knows our needs; he pities our sorrows; he relieves our miseries; he supports our weaknesses; he bids us ask for help, and he promises to give us all that; and he usually gives us more. 2. Prevent the violence and trouble of your spirit by an act of thanksgiving; for which, in the worst of sicknesses, you cannot lack cause, especially if you remember that this pain is not an eternal pain. Bless God for that; but take heed also lest you so order your affairs that you pass from hence to an eternal sorrow. If that is hard, this will be intolerable. But as for the present evil, a few days will end it. 3. Remember that you are a man and a Christian. As the covenant of nature has made it necessary, so the covenant of grace has made it to be chosen by you to be a suffering person. Either you must renounce your religion, or submit to God, and your portion of sufferings. And since our religion has made a covenant of sufferings, and the great business of our lives in sufferings, and most of the virtues of a Christian are passive graces, and all the promises of the gospel are passed upon us through Christ’s cross; we have a necessity upon us to have an equal courage in all the variety of our sufferings. For without a universal fortitude, we can do nothing of our duty. 4. Never say, “I can do no more, I cannot endure this.” For God would not have sent it if he had not known you strong enough to abide it; only he who knows you well already, would also take this occasion to make you know yourself. But it will be fit that you pray to God to give you a discerning spirit, that you may rightly distinguish just necessity from the flattery and fondness of flesh and blood. 5. Propound to your eyes and heart the example of the holy Jesus upon the cross. He endured more for you than you can, either for yourself or him. And remember, that if we are put to suffer, and do suffer in a good cause, or in a good manner; so that, in any sense, our sufferings are conformable to his sufferings; we shall reign together with him. The highway of the cross, which the King of sufferings has trodden before us, is the way to ease, to a kingdom. 6. The very suffering is a title to an excellent inheritance. For God chastens every son whom he receives, and if we are not chastised, we are bastards, and not sons. And be confident, that although God often sends pardon without correction, yet he never sends correction without pardon, unless it is your fault. And therefore take every or any affliction as an earnest of your pardon; and upon condition there may be peace with God, let anything be welcome that he can send as its instrument or condition. Suffer therefore God to choose his own circumstances of adopting you, and be content to be under discipline, when the reward of that is to become a son of God. And if this be the effect or the design of God’s love to you, let it be the occasion of your love to him, and remember that the truth of love is hardly known unless something puts us to pain. 7. Use this as a punishment for your sins, and that God so intends it commonly is certain. If therefore you submit to it, you approve of the divine judgment. And no man can have cause to complain of anything but of himself, if either he believes God to be just, or himself to be a sinner; if he either thinks he has deserved hell, or that this little may be a means to prevent the greater, and bring him to heaven. Section IV Advantages of Sickness 1. I consider one of the great felicities of heaven consists in immunity from sin. Then we shall love God without mixture of malice, then we shall enjoy without envy; then we shall see fuller vessels running over with glory, and crowned with larger circles; and this we shall behold without spilling from our eyes (those vessels of joy and grief) any sign of anger, trouble, or a repining spirit. Our passions shall be pure, our love without fear, our possessions all our own; and all in the inheritance of Jesus, in the richest soil of God’s eternal kingdom. Now half of this reason that makes heaven so happy by being innocent, is also in the state of sickness, making the sorrows of old age smooth, and the groans of a sick heart fit to be joined to the music of angels. And though they sound harsh to our untuned ears and discomposed organs; yet those accents must be in themselves excellent which God loves to hear, and esteems them as prayers and arguments of pity, instruments of mercy and grace, and precursors to glory. In sickness, the soul begins to dress herself for immortality. And first, she unties the strings of vanity that made her upper garment cleave to the world and sit uneasy. The flesh sits uneasy, and dwells in sorrow; and then the spirit feels itself at ease, freed from the petulant solicitations of those passions which in health were as busy and as restless as atoms in the sun. 2. Next to this, the soul, by the help of sickness, knocks off the fetters of pride and vainer complacencies. Then she draws the curtains, stops the light from coming in, and takes the pictures down—those fantastic images of self-love, and gay remembrances of vain opinion. Then the spirit stoops into the sobrieties of humble thoughts, and feels corruption chiding the forwardness of fancy, and allaying the vapors of conceit. She lays aside all her remembrances of applauses, all her ignorant confidences, and cares only to know Christ Jesus, and him crucified; to know him plainly, and with much heartiness and simplicity. 3. Next to these, as the soul is still undressing, she takes off the roughness of her anger and animosities, and receives the oil of mercies and forgiveness; fair interpretations and gentle answers, designs of reconciliation and Christian atonement. Wise men have said that anger sticks to a man’s nature inseparably. But God, who has found out remedies for all diseases, has so ordered the circumstances of man that, in the worst sort of men, anger and great indignation consume and shrivel into little peevishness and uneasy accents of sickness; and in the better and more sanctified, it goes off in prayers, and alms, and solemn reconcilement. 4. Sickness is in some sense eligible, because it is the opportunity and the proper scene of exercising some virtues. It is that agony in which men are tried for a crown. And if we remember what glorious things are spoken of faith: that it is the life of just men, the restitution of the dead in trespasses and sins, the justification of a sinner, the support of the weak, the confidence of the strong, the warehouse of promises, and the title to very glorious rewards; we may easily imagine that it must have in it a work and a difficulty in some proportion answerable to so great effects. But if you will try the excellency, and feel the work of faith; place yourself in a persecution, ride in a storm, let your bones be broken with sorrow, and your eyelids loosened with sickness; let your bread be dipped in tears, and all the daughters of music be brought low; then God tries your faith. Can you then trust his goodness, and believe him to be a Father, when you groan under his rod? Can you rely upon all the strange propositions of Scripture, and be content to perish if they are not true? Can you receive comfort in the discourses of death and heaven, of immortality and the resurrection, of the death of Christ, and conforming to his sufferings? The truth is, there are but two great periods in which faith demonstrates itself to be a powerful and mighty grace: and they are the time of persecution and the approaches of death, for the passive part; and temptation for the active. In the days of pleasure, and the night of pain, faith is to fight, to contend for mastery. And faith overcomes all alluring temptations to sin, and all our weaknesses and fainting in our troubles. In our health and clearer days it is easy to talk of putting our trust in God; we readily trust in him for life when we have fair revenues, and for deliverance when we are newly escaped. But let us come to sit upon the margin of our grave, and let a tyrant lean hard upon our fortunes; let the storm arise, and the keels toss till the cordage crack—then can you believe, when you neither hear, nor see, nor feel anything but objections? This is the proper work of sickness. Faith is then brought into the theater, and so exercised, that if it abides but to the end of the contention, we may see that work of faith which God will hugely crown. The same I say of hope, and of the love of God, and of patience, which is a grace produced from the mixtures of all these. They are virtues that are greedy of danger. God has crowned the memory of Job with a wreath of glory, because he sat upon his dunghill wisely and temperately; and his potsherd and groans, mingled with praises and justifications of God, pleased like an anthem sung by angels in the morning of the resurrection. God could not choose but be pleased with the accents of martyrs, when in their tortures they cried out nothing but “Holy Jesus,” and “Blessed be God.” And they also themselves, who, with a hearty resignation to the divine pleasure, can delight in God’s severe dispensations, will have the transports of cherubim, when they enter into the joys of God. Section V The Second Temptation Proper to the State of Sickness: Fear of Death, with Its Remedies There is nothing that can make sickness unsanctified but the same also will give us cause to fear death. If therefore we so order our affairs and spirits that we do not fear death, our sickness may easily become our advantage; and we can then receive counsel, and consider, and do those acts of virtue that are in that state the proper services of God. Remedies against the Fear of Death, by Way of Consideration 1. God having in this world placed us in a sea, and troubled the sea with a continual storm, has appointed the church for a ship, and religion to be the stern. But there is no haven or port but death. Death is that harbor, to which God has designed every one, that there he may rest from the troubles of the world. Let us look on it as an act of mercy, to prevent many sins, and many calamities of a longer life and lay our heads down softly, and go to sleep without wrangling like disobedient children. 2. No good man was ever thought the more miserable for dying, but much the happier. When men saw the graves of Calatinus, of the Servilii, the Scipios, the Metelli, did ever any man amongst the wisest Romans think them unhappy? And when St. Paul fell under the sword of Nero, and St. Peter died upon the cross, and St. Stephen from an heap of stones was carried into an easier grave, they that made great lamentation over them wept for their own interest, and after the manner of men; but the martyrs were accounted happy, and their days kept solemnly, and their memories preserved in never-dying honors. 3. But when we consider death is not only better than a miserable life, but also that it is a state of advantage, we shall have reason not to double the sharpness of our sickness by our fear of death. To this all those arguments will minister which relate the advantages of the state of separation and resurrection. Section VI Remedies against the Fear of Death, by Way of Exercise 1. He who would willingly be fearless of death must learn to despise the world. He must neither love anything passionately, nor be proud of any circumstance of his life. “O death, how bitter is the remembrance of you to a man who lives at rest in his possessions, to a man who has nothing to vex him, and who has prosperity in all things.” 2. He who would not fear death must strengthen his mind with Christian fortitude. The religion of a Christian does more command fortitude than ever did any institution; for we are commanded to be willing to die for Christ, to die for the brethren; to die rather than give offense or scandal. The effect of which is this: he who is thus instructed to do the necessary parts of his duty, is by the same instrument fortified against death. As he who does his duty needs not fear death, so neither shall he; the parts of his duty are parts of his security. 3. If God should say to us, “Cast yourself into the sea” (as Christ did to Peter, or as God concerning Jonas), “I have provided for you a dolphin, or a whale, or a port, a safety, or deliverance,” would we not be incredulous and pusillanimous persons, if we should tremble to put ourselves into possession? The very duty of resignation and the love of our own interest, are good antidotes against fear. There is no reason, if we are pious, but that we should really desire death, and account it among the good things of God. St. Paul understood it well, when he desired to be dissolved; he well enough knew his own advantages, and pursued them accordingly. But it is certain that he who is afraid of death, either loves this world too much, or dares not trust God for the next.