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O miserable condition of Man!
One minute I was well, now I am ill. I am surprised by a sudden change for the worse and can impute it to no cause, nor call it by any name.
We study health. We think about our food and drink and air and exercises. Our health is a long and regular work.
But in a minute a cannon batters all, overthrows all, demolishes all.
A sickness unprevented for all our diligence, unsuspected for all our curiosity, nay undeserved, seizes us, possesses us, destroys us in an instant.
O miserable condition of Man!
God, who is immortal himself, put a spark of immortality into us. We might have blown it into a flame but blew it out by our first sin.
We beggared ourselves by chasing after false riches and infatuated ourselves by believing false ideas.
So now we not only die but die upon the rack, die by the torment of sickness.
We are pre-afflicted, super-afflicted with fear of sickness before we are even ill.
We are not sure what is wrong with us. One hand asks the other by the pulse, and our eye asks our own urine how we do.
O multiplied misery!
We die and we cannot enjoy death because we die in this torment of sickness.
We do not even wait until the torment comes, but prophesy it and induce that death.
The moment we are ill, we are convinced we are dying.
Man is a little world.
He has these earthquakes in himself, sudden shakings; these lightnings, sudden flashes; these thunders, sudden noises; these eclipses, sudden obfuscations 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 has enough in himself to destroy and execute only himself? To assist the sickness, to anticipate the sickness, to make the sickness the more irremediable by fear?
As if he would make a fire the more vehement by sprinkling water upon the coals, so he wraps a hot fever in cold melancholy lest the fever alone should not destroy him fast enough.
O perplexed discomposition, O riddling distemper, O miserable condition of Man!
