3 The patient takes to his bed

We attribute but one privilege and advantage to Mans body above other moving creatures: that he is not grovelling, but of an erect, an upright form, naturally built and disposed to the contemplation of heaven.

Indeed it is a thankful form, and rewards the soul by carrying it so many foot higher towards Heaven.

Other creatures look to the earth, and even that is no unfit object, no unfit contemplation for Man, for thither he must come. But Man does not stay there forever, so in his natural form he is carried upright in contemplation of that place which is his home, Heaven.

This is Man's prerogative, but what is this dignity worth?

A fever can flip him down, a fever can depose him, a fever can bring that head, which yesterday carried a crown of gold five foot towards a crown of glory, as low as his own foot today.

When God came to breathe into Man the breath of life he found him flat upon the ground. When God comes to withdraw that breath from him again he prepares him to it by laying him flat upon his bed.

Even prison gives the prisoner space to take two or three steps. The Anchorites that barked themselves up in hollow trees and immured themselves in hollow walls, that perverse man who barrelled himself in a tub, all could stand or sit and enjoy some change of posture.

A sick bed is a grave.

Every nights bed is a type of the grave.

At night we tell our servants at what hour we will rise, but on our bed of sickness we cannot tell ourselves at what day, what week, what month. Here the head lies as low as the foot, the Head of the people as low as they, whom those feet trod upon. And that hand that signed pardons is too weak to beg his own.

Strange fetters to the feet, strange manacles to the hands, when the feet and hands are bound so much the faster by how much the sinews and ligaments are slacker.

In the grave I may speak through the stones in the voice of my friends and in the accents of those words which their love may afford my memory. In my sick bed I am mine own ghost and frighten my beholders rather than instruct them.

They think the worst for me now and yet fear worse They give me for dead now and yet wonder how I am when they wake at midnight and ask how I do tomorrow.

Miserable and inhuman posture, where I must practise my lying in the grave by lying still, and not practise my resurrection by rising any more