5 The Physician comes

Sickness is the greatest misery.

Its greatest misery is solitude, when the infectiousness of the disease deters from coming those who should assist. Even the physician scarce dares come.

To be completely alone is a torment not even threatened in hell.

Neither God nor Nature will permit a vacuum. And so solitude is unnatural, not loved by God.

When I am dead and my body might infect the doctors have a remedy: they may bury me.
But when I am but sick and I might infect they have no remedy but their absence and my isolation.

It is an excuse to them that are great and pretend and yet are loath to come. It is an inhibition to those who would truly come, because they may be made carriers of the infection to others by their coming.

And it is an excommunication upon the patient and separates him from all civility but charity.

A long sickness will weary friends at last, but a pestilential sickness averts them from the beginning.

Now there is but one God though there is a plurality of persons in God. All his external actions testify a love of society and communion.

In heaven there are orders of angels and armies of martyrs and in that house many mansions.
In earth there are families, cities, churches, colleges, all plural things.

And lest either of these should not be company enough there is an association of the two, a communion of saints which makes the militant and triumphant church one parish, so that Christ was not out of his diocese when he was upon earth nor out of his temple when he was in our flesh

God saw all that he had made was good, but recognised a defect when he saw that it was not good for man to be alone. Therefore he made him a helper, one that could help him to increase the number and give him her own, and more, company.

Angels, who do no propagate nor multiply, were made at first in an abundant number, and so were stars.

But for the things of this world their blessing was increase; for I think, I need not ask leave to think, that there is no phoenix, nothing singular, nothing alone.

Scientists are so far from thinking that there is anything singular in this world as that they will scarce think that this world itself is singular, but that every planet and every star is another world like this.

They find reason to conceive not only a plurality in every species in the world but a plurality of worlds, so that the abhorrers of solitude are not solitary. God and nature agree in this.

Now some men become hermits in pursuit of their religion. They retire completely from the world, do good to no man, converse with no man.

God has two testaments, two wills, but this idea of religion is a a codicil, and not of his will; not in the body of his testaments but interlined by others, that the way to the communion of saints should be by such a solitude as excludes all doing of good here.

That is a disease of the mind, as the height of an infectious disease of the body is solitude, to be left alone. For this makes an infectious bed equal, nay worse than a grave.

Though in both I be equally alone, in my bed I know it and feel it and shall not in my grave. And this too, that in my bed my soul is still in an infectious body and shall not in my grave be so