15 I sleep not day nor night

Scholars have conceived a twofold use of sleep. It is a refreshing of the body in this life, and it is a preparing of the soul for the next.

It is a feast and it is the grace at that feast.

It is our recreation and cheers us, and it is our catechism and instructs us.

We lie down in a hope that we shall rise the stronger and we lie down in a knowledge that we may rise no more.

Sleep is an opiate which gives us rest, but such an opiate as perchance being under it we shall wake no more.

Those who study nature have introduced these secondary and figurative meanings, this emblematical use of sleep as a representation of death.

God perfected his work before nature began. Nature was but God’s apprentice in the first seven days and is now his foreman.

God intended sleep only for the refreshing of Man by bodily rest. He did not intend it as a metaphor for death, for he intended not death itself then. Man having induced death upon himself, God took Mans creature, death, into his hand and mended it.

Death has a fearful form and aspect, so Man is afraid of his own creature. God presents it to him in a familiar, in an agreeable and acceptable form in sleep.

When Man awakes from sleep and says to himself Shall I be the same when I am dead than I was even now when I was asleep he may be ashamed of his melancholic fancy of a death which is so like sleep.

We need sleep to live out our threescore and ten years. We need death to live that life which we cannot out-live.

Since death is our enemy God allows us to defend ourselves against it. We victual ourselves against death twice every day when we eat.

God sweetened death unto us in sleep. We put ourselves into our enemies hands once every day. Sleep is death only in the way that food is life.

This then is the misery of my sickness. Death, mine own creature, is now before mine eyes, but in that form in which God has made it acceptable, in sleep, I cannot see it.

He that has seen his friend die today or knows he shall see him die tomorrow yet will sink into a sleep between.

I cannot sleep. And Oh! if I be entering now into eternity where there shall be no more distinction of hours, why is it that all I can do is count the hours by the chiming of the clock?

Why is none of the heaviness of my heart dispensed into my eyelids that they might fall as my heart does?

And why, since I have lost my delight in all objects, can I not discontinue the faculty of seeing them by closing my eyes in sleep?

Why rather when I am about to enter into that presence where I shall wake continually and never sleep more, why do I not interpret my continual waking here to be a preparation to that?