23 They warn me of the fearful danger of relapsing

In the city, when the bell has rung to tell you to cover your fire and rake up the embers, you may lie down and sleep without fear. But when you have, by physick and diet, raked up the embers of your disease, still there is a fear of relapse.

Even in pleasures and in pains there is ownership.

A man is most affected with that pleasure which is his by former enjoyment and experience. He is most intimidated with those pains which are his by a woeful sense of them in former afflictions.

A covetous person who has preoccupied all his senses with the delight of gathering wonders how any man can have any taste of any pleasure in generosity.

So also in bodily pains.

In a fit of the stone, the patient wonders why any man should call the gout a pain. A man who has felt only toothache is as much afraid of that as anything.

Compassion comes if we have felt in ourselves some small degree of that which we condole in another. But when we have those torments really badly ourselves we tremble at a relapse.

When we must pant through all those fiery heats and sail through all those overflowing sweats,

when we must watch through all those long nights and mourn through all those long days ( days and nights so long as that nature herself shall seem to be perverted and to have put the longest day and the longest night, which should be six months asunder, into one natural unnatural day),
when we must stand again on trial, awaiting the return of physicians from their consultations and not be sure of the same verdict
when we must go the same way over again and not see the same outcome, this is a state, a condition, a calamity in respect of which any other sickness were a convalescence, and any greater, less.


It adds to the affliction that relapses are (and for the most part justly) judged to be self-inflicted.

We are not only passive but active in our own ruin. We do not only stand under a falling house but pull it down upon us.

We are not only executed, (that implies guiltiness) but we are executioners (that implies dishonour) and executioners of ourselves (and that implies impiety).

We no longer have that comfort which we might have in our first sickness, Alas how generally miserable is man and how subject to diseases (for in that it is some degree of comfort that we are but in the state common to all).

In relapse we fall, I say, to self-accusing and self-condemning.

Alas how unprovident and how unthankful to God and his instruments am I in making so ill use of so great benefits, in destroying so soon so long a work, in relapsing by my own fault to that from which they had delivered me.

And so my meditation is fearfully transferred from the body to the mind.

From the consideration of the sickness to that sinful carelessness by which I have occasioned my relapse.

And amongst the many weights that aggravate a relapse this also is one, that a relapse is more violent and more irremediable because it finds the country weakened and depopulated.

Upon a sickness which as yet appears not we cannot fix a fear because we know not what to fear.

Fear is the busiest and irksomest emotion. A relapse still to come into that which is but newly gone, is the nearest object of that fear.