.
When we return to that Meditation, that Man is a World, we find new discoveries.
If man is a world a world, he will be the land and misery the sea.
His misery will be his own. Of happiness he is only a tenant, but of misery the freeholder; of happiness he is only the farmer, but of misery the landlord, the proprietor.
His misery, as the sea, swells above all the hills and reaches to the remotest parts of this earth.
Man is but dust, coagulated and kneaded into earth by tears. His matter is earth, his form misery.
In this world that is mankind the highest ground, the most eminent hills are kings. They are just as subject to sickness as their lowest subject.
A glass is not less brittle because a kings face is represented in it, nor a king the less brittle because God is represented in him.
Kings have physicians continually about them and therefore sicknesses or, the worst of sicknesses, continual fear of it.
Are kings gods? He that called them so cannot flatter. They are gods, but sick gods.
God is presented to us in many human moods. God is called angry, and sorry, and weary, and heavy, but never a sick God, for then he might die like men, as our kings do.
The worst that they could say in reproach and scorn of the gods of the heathen was that perchance they were asleep, but gods that are so sick as that they cannot sleep are in an even worse condition.
A god, and yet need a physician? A Jupiter, and need an Aesculapius? Who must have rhubarb to purge his choler lest he be too angry, and agaric to purge his phlegm lest he be too drowsy?
That as Tertullian says, that God was beholden to man for growing plants and herbs in his garden, so we must say of kings. Their eternity (an eternity of three-score and ten years) is in the apothecarys shop and not in the metaphorical deity.
Deity of kings is better expressed in their humility than in their height. When they descend, as God, to a sharing of their abundances with men according to their necessities, then they are gods.
No man is well that understands not, that values not his being well, that has not a cheerfulness and a joy in it. And whoever has this joy has a desire to communicate his happiness and his joy to others.
For every man loves witnesses of his happiness and the best witnesses are they who have tasted of that in themselves which makes us happy.
It perfects therefore the happiness of kings to confer, to transfer honour and riches and (as they can) health upon those that need them
