1 We Study Health

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O miserable condition of Man!

One minute I was well, now I am ill. I am surprised by a sudden change for the worse and can impute it to no cause, nor call it by any name.

We study health. We think about our food and drink and air and exercises. Our health is a long and regular work.

But in a minute a cannon batters all, overthrows all, demolishes all.

A sickness unprevented for all our diligence, unsuspected for all our curiosity, nay undeserved, seizes us, possesses us, destroys us in an instant.

O miserable condition of Man!

God, who is immortal himself, put a spark of immortality into us. We might have blown it into a flame but blew it out by our first sin.

We beggared ourselves by chasing after false riches and infatuated ourselves by believing false ideas.

So now we not only die but die upon the rack, die by the torment of sickness.

We are pre-afflicted, super-afflicted with fear of sickness before we are even ill.

We are not sure what is wrong with us. One hand asks the other by the pulse, and our eye asks our own urine how we do.

O multiplied misery!

We die and we cannot enjoy death because we die in this torment of sickness.

We do not even wait until the torment comes, but prophesy it and induce that death.

The moment we are ill, we are convinced we are dying.

Man is a little world.

He has these earthquakes in himself, sudden shakings; these lightnings, sudden flashes; these thunders, sudden noises; these eclipses, sudden obfuscations and darkenings of his senses; these blazing stars, sudden fiery exhalations; these rivers of blood, sudden red waters.

Is he a world to himself only therefore, that he has enough in himself to destroy and execute only himself? To assist the sickness, to anticipate the sickness, to make the sickness the more irremediable by fear?

As if he would make a fire the more vehement by sprinkling water upon the coals, so he wraps a hot fever in cold melancholy lest the fever alone should not destroy him fast enough.

O perplexed discomposition, O riddling distemper, O miserable condition of Man!

2 Strength fails

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The heavens are not the less constant because they move continually, because they move continually the same way.

The earth is not the more constant because it lies still continually, because continually it changes and melts in all its parts.

Man, who is the noblest part of the earth, melts as if he were made not of earth but of snow. His own envy melts him, he grows lean with that.

He will say anothers beauty melts him. But he feels that a fever does not melt him like snow but powers him out like lead, like iron, like brass melted in a furnace. Fever not only melts him but calcines him, reduces him to atoms and to ashes, not to water but to lime.

And how quickly? Sooner than you can receive an answer, sooner than you can conceive the question.

Earth is the centre of my body, Heaven is the centre of my soul.

My body falls down without pushing, my soul does not go up without pulling. Ascension is my souls pace and measure, but precipitation my bodys.

Even Angels, whose home is Heaven and who have wings too, had a ladder to go to heaven by steps.

The sun goes many miles in a minute, the stars of the firmament go even quicker. Neither goes as fast as my body falls to the earth. From the first moment that I feel ill I feel the disease will win.

In the twinkling of an eye I can barely see. Taste is insipid and fatuous, appetite is dull and desireless.

My knees are sinking and strengthless.

And in an instant sleep, which is the picture, the copy of death, is taken away.

Death itself may succeed so that I might have death to the life

It was part of Adams punishment: In the sweat of thy brows thou shalt eat thy bread.

My punishment is even greater. I have earned bread by the sweat of my brows in the labour of my calling, and I have it. Now I sweat again and again, from the brow to the sole of the foot, but I cannot eat bread, I taste no sustenance

Miserable distribution of mankind, where one half lacks meat and the other stomach

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

4 The physician is sent for

It is too little to call Man a little World. Man is a diminutive to nothing except God.

Man consists of more pieces, more parts, than the world. And if those pieces were extended and stretched out, in man as they are in the world, Man would be the Giant and the world the Dwarf, the world but the Map, and the man the World.

If all the veins in our bodies were extended to rivers, and all the sinews to veins of mines, and all the muscles that lie upon one another to hills, and all bones to quarries of stones, the air would be too little for this orb of Man to move in. The firmament would be but enough for this star.

Man has many pieces of which the whole world has no representation.

What creatures inhabit the World that is Man?

Our creatures are our thoughts, creatures that are born giants, that reach from east to west, from earth to heaven, that bestride all the sea and land. They span the sun and firmament. My thoughts reach all, comprehend all.

Inexplicable mystery; I their creator am in prison, in a sick bed. My creatures, my thoughts, are with the sun and beyond the sun, overtake the sun in one pace, one step everywhere.

And then as the other world produces serpents and vipers, malignant and venomous creatures, and worms and caterpillars that endeavour to devour the world which produces them, and monsters compiled of divers parents and kinds, so this world, our selves, produces all these in us.

We produce diseases and sicknesses of all sorts, venomous and infectious diseases, feeding and consuming diseases and manifold and entangled diseases made up of many several ones.

Can the other world name so many venomous, so many consuming, so many monstrous creatures as we can diseases of all these kinds?

O miserable abundance, O beggarly riches! How can we have remedies for every disease when as yet we have not names for them?

But we have a Hercules against these giants, these monsters: the physician. He musters up all the forces of the other world to succour this, all nature to relieve Man.

We have the physician but we are not the physician. Here we are less able than lesser creatures who are physicians to themselves.

The hart that is pursued and shot with an arrow knows a herb which will heal the wounds. The dog knows a grass that will cure his proverbial sickness.

And it may be true that common plants, easy to be had, would cure man, but Man has not that innate instinct to apply those natural medicines to his present danger as those inferior creatures have. He is not his own apothecary, his own physician, as they are.

What has become of Mans great extent and proportion when he shrinks himself and consumes himself to a handful of dust? What has become of his soaring thoughts when he brings himself to the ignorance, to the thoughtlessness of the grave?

His diseases are his own but the physician is not. He must send for the physician

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

6 The physician is afraid

I observe the physician with the same diligence as he the disease.

I see he fears and I fear with him. I overtake him, I overrun him in his fear and I go the faster because he makes his pace slow.

I fear the more because he disguises his fear and I see it with the more sharpness because he would not have me see it.

He knows that his fears will not interfere with the practice and exercise of his art, but he knows that my fear may affect the working of his practice.

As the ill affections of the spleen complicate and mingle themselves with every infirmity of the body so does fear insinuate itself in every action or passion of the mind.

A wind in the body will counterfeit any disease and seem the stone, and seem the gout. Fear will counterfeit any disease of the mind.

It shall seem love, a love of having, and it is but a fear, a fear of losing. It shall seem valour in despising danger, and it is but fear in an overvaluing of respect and esteem and a fear of losing that.

A man that is not afraid of a lion is afraid of a cat. Not afraid of starving but afraid of some joint of meat at the table presented to feed him.

Not afraid of the sound of drums and trumpets and shot and the last cries of men, but afraid of some particular harmonious instrument. So much afraid that with any of these the enemy might drive this man, otherwise valiant enough, out of the field of battle.

I know not what fear is. I know not what it is that I fear now. I fear not the hastening of my death, and yet I do fear the increase of the disease.

I should contradict nature if I should deny that I feared this and if I should say that I feared death I should belie God.

My weakness is from Nature, my strength is from God who possesses and distributes infinitely.

As then every cold air is not a damp, every shivering is not a stupefaction, so every fear is not a fearfulness, every refusal is not a running away, every debating is not a resolving, every wish that it were not thus is not a dejection.

But as my physicians fear does not stop him doing his job, neither does mine put me from receiving, from God and man and myself, spiritual and civil and moral assistances and consolations.

7 The physician consults

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Fear grows if the physician desires the help of others.

If there is a growth of the disease then there must be an autumn too, but whether an autumn of the disease or of me it is not my part to choose. But if it be of me, it is of both; my disease cannot survive me, I may overlive it

The physician who wishes to consult with others shows his honesty and his ingenuity.

If the danger be great he justifies his treatment so far & shows he has nothing to hide.

If the danger be not great he shows a readiness to share with others the thanks and the honour for the work, which he began alone.

It does not diminish the dignity of a monarch if he devolves some of his power to others.

God has not made many suns but he has made many bodies that receive and give light.

The Romans began with one king, they came to two consuls, they returned in extremities to one dictator.

Whether in one or many, sovereignty is the same in all states.

The danger is not the more, and the providence is the more where there are more physicians, as the state is the happier where businesses are carried by more counsels than can be in one breast, however large.

Diseases themselves hold consultations and conspire how they may multiply and join with one another and exalt one anothers force. So why not call physicians to consultations?

Death is at an old mans door, he appears and tells him so.

Death is at a young mans back and says nothing.

Age is a sickness and youth is an ambush and we need so many physicians as may make up a watch and spy every inconvenience

[continued]

7 ... There is scarce anything that has not killed somebody

There is scarce anything that has not killed somebody; a hair, a feather has done it. Even that which is our best antidote against it has done it, the best cordial has been deadly poison.

Men have died of joy and almost forbidden their friends to weep for them when they have seen them die laughing.

Even that tyrant Dionysius (I think the same that suffered so much after) could not die of the sorrow of that high fall from a king to a wretched private man. He died of so poor a joy as to be declared by the people at a theatre that he was a good poet.

We say often that a man may live of a little, but alas of how much less may a man die?

And therefore the more assistants the better. Who comes to court on the day of a hearing, in a case of any importance, with but one advocate?

In our funerals we ourselves have no interest, cannot advise, we cannot direct.

Some nations (the Egyptians in particular) built themselves better tombs than houses because they were to dwell longer in them. Yet the greatest man of style whom we have had, William the Conqueror, was left as soon as his soul left him not only without anyone at his graveside but without a grave.

Who will keep us then we know not.

As long as we can let us admit as much help as we can.

Another and another physician is not another and another symptom of death but another and another protector of life.

They do not so much feed our imagination with apprehension of danger as our understanding with comfort. Let not one bring learning, another diligence, another religion but everyone bring all and, as many ingredients enter into a receipt, so may many men make the receipt.

[continued]

... in time of need

But why am I writing so much about how I had plentiful help in time of need?

Is not my Meditation rather to condole and commiserate with those who have no help?

How many are sicker than I and laid in their woeful straw at home (if that corner be a home) and have no more hope of help, though they die, than of getting a good job if they live?

They no more expect to see a physician than to be an officer after. The first person who takes notice is the sexton who buries them, buries them in oblivion too.

For they do but fill up the number of the dead in the statistics and we shall never hear their names till we read them in the Book of Life with our own.

How many are sicker than I and thrown into hospitals where (as fish left upon the sand must wait for the tide) they must wait for the physicians hour of visiting and then can be but visited?

How many are sicker than all of us and have no hospital to cover them, no straw to lie in, to die in, but have their gravestone under them? They breathe out their souls in the ears and in the eyes of passersby, harder than their bed, the flint of the street.

They taste of no part of our physick but a sparing diet, to whom ordinary porridge would be Julep enough, the refuse of our servants Bezar enough, and the off-scouring of our kitchen tables cordial enough.

O my soul, when thou art not enough awake to bless thy God enough for his plentiful mercy in affording thee many helpers, remember how many lack them and help them to them, or to those other things which they lack as much as them

8 The King sends his own physician

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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

9 Upon their consultation they prescribe

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They have seen me and heard me, handcuffed me and received the evidence. I have cut up mine own anatomy, dissected myself and they are gone to read upon me.

We see physicians can scarce number nor name all sicknesses. Everything that disorders a faculty or its function is a sickness.

It is not enough just to name them after the affected part - pleurisy. Nor from the effect which it has - falling sickness. They cannot have names enough from what it does nor where it is, they must add names for what it is like, what it resembles, or else they would lack names - wolf and the canker and the polypus are so.

And that question whether there be more names or things is as perplexed in sicknesses as in anything else, except it be easily resolved. There are more sicknesses than names.

If there was only one kind of ruin, and man could perish only by sickness, yet his danger would be infinite. And if sicknesses were reduced to one - fever - yet the way were infinite still, for it would overload and oppress any natural disorder and discompose any artificial memory to deliver the names of several fevers.

How difficult then for those who have gone away to consult over which of these sicknesses mine is, and then what it will do and then how it may be cured.

But it is a degree of good when the evil will allow consultation.

In many diseases that which is but a symptom of the main disease is so violent that the physician must attend the cure of that, even though he delays the cure of the disease itself.

Is it not so in states too? Sometimes the arrogance of the powerful puts the people into commotions. The greatest danger to the head of state is the insolence of the powerful, and yet they execute martial law upon the common people whose commotion was indeed but a symptom, but an accident of the main disease. But this symptom grew so violent there was no time for a consultation.

Is it not so in the diseases of our mind too? In our moods, in our passions then? If a choleric man be ready to strike must I go to purge his anger or to break the blow?

But where there is room for consultation things are not desperate. They consult, so there is nothing rashly, inconsiderately done. And then they prescribe, they write, so there is nothing covertly, disguisedly, unavowedly done.

In bodily diseases it is not always so.

Sometimes as soon as the physicians foot is in the room his knife is in the patients arm. The disease would not allow a minutes delay nor prescribing of other remedies.

In matters of government it is so too.

They are sometimes surprised with such accidents as that the magistrate asks not what may be done by law but does that which must necessarily be done.

But it is a degree of good in evil, a degree that carries hope and comfort in it, when we may have recourse to that which is written and that the proceedings may be open and ingenuous and candid. That gives satisfaction and acquiescence.

They who have received my account of my symptoms consult and end their consultation in prescribing physick, a proper and convenient remedy.

If, instead, they came back and chided me for some behaviour that had occasioned and induced or that had hastened and exalted this sickness, or if they should begin to write now rules for my diet and exercise when I am well, this would not be treatment.

It were rather a vexation than a relief to tell a condemned prisoner You might have lived if you had done this, and If you can get your pardon you shall do well to take this or this course hereafter

I am glad they know (I have hid nothing from them), glad they consult (they hide nothing from one another), glad they write (they hide nothing from the world), glad that they write and prescribe physick, that there are remedies for the present case

10 They struggle to treat the patient's deteriorating condition

This is natures nest of boxes: the heavens contain the earth, the earth cities, cities men. All these are concentric. The common centre to them all is decay.

Only that is eccentric which was never made.

Only that place which we can imagine but not demonstrate, that light which is the very emanation of the light of God, only that bends not to this centre, to ruin.

Only that which was not made, is of nothing, is not threatened with annihilation.

All other things are, even angels, even our souls. They move upon the same poles, they bend to the same centre.

And if they were not made immortal by preservation their nature could not keep them from sinking to this centre, annihilation.

In all these - the frame of the heavens, the states upon earth and men in them - the greatest mischiefs are those which are least detectable.

The heavens have had their dropsy, they drowned the world. They shall have their fever and burn the world.

The world had a foreknowledge of the Flood 120 years before it came and so some made provision against it and were saved.

The fever shall break out in an instant and consume all.

The Flood did no harm to the heavens from whence it fell, it did not put out those lights, it did not quench those heats.

But the fever, the fire shall burn the furnace itself, annihilate those heavens that breathe it out .

Though the Dog Star has a pestilent breath, an infectious exhalation, yet because we know when it will rise we clothe ourselves and we diet ourselves and we protect ourselves against it.

But comets and blazing stars, whose effects no man can interrupt or frustrate, no man foresaw.

No almanac tells us when a blazing star will break out. No astrologer tells us when the effects will be accomplished for that is a secret of a higher sphere.

That which is most secret is most dangerous.

It is also here in the societies of men, in states and commonwealths.

Twenty rebellious drums make not so dangerous a noise as a few whisperers and secret plotters in corners.

The cannon does not do so much damage against a wall as a mine under the wall. A thousand enemies who make threats do not harm so much as a few that take an oath to say nothing.

God knew many heavy sins of the people in the wilderness and after, but still he charges them with that one, with murmuring, murmuring in their hearts, secret disobediences, secret repugnances against his declared will. These are the most deadly, the most pernicious.

So it is with the diseases of the body.

The pulses, the urine, the sweat, all have sworn to say nothing, to give no indication of any dangerous sickness. My forces are not enfeebled, I find no decay in my strength. I find no abhorring in my appetite. I find no false apprehensions to work upon my understanding; and yet invisibly, and insensibly, the disease prevails.

The disease has established a kingdom, an empire in me and will have certain state secrets, by which it will proceed and not be bound to declare.

The magistrates can use torture to root out conspiracies against the state.

Physicians have their weapons against disease, and those they employ now.

11 They use cordials, to keep the disease from the heart

Where else but from Mans heart can we draw a better argument, a clearer demonstration that all the greatness of this world is built upon the opinions of others?

Greatness has in itself no real being or power or substance.

The heart is always in action and motion. Still busy, still pretending to do all, to furnish all the powers and faculties with all that they have. But if an enemy dare rise up against it, it is the soonest endangered, the soonest defeated of any part.

The brain will hold out longer than the heart, and the liver longer than that - they will endure a siege.

But an unnatural heat, a rebellious heat, will blow up the heart, like a mine, in a minute.

The heart has the birthright and primogeniture and is natures eldest son in us, the part which is first born to life in man. The other parts are like younger brethren and servants in this family, they depend upon the heart.

So treatment must first focus on the heart though it be not the strongest part, just as the eldest is oftentimes not the strongest of the family.

Brain, liver and heart hold not a triumvirate in man, a sovereignty equally shared for his well-being. The heart alone is in the throne as king.

The rest, as subjects, must contribute as children to their parents, as all persons to all kinds of superiors, though oftentimes those parents or those superiors are no stronger than they.

This obligation to put the heart first does not fall upon us by second–order laws of nature, It does not come from consequences and conclusions arising out of nature or derived from nature by discourse.

Many things bind us by the law of nature and yet not by the primary law of nature.

All laws of ownership are of the law of nature, which law is To give every one his own. Yet in the primary law of nature there was no private property, but a universal community over all.

Obedience to superiors is of the law of nature, and yet in the primary law of nature there was no superiority, no magistracy.

This contribution of assistance of all parts to the heart, is from the very first dictates of nature, which is in the first place to have care of our own preservation, to look first to ourselves.

That is why the physician postpones the care of brain or liver, because there is a possibility that they may survive without immediate treatment. There is no possibility that they can survive if the heart perish.

And so, when we seem to begin to help others indeed we do begin with ourselves - we ourselves are principally in our contemplation. All mutual assistances are but compliments towards others and our true end is ourselves.

Sometimes kings need the power of law, to be obeyed. When they seem to be obeyed voluntarily they who do it do it for their own sakes.

O how little a thing is all the greatness of man. Through how false glasses does he make shift to multiply it and magnify it?

This is also another misery of this king of man, the heart, which is also applicable to the kings of this world, great men. The venom and poison of every pestilential disease directs itself to the heart and the malevolence of men is also directed upon the greatest and the best.

Goodness too loses vigour through being an antidote against such malevolence.

The noblest and most generous cordials that nature or art provide lose their effectiveness if they be often taken and made familiar.

And so the greatest virtue of the heart, patience, if it be much exercised exalts the venom and malevolence of the enemy and the more we suffer the more we are insulted upon.

When God had made this earth he had but a little help to make other things of this earth.

Nothing can be nearer nothing than this earth, and yet how little of this earth is the greatest man? He thinks he treads upon the earth, that all is under his feet. But the brain that thinks so is but earth.

Mans highest region, the flesh that covers his brain is but earth and even the hair on top of that, in which so many Absaloms take so much pride, is but a bush growing upon that turf of earth.

How little of the world is the earth? And yet that is all that man has or is.

How little of a man is the heart and yet it is all by which he is. For the heart is continually subject not only to foreign poisons conveyed by others but to internal poisons bred in ourselves by pestilential sicknesses.

O who, if before he had a being he could have sense of this misery, would buy a being here upon these conditions?

12 They apply pigeons to the feet to draw the vapours from the head

What will not kill a man if a vapour will? How great an elephant how small a mouse destroys!

To die by a bullet is the soldiers daily bread, but few men die by hail shot.

A man is more worth than to be sold for small change, a life to be valued above a trifle.

In a violent shaking of the air by thunder or by cannon the air is condensed above the thickness of water, of water baked into ice, almost petrified, almost made stone, and no wonder that that kills.

But that a vapour, and a vapour not forced but breathed should kill? That a nurse should overlay a baby or air that nourishes us should destroy us?

It is a half atheism to murmur against nature who is Gods immediate commissioner. But who would not think himself miserable to be put into the hands of nature who sets him up for a mark for others to shoot at and delights herself to blow him up like a glass till she sees him break even with her own breath?

It is not as if this infectious vapour were sought for or travelled to, as Pliny hunted after the vapour of Etna and challenged death to do his worst. He felt the worst, he died.

It is not as if this vapour ambushed us out of a long shut well or out of a new opened mine. Who would lament or accuse when we had nothing to accuse, none to lament against but bad luck?

But when our own body is the well that breathes out this exhalation, the oven that spits out this fiery smoke, the mine that spews out this suffocating and strangling damp? Who could blame his neighbour, his familiar friend, his brother for any sin against us when we ourselves kill ourselves with our own vapours?

Did we bring this self-destruction upon ourselves? Through any contribution from our own wills, any assistance from our own intentions, nay from our own errors? If so we might chide ourselves.

Fevers caused by eating or drinking too much, consumptions from intemperances and licentiousness, madness from misplacing or overbending our natural faculties proceed from ourselves. In all those cases we ourselves are in the plot and we are not only passive but active too, in our own destruction.

But what have I done either to breed or to breathe these vapours?

They tell me it is my melancholy - did I infuse it, did I drink in melancholy into myself?

It is my thoughtfulness - was I not made to think?

It is my study - does not my calling call for that?

I have done nothing, wilfully, perversely toward it yet must suffer in it, die by it.

There are too many examples of men that have been their own executioners and that have worked hard to be so.

Some have always had poison about them in a hollow ring upon their finger and some in their pen that they used to write with.

Some have beat out their brains at the wall of their prison and some have eat the fire out of their chimneys.

One is said to have strangled himself, though his hands were bound, by crushing his throat between his knees.

But I do nothing upon myself and yet am mine own executioner.

We have heard of death upon small occasions and by scornful instruments. A pin, a comb, a hair pulled has gangrened and killed.

But if I were asked what is a vapour I could not tell. It is so insensible a thing, so near nothing is that which reduces us to nothing.

Consider the equivalent in any body politic, in a state.

That which is fume in us is in a state rumour. These vapours in us which we consider infectious fumes are in a state infectious rumours, detracting and dishonourable calumnies, libels.

The heart in that body politic is the king and the brain his Council. the magistracy that ties it all together is the sinews. And the life of all is honour and just respect and due reverence. Therefore when these vapours, these venomous rumours are directed against these noble parts the whole body suffers.

But yet for all their privileges they are not privileged from our misery. Just as the pernicious vapours arise in our own bodies so do the most dishonourable rumours, those that wound a state most, arise at home.

What ill air that I could have met in the street, what gutter, what shambles, what dunghill, what vault could have hurt me so much as these home-bred vapours?

What fugitive, what almsman of any foreign state can do so much harm as a detractor, a libeller, a scornful satirist at home?

They that write of poisons and of creatures naturally disposed to the ruin of man mention the flea as well as the viper. Although the flea kills none he does all the harm he can. And so even these libellous and licentious satirists utter venom.

Sometimes virtue, and always power, is a good pigeon to draw this vapour from the head and from doing any harm there

Diagnostic note: A vapour is caused by an imbalance in the 4 humours of the body. The vapour rises to the head & death may result. The application of pigeon carcases, plucked & singed, to the soles of the feet will draw the vapour away from the head

13 Spots develop

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We say that the world is made of sea and land as though they were equal, but we know that there is more sea in the western than in the eastern hemisphere.

We say that the firmament is full of stars as though it were equally full, but we know that there are more stars under the northern than under the southern pole.

We say the elements of man are misery and happiness as though he had an equal proportion of both.

We call the days of a man vicissitudinary as though he had as many good days as ill, night and day equal, good and ill fortune in the same measure.

But it is far from that. He drinks misery and he tastes happiness. He mows misery and he gleans happiness. He journeys in misery, he does but walk in happiness.

Man’s misery is positive and dogmatical, his happiness is but disputable and problematical.

All men call misery misery but happiness changes the name by the taste of man.

Now this sickness of mine declares itself by spots to be a malignant and pestilential disease. There is comfort in knowing that the physicians can now see more clearly what to do. There is also discomfort in knowing that the malignancy may be so great that all that they can do shall do nothing.

That an enemy declares himself, when he is able to subsist and to pursue and to achieve his ends, is no great comfort.

In internal conspiracies against the state voluntary confessions do more good than those extracted by torture.

In infections, when nature herself confesses by symptoms, they minister comfort. But when the symptoms are brought on by cordials it is but a confession upon the rack.

We come to know the malice of the man who confesses yet we do not know whether there is still as much malice in his heart as before his confession. We are sure of his treason but not of his repentance, sure of him but not of his accomplices.

It is a faint comfort to know the worst when the worst is remedyless. And even less of a comfort to be so ill and not to know that that is the worst.

A woman is comforted with the birth of her son, her body is eased of a burden. But if she could prophetically read his history, how ill a man, perchance how ill a son he would prove, she should receive a greater burden into her mind.

Scarce any happiness does not have in it so much of the nature of false and base money with more alloy than silver or gold.

Is it not so even in the exercise of virtues?

I must be poor and want before I can exercise the virtue of gratitude.

I must be miserable and in torment before I can exercise the virtue of patience.

How deep do we dig and for how coarse gold? And what other touchstone have we of our gold but comparison, whether we be as happy as others or as ourselves at other times?

O poor step towards being well when these spots do only tell us that we are worse than we were sure of before.

14 Critical days

I would not make Man worse than he is, nor his condition more miserable than it is. But could I though I would?

As a man cannot flatter God nor overpraise him, so a man cannot injure Man nor undervalue him.

So man must be reminded that those false happinesses which he has in this world have their times and their seasons and their critical days and they are judged according to the times when they befall us.

What poor elements are our happinesses made of if time, time which we can scarce consider to be any thing, be an essential part of our happiness?

All things are done in some place, but if we consider place to be no more but the next hollow surface of the air, alas how thin and fluid a thing is air and how thin a film is a surface and a surface of air?

All things are done in time too. But if we consider time to be but the measure of motion, with three stations, past, present and future, yet the first and last of these are not. One is not now and the other is not yet.

Even the present is not now the same that it was when you began to call it so. Before you sound that word present, or that monosyllable now, the present and the now is past.

If this imaginary half-nothing, time, is the essence of our happinesses how can they be thought durable? Time is not so; how can they be thought to be?

If we consider eternity, into that time never entered. Eternity is not an everlasting flux of time. Time is a short parenthesis in a long period, and eternity had been the same as it is though time had never been.

If we consider not eternity but perpetuity, not that which had no time to begin in, but which shall outlive time and shall be even when time shall be no more, what a minute is the life of the most durable creature compared to that?

And what a minute is Man’s life in respect of the sun’s or of a tree?

And yet how little of our life is occasion, opportunity to receive good in, and how little of that occasion do we apprehend and lay hold of?

How busy and perplexed a cobweb is the happiness of man? He must be made up with watchfulness to lay hold upon occasion which is but a little piece of that which is nothing, time.

And yet the best things are nothing without time. Honours, pleasures, possessions presented to us out of time in our decrepit old age lose their office and lose their name.

They are not honours to us who shall never come abroad into the eyes of the people to receive honour from them who give it.

They are not pleasures to us who have lost our sense to taste them, nor possessions to us who are departing from the possession of them.

Youth is their day that judges them, that denominates them, that makes them honours and pleasures and possessions.

When they come in senility they come as a cordial when the funeral bell rings out, as a pardon when the head is off.

We rejoice in the comfort of fire, but does any man cleave to it in midsummer?

We are glad of the freshness and coolness of a vault, but does any man keep his Christmas there?

Are the pleasures of the spring acceptable in autumn?

If happiness be in the season or in the climate how much happier then are birds than men, who can change the climate and accompany and enjoy the same season ever

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?

16 Funeral bells ring

We have an author who wrote a Discourse of Bells when he was a prisoner in Turkey. What would he have written if he had been my fellow prisoner in this sick bed?

The bells in the steeple next door, just like the harmony of the spheres, never cease but are more audible.

When the Turks took Constantinople they melted the bells into cannons. I have heard both bells and ordnance, but never been so much affected as with these bells.

I have lain near a steeple in which there are said to be more than thirty bells and near another where there is one so big as that the clapper is said to weigh more than 600 pounds, yet never so affected as here.

These bells solemnize the funerals of people that I knew or of people that I knew to be my neighbour. We dwelt in houses near to one another before but now they are gone into that house into which I must follow.

There is a way of punishing the children of great persons. Other children are punished on their behalf and in their names. This works on those who indeed had more deserved it.

When these bells tell me that now one, now another is buried, must not I acknowledge that they have received the punishment due to me and paid the debt that I owe?

There is a story of a bell in a monastery which, when anyone in the house was sick to death, rang by itself so they knew the inevitableness of the danger. Once it rang when nobody was sick, but the next day one of the monks fell from the steeple and died and the bell kept its reputation as a prophet.

If these funeral bells were ringing now even if nobody has died, may not I, by the hour of the funeral, be the one who needs it?

When we hear of some man’s promotion we think that we might very well have been that man. Why might not I have been that man that is carried to his grave now?

Could I fit myself to stand or sit in any mans place and not lie in any mans grave?

They may have acquired better abilities than I but I was born to as many infirmities as they.

Though I may have seniors, others may be elder than I, yet I have proceeded apace in a good university and gone a great way in a little time by a vehement fever.

Whoever these bells bring to the ground today, if he and I had been compared yesterday perchance I should have been thought likelier to come to this preferment than he.

God has kept the power of death in his own hands lest any man should bribe death.

If man knew the gain of death, the ease of death, he would provoke death to assist him by any hand which he might use.

When men see many of their own professions promoted it encourages a hope of promotion for themselves.

So when these hourly bells tell me of so many funerals of men like me it presents a comfort whensoever mine shall come.

17 The Passing Bell tolls ...

Perchance he for whom this bell tolls is too ill to know that it tolls for him.

And perchance I may think myself much better than I am even though those who are about me and see my state may have caused it to toll for me and I know not that.

The Church is catholic, universal; so are all her actions. All that she does belongs to all.

When the Church baptises a child that action concerns me for that child is thereby connected to that Head which is my Head too and engrafted into that body whereof I am a member.

And when the Church buries a man that action concerns me too.

All mankind is of one author and is one volume. When one man dies one chapter is not torn out of the book but translated into a better language and every chapter must be so translated.

God employs several translators. Some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice, but Gods hand is in every translation. His hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.

The bell that calls to a sermon calls not just on the preacher only but upon the congregations too.
And so this bell tolling now calls us all. But how much more me who am brought so near the door by this sickness.

There was a lawsuit (in which both piety and dignity, religion and esteem were mingled), about which of the religious orders should ring to prayers first in the morning. It was determined that they should ring first that rose earliest.

If we understand aright the dignity of this bell that tolls for our evening prayer we would be glad to make it ours by rising early. It might be ours as well as his whose indeed it is.

The bell doth toll for him that thinks it doth. He is united to God.

Who casts not up his eye to the sun when it rises? Who takes off his eye from a comet when that breaks out? Who bends not his ear to any bell which upon any occasion rings?

Who can fail to hear that bell which is passing a piece of himself out of this world?

Continued

... No man is an island

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea Europe is the less as well as if a promontory were.

Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.

And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.

Neither can we call this a borrowing of misery, as though we were not miserable enough of ourselves but must fetch in more from the next house, taking upon us the misery of our neighbours.

Truly it were an excusable covetousness if we did. Affliction is a treasure and scarce any man has enough of it. Affliction matures & ripens a man & makes him fit for God.

If a man carries treasure in bullion or in a wedge of gold not coined into current monies his treasure will not defray him as he travels.

Tribulation is treasure, but it is not current money until we get nearer and nearer our home, heaven.

Another man may be sick too, and sick to death. His affliction may lie in his bowels as gold in a mine and be of no use to him.

But this bell that tells me of his affliction digs out and applies that gold to me. By thinking about his danger I take mine own into contemplation and so secure myself by making my recourse to my God, who is our only security