ery and convalescence. For there is
to every man a day of salvation. _Now is the accepted time, now is the
day of salvation_,[199] and there is _a great day of thy wrath_,[200]
which no man shall be able to stand in; and there are evil days before,
and therefore thou warnest us and armest us, _Take unto you the whole
armour of God, that you may be able to stand in the evil day_.[201] So
far then our days must be critical to us, as that by consideration of
them, we may make a judgment of our spiritual health, for that is the
crisis of our bodily health. Thy beloved servant, St. John, wishes to
Gaius, _that he may prosper in his health, so as his soul
prospers_;[202] for if the soul be lean the marrow of the body is but
water; if the soul wither, the verdure and the good estate of the body
is but an illusion and the goodliest man a fearful ghost. Shall we, O my
God, determine our thoughts, and shall we never determine our
disputations upon our climacterical years, for particular men and
periodical years, for the life of states and kingdoms, and never
consider these in our long life, and our interest in the everlasting
kingdom? We have exercised our curiosity in observing that Adam, the
eldest of the eldest world, died in his climacterical year, and Shem,
the eldest son of the next world, in his; Abraham, the father of the
faithful, in his, and the blessed Virgin Mary, the garden where the
root of faith grew, in hers. But they whose climacterics we observe,
employed their observation upon their critical days, the working of thy
promise of a Messias upon them. And shall we, O my God, make less use of
those days who have more of them? We, who have not only the day of the
prophets, the first days, but the last days, in which thou hast spoken
unto us by thy Son?[203] We are the children of the day,[204] for thou
hast shined in as full a noon upon us as upon the Thessalonians: they
who were of the night (a night which they had superinduced upon
themselves), the Pharisees, pretended, _that if they had been in their
fathers' days_ (those indicatory and judicatory, those critical days),
_they would not have been partakers of the blood of the prophets_;[205]
and shall we who are in the day, these days, not of the prophets, but of
the Son, stone those prophets again, and crucify that Son again, for all
those evident indications and critical judicatures which are afforded
us? Those opposed adversaries of thy Son, the Pharisees, with th