man in this sound says, I send to prepare you for a place,
for a grave. But, O my God, my God, since heaven is glory and joy, why
do not glorious and joyful things lead us, induce us to heaven? Thy
legacies in thy first will, in the Old Testament, were plenty and
victory, wine and oil, milk and honey, alliances of friends, ruin of
enemies, peaceful hearts and cheerful countenances, and by these
galleries thou broughtest them into thy bedchamber, by these glories and
joys, to the joys and glories of heaven. Why hast thou changed thine old
way, and carried us by the ways of discipline and mortification, by the
ways of mourning and lamentation, by the ways of miserable ends and
miserable anticipations of those miseries, in appropriating the exemplar
miseries of others to ourselves, and usurping upon their miseries as our
own, to our prejudice? Is the glory of heaven no perfecter in itself,
but that it needs a foil of depression and ingloriousness in this world,
to set it off? Is the joy of heaven no perfecter in itself, but that it
needs the sourness of this life to give it a taste? Is that joy and that
glory but a comparative glory and a comparative joy? not such in itself,
but such in comparison of the joylessness and the ingloriousness of this
world? I know, my God, it is far, far otherwise. As thou thyself, who
art all, art made of no substances, so the joys and glory which are with
thee are made of none of these circumstances, essential joy, and glory
essential. But why then, my God, wilt thou not begin them here? Pardon,
O God, this unthankful rashness; I that ask why thou dost not, find even
now in myself, that thou dost; such joy, such glory, as that I conclude
upon myself, upon all, they that find not joys in their sorrows, glory
in their dejections in this world, are in a fearful danger of missing
both in the next.

XVII. PRAYER.

O eternal and most gracious God, who hast been pleased to speak to us,
not only in the voice of nature, who speaks in our hearts, and of thy
word, which speaks to our ears, but in the speech of speechless
creatures, in Balaam's ass, in the speech of unbelieving men, in the
confession of Pilate, in the speech of the devil himself, in the
recognition and attestation of thy Son, I humbly accept thy voice in the
sound of this sad and funeral bell. And first, I bless thy glorious
name, that in this sound and voice I can hear thy instructions, in
another man's to consider mine own conditi