thy right
hand receive his soul into thy kingdom, and unite him and us in one
communion of saints. Amen.

FOOTNOTES:

[240] Rev. xiv. 13.

[241] Gen. xlix. 1.

[242] Deut. xxxiii. 1.

[243] 2 Kings, xx. 1.

[244] 2 Pet. i. 13.

[245] John, xiv. 1.

[246] Psalm xxxi. 5.

XVIII. ------------------------ AT INDE
MORTUUS ES, SONITU CELERI, PULSUQUE AGITATO.

_The bell rings out, and tells me in him, that I am dead._

XVIII. MEDITATION.

The bell rings out, the pulse thereof is changed; the tolling was a
faint and intermitting pulse, upon one side; this stronger, and argues
more and better life. His soul is gone out, and as a man who had a lease
of one thousand years after the expiration of a short one, or an
inheritance after the life of a man in a consumption, he is now entered
into the possession of his better estate. His soul is gone, whither? Who
saw it come in, or who saw it go out? Nobody; yet everybody is sure he
had one, and hath none. If I will ask mere philosophers what the soul
is, I shall find amongst them that will tell me, it is nothing but the
temperament and harmony, and just and equal composition of the elements
in the body, which produces all those faculties which we ascribe to the
soul; and so in itself is nothing, no separable substance that overlives
the body. They see the soul is nothing else in other creatures, and they
affect an impious humility to think as low of man. But if my soul were
no more than the soul of a beast, I could not think so; that soul that
can reflect upon itself, consider itself, is more than so. If I will
ask, not mere philosophers, but mixed men, philosophical divines, how
the soul, being a separate substance, enters into man, I shall find some
that will tell me, that it is by generation and procreation from
parents, because they think it hard to charge the soul with the
guiltiness of original sin if the soul were infused into a body in which
it must necessarily grow foul, and contract original sin whether it
will or no; and I shall find some that will tell me, that it is by
immediate infusion from God, because they think it hard to maintain an
immortality in such a soul, as should be begotten and derived with the
body from mortal parents. If I will ask, not a few men, but almost whole
bodies, whole churches, what becomes of the souls of the righteous at
the departing thereof from the body, I shall be told by some, that they
attend an expi