should be the house of life,
becomes death itself if God leave us there. That which God threatens so
often, the shutting of a womb, is not so heavy nor so discomfortable a
curse in the first as in the latter shutting, nor in the shutting of
barrenness as in the shutting of weakness, when _children are come to
the birth, and no strength to bring forth_.[351]

It is the exaltation of misery to fall from a near hope of happiness.
And in that vehement imprecation, the prophet expresses the highest of
God's anger, _Give them, O Lord, what wilt thou give them? give them a
miscarrying womb._ Therefore as soon as we are men (that is, inanimated,
quickened in the womb), though we cannot ourselves, our parents have to
say in our behalf, _Wretched man that he is, who shall deliver him from
this body of death?_[352] if there be no deliverer. It must be he that
said to Jeremiah, _Before I formed thee I knew thee, and before thou
camest out of the womb I sanctified thee_. We are not sure that there
was no kind of ship nor boat to fish in, nor to pass by, till God
prescribed Noah that absolute form of the ark.[353] That word which the
Holy Ghost, by Moses, useth for the ark, is common to all kind of boats,
_thebah_; and is the same word that Moses useth for the boat that he was
exposed in, that his mother laid him in an ark of bulrushes. But we are
sure that Eve had no midwife when she was delivered of Cain, therefore
she might well say, _Possedi virum a Domino, I have gotten a man from
the Lord_,[354] wholly, entirely from the Lord; it is the Lord that
enabled me to conceive, the Lord that infused a quickening soul into
that conception, the Lord that brought into the world that which himself
had quickened; without all this might Eve say, my body had been but the
house of death, and _Domini Domini sunt exitus mortis, To God the Lord
belong the issues of death_. But then this _exitus a morte_ is but
_introitus in mortem_; this issue, this deliverance, from that death,
the death of the womb, is an entrance, a delivering over to another
death, the manifold deaths of this world; we have a winding-sheet in our
mother's womb which grows with us from our conception, and we come into
the world wound up in that winding-sheet, for we come to seek a grave.
And as prisoners discharged of actions may lie for fees, so when the
womb hath discharged us, yet we are bound to it by cords of hestae, by
such a string as that we cannot go thence, nor stay