mines all. Nor do
all these, youth out of infancy, or age out of youth, arise so, as the
phoenix out of the ashes of another phoenix formerly dead, but as a
wasp or a serpent out of a carrion, or as a snake out of dung. Our youth
is worse than our infancy, and our age worse than our youth. Our youth
is hungry and thirsty after those sins which our infancy knew not; and
our age is sorry and angry, that it cannot pursue those sins which our
youth did; and besides, all the way, so many deaths, that is, so many
deadly calamities accompany every condition and every period of this
life, as that death itself would be an ease to them that suffer them.
Upon this sense doth Job wish that God had not given him an issue from
the first death, from the womb, _Wherefore thou hast brought me forth
out of the womb? Oh that I had given up the ghost, and no eye seen me! I
should have been as though I had not been._[361] And not only the
impatient Israelites in their murmuring (_would to God we had died by
the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt_),[362] but Elijah himself,
when he fled from Jezebel, and went for his life, as that text says,
under the juniper tree, requested that he might die, and said, _It is
enough now, O Lord, take away my life_.[363] So Jonah justifies his
impatience, nay, his anger, towards God himself: _Now, O Lord, take, I
beseech thee, my life from me, for it is better to die than to
live_.[364] And when God asked him, _Dost thou well to be angry for
this?_ he replies, _I do well to be angry, even unto death_. How much
worse a death than death is this life, which so good men would so often
change for death! But if my case be as Saint Paul's case, _quotidie
morior_, that I die daily, that something heavier than death fall upon
me every day; if my case be David's case, _tota die mortificamur; all
the day long we are killed_, that not only every day, but every hour of
the day, something heavier than death fall upon me; though that be true
of me, _Conceptus in peccatis, I was shapen in iniquity, and in sin did
my mother conceive me_ (there I died one death); though that be true of
me, _Natus filius irae_, I was born not only the child of sin, but the
child of wrath, of the wrath of God for sin, which is a heavier death:
yet _Domini Domini sunt exitus mortis, with God the Lord are the issues
of death_; and after a Job, and a Joseph, and a Jeremiah, and a Daniel,
I cannot doubt of a deliverance. And if no other deliveranc