ou loth to go into his presence?
Yet Hilarion was loth. Barlaam was a devout man (a hermit too) that said
that day he died, _Cogita te hodie caepisse servire Domino, et hodie
finiturum_, Consider this to be the first day's service that ever thou
didst thy Master, to glorify him in a Christianly and a constant death,
and if thy first day be thy last day too, how soon dost thou come to
receive thy wages! Yet Barlaam could have been content to have stayed
longer forth. Make no ill conclusions upon any man's lothness to die,
for the mercies of God work momentarily in minutes, and many times
insensibly to bystanders, or any other than the party departing. And
then upon violent deaths inflicted as upon malefactors, Christ himself
hath forbidden us by his own death to make any ill conclusion; for his
own death had those impressions in it; he was reputed, he was executed
as a malefactor, and no doubt many of them who concurred to his death
did believe him to be so. Of sudden death there are scarce examples be
found in the Scriptures upon good men, for death in battle cannot be
called sudden death; but God governs not by examples but by rules, and
therefore make no ill conclusion upon sudden death nor upon distempers
neither, though perchance accompanied with some words of diffidence and
distrust in the mercies of God. The tree lies as it falls, it is true,
but it is not the last stroke that fells the tree, nor the last word nor
gasp that qualifies the soul. Still pray we for a peaceable life against
violent death, and for time of repentance against sudden death, and for
sober and modest assurance against distempered and diffident death, but
never make ill conclusions upon persons overtaken with such deaths;
_Domini Domini sunt exitus mortis, to God the Lord belong the issues of
death_. And he received Samson, who went out of this world in such a
manner (consider it actively, consider it passively in his own death,
and in those whom he slew with himself) as was subject to interpretation
hard enough. Yet the Holy Ghost hath moved Saint Paul to celebrate
Samson in his great catalogue,[372] and so doth all the church. Our
critical day is not the very day of our death, but the whole course of
our life. I thank him that prays for me when the bell tolls, but I thank
him much more that catechises me, or preaches to me, or instructs me how
to live. _Fac hoc et vive_, there is my security, the mouth of the Lord
hath said it, _do this and t