131

21. God prospers their practice, and he, by them, calls
Lazarus out of his tomb, me out of my bed 138

22. The physicians consider the root and occasion, the
embers, and coals, and fuel of the disease, and seek
to purge or correct that 145

23. They warn me of the fearful danger of relapsing 152

_DEVOTIONS_

I

INSULTUS MORBI PRIMUS.

_The first Alteration, the first Grudging, of the Sickness._

I. MEDITATION.

Variable, and therefore miserable condition of man! this minute I was
well, and am ill, this minute. I am surprised with a sudden change, and
alteration to worse, and can impute it to no cause, nor call it by any
name. We study health, and we deliberate upon our meats, and drink, and
air, and exercises, and we hew and we polish every stone that goes to
that building; and so our health is a long and a regular work: but in a
minute a cannon batters all, overthrows all, demolishes all; a sickness
unprevented for all our diligence, unsuspected for all our curiosity;
nay, undeserved, if we consider only disorder, summons us, seizes us,
possesses us, destroys us in an instant. O miserable condition of man!
which was not imprinted by God, who, as he is immortal himself, had put
a coal, a beam of immortality into us, which we might have blown into a
flame, but blew it out by our first sin; we beggared ourselves by
hearkening after false riches, and infatuated ourselves by hearkening
after false knowledge. So that now, we do not only die, but die upon the
rack, die by the torment of sickness; nor that only, but are
pre-afflicted, super-afflicted with these jealousies and suspicions and
apprehensions of sickness, before we can call it a sickness: we are not
sure we are ill; one hand asks the other by the pulse, and our eye asks
our own urine how we do. O multiplied misery! we die, and cannot enjoy
death, because we die in this torment of sickness; we are tormented with
sickness, and cannot stay till the torment come, but pre-apprehensions
and presages prophesy those torments which induce that death before
either come; and our dissolution is conceived in these first changes,
quickened in the sickness itself, and born in death, which bears date
from these first changes. Is this the honour which man hath by being a
little world, that he hath these earthquakes in himself, sudden
shakings; t