,
and are putting marks upon your doors, as in the time of the plague upon
houses infected, "Lord have mercy upon us,"(203) and are continually
bearing this motto to our view, and sounding this direction to our ears,
_cito, procul, diu_--to get soon our of Sodom that is appointed for
destruction, to fly quickly out of ourselves to the refuge appointed of
God, even one that was dead and is alive, and hath redeemed us by his
blood, and to get far off from ourselves, and take up dwelling in the
blessed Son of God, through whose flesh there is access to the
Father,--seeing all these, I say, are so, why do not we awake ourselves
upon the sound of the promise of immortality and life, brought to our ears
in the gospel? Mortality hath already seized upon our bodies, but why do
you not catch hold of this opportunity of releasing your souls from the
chains and fetters of eternal death? Truly, my beloved, all that can be
spoken of torments and miseries in this life, suppose we could imagine all
the exquisite torments invented by the most cruel tyrants since the
beginning, to be combined in some one kind of torture, and would then
stretch our imagination beyond that, as far as that which is composed of
all torments surpasseth the simplest death, yet we do not conceive nor
express unto you that death to come. Believe it, when the soul is out of
the body it is a most pure activity, all sense, all knowledge. And seeing
where it is dulled and dampished(204) in the body, it is capable of so
much grief or joy, pleasure or pain, we may conclude, that being loosed
from these stupifying earthly chains, that it is capable of infinite more
vexation, or contentation, in a higher and purer strain.

Therefore, we may conclude with the apostle, that all men by nature are
miserable in life, but infinitely more miserable in death. Only the man
who is in Jesus Christ, in whose spirit Christ dwells, and hath made a
temple of his body for offering up reasonable service in it, that man only
is happy in life, but far happier in death, happy that he was born, but
infinitely more happy that he was born mortal, born to die, for "if the
body be dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness."
Men commonly make their accounts and calculate their time so, as if death
were the end of it. Truly, it were happiness in the generality of men
that that computation were true, either that it had never begun, or that
it might end here, for that whic