h is the greatest dignity and glory of a
man--his immortal soul--it is truly the greatest misery of sinful men,
because it capacitates them for eternal misery. But if we make our
accounts right, and take the right period, truly death is but the
beginning of our time, of endless and unchangeable endurance either in
happiness or misery, and this life in the body, which is only in the view
of the short sighted sons of men, is but a strait and narrow passage into
the infinite ocean of eternity, but so inconsiderable it is that,
according as the spirit in this passage is fashioned and formed, so it
must continue for ever, for where the tree falleth, there it lieth. There
may be hope that a tree will sprout again, but truly there is no hope that
ever the damned soul shall see a spring of joy, and no fear that ever the
blessed spirits shall find a winter of grief. Such is the evenness of
eternity, that there is no shadow of change in it.

O then, how happy are they in whose souls this life is already begun,
which shall then come to its meridian, when the glory of the flesh falls
down like withered hay into the dust! The life as well as the light of the
righteous is progressive. It is shining more and more till that day come,
the day of death, only worthy to be called the present day, because it
brings perfection, it mounts the soul in the highest point of the orb, and
there is no declining from that again. The spirit is now alive in some
holy affections and motions, breathing upwards, wrestling towards that
point. The soul is now in part united to the Fountain of life, by loving
attendance and obedience, and it is longing to be more closely united. The
inward senses are exercised about spiritual things, but the burden of this
clayey mansion doth much dull and damp them, and proves a great
_remora_(205) to the spirit. The body indisposes and weakens the soul
much. It is life, as in an infant, though a reasonable soul be there, yet
overwhelmed with the incapacity of the organs. This body is truly a prison
of restraint and confinement to the soul, and often loathsome and ugly
through the filthiness of sin, but when the spirit is delivered from this
necessary burden and impediment, O how lively is that life it then lives!
Then the life, peace, joy, love, and delight of the soul surmounts all
that is possible here, further than the highest exercise of the soul of
the wisest men surpasses the brutish like apprehensions of an infant,