SECT. IV.-Acts of Faith by way of Prayer and Ejaculation, to be said by sick men in the days of their Temptation The Prayer for the grace and perfection of Repentance A Prayer for pardon of Sins, to be said frequently in the SECT. VIII.-An Analysis or Resolution of the Decalogue, enumerating the Duties commanded, and the Sins for- bidden, in every Commandment, for the helping the sick The special Precepts of the Gospel enumerated SECT. IX. Of the sick man's practice of Charity and Jus- SECT. X.-Acts of Charity, by way of Prayer and Ejaculation; which may also be used for Thanksgiving in case of Re- covery Arguments and Exhortations to move the sick man to SECT. IV. Of ministering to the Restitution and Pardon, or Reconciliation of the sick person, by administering the Considerations against unreasonable Fears, concerning For- giveness of Sins, and its uncertainty and danger An exercise against Despair in the Day of our Death SECT. VI.-Considerations against Presumption SECT. VII.-Offices to be said by the Minister in his Visita- A Prayer taken out of the Greek Euchologion, &c. The order of Recommendation of the Soul in its agony A Prayer to be said in the case of a sudden Death, or SECT. VIII.-A Peroration concerning the contingencies and THE RULE AND EXERCISES OF Holy Dying, &c. CHAP. I. A GENERAL PREPARATION TOWARDS A HOLY AND BLESSED DEATH, BY WAY OF CONSIDERATION. A SECT. I. Consideration of the vanity and shortness of Man's life. MAN is a bubble (said the Greek Proverb a); which Lucian represents with advantages and its proper circumstances, to this purpose; saying, that all the world is a storm, and men rise up in their several generations like bubbles descending à Jove pluvio, from God and the dew of Heaven, from a tear and drop of rain, from Nature and Providence and some of these instantly sink into the deluge of their first parent, and are hidden in a sheet of water, having had no other business in the world, but to be born, that they might be able to die : others float up and down two or three turns, and suddenly disappear, and • Πομφόλυξ ὁ ἄνθρωπος. : give their place to others: and they that live longest upon the face of the waters are in perpetual motion, restless and uneasy, and being crushed with the great drop of a cloud sink into flatness and a froth; the change not being great, it being hardly possible it should be more a nothing than it was before. So is every man: he is born in vanity and sin; he comes into the world like morning mushrooms, soon thrusting up their heads into the air, and conversing with their kindred of the same production, and as soon they turn into dust and forgetfulness: some of them without any other interest in the affairs of the world, but that they made their parents a little glad, and very sorrowful: others ride longer in the storm; it may be until seven years of vanity be expired, and then peradventure the sun shines hot upon their heads, and they fall into the shades below, into the cover of death and darkness of the grave to hide them. But if the bubble stands the shock of a bigger drop, and outlives the chances of a child, of a careless nurse, of drowning in a pail of water, of being overlaid by a sleepy servant, or such little accidents, then the young man dances like a bubble empty and gay, and shines like a dove's neck, or the image of a rainbow, which hath no substance, and whose very imagery and colours are fantastical; and so he dances out the gaiety of his youth, and is all the while in a storm, and endures, only because he is not knocked on the head by a drop of bigger rain, or crushed by the pressure of a load of indigested meat, or quenched by the disorder of an ill-placed humour: and to preserve a man alive in the midst of so many chances and hostilities is as great a miracle as to create him; to preserve him from rush ing into nothing, and at first to draw him up from nothing, were equally the issues of an Almighty power. And therefore the wise men of the world have contended who shall best fit man's condition with words signifying his vanity and short abode. Homer calls a man a leaf, the smallest, the weakest piece of a shortlived, unsteady plant. Pindar calls him the dream of a shadow: Another, the dream of the shadow of smoke. But S. James spake by a more excellent Spirit, saying, Our life is but a vapour, viz., drawn from the earth by a celestial influence: made of smoke, or the lighter parts of water, tossed with every wind, moved by the motion of a superior body, without virtue in itself, lifted up on high, or left below, according as it pleases the sun its foster-father. But it is lighter yet. It is but appearing; a fantastic vapour, an apparition, nothing real: it is not so much as a mist, not the matter of a shower, nor substantial enough to make a cloud; but it is like Cassiopeia's chair, or Pelops' shoulder, or the circles of Heaven, pavópeva, than which you cannot have a word that can signify a verier nothing. And yet the expression is one degree more made diminutive; a vapour, and fantastical, or a mere appearance, and this but for a little while d neither; the very dream, the phantasm disappears in a small time, like the shadow that departethe, or like a tale that is told, or as a dream when one awaketh %. A man is so vain, so unfixed, so perishing a creature, that he cannot long last in the scene of fancy: a man goes off, and is forgotten like the dream of a distracted person. The sum of all is this: that thou art a man; * James iv. 14. ἀτμίς. • Ps. cix. 22. • φαινομένη. ibid. ὰ πρὸς ὀλίγον. ibid, Ps. lxxiii. 19. |