of any man." The rich is not protected for favour, nor the poor for pity; the old man is not reverenced for his age, nor the infant regarded for his tenderness; youth and beauty, learning and prudence, wit and strength, lie down equally in the dishonours of the grave. All men, and all natures, and all persons resist the addresses and solemnities of death, and strive to preserve a miserable and unpleasant life; and yet they all sink down and die. For so have I seen the pillars of a building assisted with artificial props, bending under the pressure of a roof, and pertinaciously resisting the infallible and prepared ruin, till the determined day comes, and then the burden sunk upon the pillars, and disordered the aids and auxiliary rafters into a common ruin and a ruder grave: so are the desires and weak arts of man; with little aids and assistances of care and physic, we strive to support our decaying bodies, and to put off the evil day; but quickly that day will come, and then neither angels nor men can rescue us from our grave; but the roof sinks down upon the walls, and the walls descend to the foundation; and the beauty of the face, and the dishonours of the belly, the discerning head and the servile feet, the thinking heart and the working hand, shall be crushed into the confusion of a heap, and dwell with creatures of an equivocal production, with worms and serpents, the sons and daughters of our own bones, in a house of dirt and darkness. Let us not think to be excepted or deferred: if beauty, or wit, or youth, or nobleness, or wealth, or virtue, could have been a defence and an excuse from the grave, we had not met here to-day to mourn upon the hearse of an excellent lady and God only knows, for which of us next the mourners shall go about the streets, or weep in houses. : We have lived so many years; and every day, and every minute, we make an escape from those thousands of dangers and deaths that encompass us round about and such escapings we must reckon to be an extraordinary fortune; and, therefore, that it cannot last long. Vain are the thoughts of man, who, when he is young and healthful, thinks he hath a long thread of life to run over, and that it is violent and strange for young persons to die ; and natural and proper only for the aged. It is as natural for a man to die by drowning as by a fever; and what greater violence or more unnatural thing is it, that the horse threw his rider into the river, than that a drunken meeting cast him into a fever? and the strengths of youth are as soon broken by the strong sicknesses of youth, and the stronger intemperance, as the weakness of old age by a cough, or an asthma, or a continual rheum: nay, it is more natural for young men and women to die, than for old; because that is more natural, which hath more natural causes, and that is more natural, which is most common: but to die with age is an extreme rare thing; and there are more persons carried forth to burial before the five-and-thirtieth year of their age, than after it: and, therefore, let no vain confidence make you hope for long life: if you have lived but little and are still in youth, remember that now you are in your biggest throng of dangers, both of body and soul; and the proper sins of youth to which they rush infinitely and without consideration, are also the proper and immediate instruments of death. But if you be old, you have escaped long and wonderfully and the time of your escaping is out: you must not forever think to live upon wonders, or that God will work miracles to satisfy your longing follies, and unreasonable desires of living longer to sin and to the world. Go home and think to die, and what you would choose to be doing when you die, that do daily for you will all come to that pass to rejoice that you did so, or wish that you had that will be the condition of every one of us: for 'God regardeth no man's person.' : Well! but all this you will think is but a sad story; What! we must die, and go to darkness and dishonour; and we must die quickly, and we must quit all our delights, and all our sins, or do worse, infinitely worse; and this is the condition of us all, from which none can be excepted; every man shall be spilt and fall into the ground, and "be gathered up no more." Is there no comfort after all this?" shall we go from hence, and be no more seen," and have no recompense? Shall we exchange our fair dwellings for a coffin, our softer beds for the moistened and weeping turf, and our pretty children for worms; and is there no allay to this huge calamity? yes, there is there is a yet in the text: "for all this yet doth God devise means that his banished be not expelled from him:"-all this sorrow and trouble is but a phantasm, and receives its account and degrees from our present conceptions, and the proportion to our relishes and gust. : : 'Death is nothing but the middle point between two lives, between this and another:' concerning which comfortable mystery the holy Scripture instructs our faith, and entertains our hope in these words: God is still the "God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; for all do live to him ;" and the souls of saints are with Christ; "I desire to be dissolved," saith St Paul," and to be with Christ, for that is much better:" and: "Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord; they rest from their labours, and their works follow them for we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens:" and this state of separation St Paul calls "a being absent from the body, and being present with the Lord." This is one of God's means which he hath devised, that although our dead are like persons banished from this world, yet they are not expelled from God: they are in the hands of Christ; they are in his presence;' they are, or shall be 'clothed with a house of God's making; they rest from all their labours ;' 'all tears are wiped from their eyes,' and all discontents from their spirits; and in their state of separation, before the soul be re-invested with her new house, the spirits of all persons are with God, so secured, and so blessed, and so sealed up for glory, that this state of interval and imperfection is, in respect of its certain event and end, infinitely more desirable than all the riches, and all the pleasures, and all the vanities, and all the kingdoms of this world. I will not venture to determine what are circumstances of the abode of holy souls in their separate dwellings; and yet, possibly, that might be easier than to tell what or how the soul is and works in this world, where it is in the body as in a prison,' in fetters and restraints; for here the soul is discomposed and hindered; it is not as it shall be, as it ought to be, as it was intended to be; it is not permitted to its own freedom and proper operation; so that all that we can understand of it is, that it is so incommodated with a troubled and abated instrument, that the object we are to consider, cannot be offered to us in a right line, in just and equal propositions: or if it could, yet because we are to understand the soul by the soul, it becomes not only a troubled and abused object, but a crooked instrument; and we can consider it as a weak eye can behold a staff thrust into the waters of a troubled * 1 Cor. xv. 18. 1 Thess. iv. 16. Rev. xiv. 13. John v. 24. 2 Cor. v. 6, 8. : river, the very water makes a refraction, and the storm doubles the refraction, and the water of the eye doubles the species, and there is nothing right in the thing the object is out of its just place, and the medium is troubled, and the organ is impotent. But when the soul is entered into her own house, into the free regions of her rest,' and the neighbourhood of heavenly joys, then its operations are more spiritual, proper, and proportioned to its being; and, though we cannot see at such a distance, yet the object is more fitted, if we had a capable understanding; it is in itself in a more excellent and free condition. That the soul is alive after our death, St Paul affirms : "Christ died for us, that whether we wake or sleep, we should live together with him.”* Now it were strange that we should be alive, and live with Christ, and yet do no act of life: the body when it is asleep, does many; and if the soul does none, the principle is less active than the instrument; but if it does any act at all in separation, it must necessarily be an act or effect of understanding; there is nothing else it can do, but this it can; for it is but a weak and unlearned proposition to say, that the soul can do nothing of itself, nothing without the phantasms and provisions of the body for, : 1. In this life the soul hath one principle clearly separate, abstracted, and immaterial; I mean the Spirit of grace,' which is a principle of life and action, and in many instances does not at all communicate with matter, as in the infusion, superinduction, and creation of spiritual graces. 2. As nutrition, generation, eating and drinking, are actions proper to the body and its state; so ecstacies, visions, raptures, intuitive knowledge and consideration of itself, acts of volition, and reflex acts of understanding, are proper to the soul. 3. And therefore it is observable that St Paul said, that "he knew not whether his visions and raptures were in or out of the body;" for by that we see his judgment of the thing, that one was as likely as the other, neither of them impossible or unreasonable; and therefore, that the soul is as capa ble of action alone as in conjunction. 4. If in the state of blessedness, there are some actions of the soul which do not pass through the body, such as contemplation of God, and conversing with spirits, and receiving those influences and rare immissions, which coming from the holy and mysterious Trinity, make up the crown of glory; it follows that the necessity of the body's ministry is but during the state of this life, and as long as it converses with fire and water, and lives with corn and flesh, and is fed by the satisfaction of material appetites; which necessity and manner of conversation, when it ceases, it can be no longer necessary for the soul to be served by phantasms and material representations. 5. And therefore, when the body shall be reunited, it shall be so ordered that then the body shall confess it gives not any thing, but receives all its being and operation, its manner and abode from the soul; and that then it comes not to serve a necessity, but to partake a glory for as the operations of the soul, in this life, begin in the body, and by it the object is transmitted to the soul; so then they shall begin in the soul, and pass to the body; and as the operations of the soul, by reason of its dependence on the body, are animal, natural, and material; so in the resurrection, the body shall be spiritual, by reason of the pre-eminence, influence, and prime operation of 1 Thess. v. 10. : the soul. Now between these two states stands the state of separation, in which the operations of the soul are of a middle nature, that is, not so spiritual as in the resurrection, and not so animal and natural as in the state of conjunction. To all which I add this consideration, that our souls have the same condition that Christ's soul had in the state of separation, because he took on him all our nature, and all our condition; and it is certain, Christ's soul, in the three days of his separation, did exercise acts of life, of joy and triumph, and did not sleep, but visited the souls of the fathers, trampled upon the pride of devils, and satisfied those longing souls which were prisoners of hope and from all this we may conclude, that the souls of all the servants of Christ are alive, and therefore do the actions of life, proper to their state; and, therefore, it is highly probable that the soul works clearer, and understands brighter, and discourses wiser, and rejoices louder, and loves nobler, and desires purer, and hopes stronger, than it can do here. But if these arguments should fail, yet the felicity of God's saints cannot fail: for suppose the body to be a necessary instrument, but out of tune and discomposed by sin and anger, by accident and chance, by defects and imperfections, yet that it is better than none at all; and that if the soul works imperfectly with an imperfect body, that then she works not at all, when she hath none and suppose also that the soul should be as much without sense or perception in death, as it is in a deep sleep, which is the image and shadow of death; yet then God devises other means that his banished be not expelled from him. For, 2. God will restore the soul to the body, and raise the body to such a perfection, that it shall be an organ fit to praise him upon; it shall be made spiritual to minister to the soul, when the soul is turned into a spirit; then the soul shall be brought forth by angels from her incomparable and easy bed, from her rest in Christ's holy bosom, and be made perfect in her being, and in all her operations; and this shall first appear by that perfection, which the soul shall receive, as instrumental to the last judgment; for then she shall see clearly all the records of this world, all the register of her own memory for all that we did in this life is laid up in our memories; and though dust and forgetfulness be drawn upon them, yet when God shall lift us from our dust, then shall appear clearly all that we have done, written in the tables of our conscience, which is the soul's memory. We see many times, and in many instances, that a great memory is hindered and put out, and we, thirty years after, come to think of something that lay so long under a curtain; we think of it suddenly, and without a line of deduction, or proper consequence: and all those famous memories of Simonides and Theodectes, of Hortensius and Seneca, of Sceptius, Metrodorus, and Carneades, of Cyneas the ambassador of Pyrrhus, are only the records better kept, and less disturbed by accident and disease: for even the memory of Herod's son of Athens, of Bathyllus, and the dullest person now alive, is so great, and by God made so sure a record of all that ever he did, that as soon as ever God shall but tune our instrument, and draw the curtains, and but light up the candle of immortality, there we shall find it all, there we shall see all, and the whole world shall see all; then we shall be made fit to converse with God after the manner of spirits, we shall be like to angels. In the mean time, although upon the persuasion of the former discourse, it be highly probable that the souls of God's servants do live in a state of present blessedness, and in the exceeding joys of a certain expectation of the revelation of the day of the Lord, and the coming of Jesus; yet it will concern us only to secure our state by holy living, and leave the event to God, that (as St Paul said) "whether present or absent, whether sleeping or waking," whether perceiving or perceiving not, "we may be accepted of him;" that when we are banished this world, and from the light of the sun, we may not be expelled from God, and from the light of his countenance, but that, from our beds of sorrow, our souls may pass into the bosom of Christ, and from thence to his right hand in the day of sentence: "For we must all appear before the judgment-seat of Christ ;" and then if we have done well in the body, we shall never be expelled from the beatifical presence of God, but be domestics of his family, and heirs of his kingdom, and partakers of his glory. Amen. CHARACTER OF FRANCES, COUNTESS OF CARBERRY. I HAVE now done with my text, but yet am to make you another sermon. I have told you the necessity and state of death, it may be, too largely for such a sad story; I shall, therefore, now with a better compendium teach you how to live, by telling you a plain narrative of a life, which if you imitate, and write after the copy, it will make that death shall not be an evil, but a thing to be desired, and to be reckoned among the purchases and advantages of your fortune. When Martha and Mary went to weep over the grave of their brother, Christ met them there, and preached a funeral sermon, discoursing of the resurrection, and applying to the purposes of faith, and confession of Christ, and glorification of God. We have no other, we can have no better precedent to follow and now that we are come to weep over the grave of our dear sister, this rare personage, we cannot choose but have many virtues to learn, many to imitate, and some to exercise. : 1. I choose not to declare her extraction and genealogy; it was indeed fair and honourable; but having the blessing to be descended from worthy and honoured ancestors, and herself to be adopted and ingrafted into a more noble family; yet she felt such outward appendages to be none of hers, because not of her choice; but the purchase of the virtues of others, which although they did engage her to do noble things, yet they would upbraid all degenerate and less honourable lives than were those, which began and increased the honour of the families. She did not love her fortune for making her noble; but thought it would be a dishonour to her, if she did not continue a nobleness and excellency of virtue fit to be owned by persons relating to such ancestors. It is fit for us all to honour the nobleness of a family; but it is also fit for them that are noble, to despise it, and to establish their honour upon the foundation of doing excellent things, and suffering in good causes, and despising dishonourable actions, and in communicating good things to others: for this is the rule in nature; those creatures are most honourable, which have the greatest power and do the greatest good: and accordingly myself have been a witness of it, how this excellent lady would, by an act of humility and Christian abstraction, strip herself of all that fair appendage and exterior honour, which decked her person and her fortune, and desired to be owned by nothing but what was her own, that she might only be esteemed honour |