Jeremy Taylor, in his _Holy Dying_ (General Considerations Preparatory
to Death), has this memorable passage, in which he illustrates the daily
experiences of every thoughtful mind:
And because this consideration is of great usefulness and of great
necessity to many purposes of wisdom and the spirit, all the
succession of time, all the changes in nature, all the varieties of
light and darkness, the thousand thousands of accidents in the
world, and every contingency to every man and to every creature,
doth preach our funeral sermon, and calls us to look and see how the
old sexton Time throws up the earth and digs a grave where we must
lay our sins or our sorrows, and sow our bodies till they rise again
in a fair or in an intolerable eternity. Every revolution which the
sun makes about the world divides between life and death; and death
possesses both those portions by the next morrow, and we are dead to
all those months which we have already lived, and we shall never
live them over again: and still God makes little periods of our age.
First we change our world, when we come from the womb to feel the
warmth of the sun. Then we sleep and enter into the image of death,
in which state we are unconcerned in all the changes of the world
[who hath not felt this when stretched upon his bed at the close of
day?]: and if our mothers or our nurses die, or a wild boar destroy
our vineyards, or our king be sick, we regard it not, but during
that state are as disinterested as if our eyes were closed with the
clay that weeps in the bowels of the earth. At the end of seven
years our teeth fall and die before us, representing a formal
prologue to the tragedy; and still every seven years it is odds but
we shall finish the last scene: and when nature, or chance, or vice,
takes our bodies in pieces, weakening some parts and loosing others,
we _taste the grave_ and the solemnities of our own funerals, first
in those parts that ministered to vice, and next in them that served
for ornament; and in a short time even they that served for
necessity become useless, and entangled like the wheels of a broken
clock. _Baldness_ is but a dressing to our funerals, the proper
ornament of mourning, and of a person entered very far into the
regions and possession of death: and we have many more of the same
signification: gray hairs, rotten teeth, dim eyes, trembling joints,
short breath, stiff limbs, wrinkled skin, short memory, decayed
appetite. Every day’s necessity calls for a reparation of that
portion which death fed on all night when we lay in his lap and
slept in his outer chambers. The very spirits of a man prey upon the
daily portion of bread and flesh, and every meal is a rescue from
one death, and lays up for another: and while we think a thought we
die; and the clock strikes, and reckons on our portion of eternity;
we form our words with the breath of our nostrils, we have the less
to live upon for every word we speak.
Thus nature calls us to meditate of death by those things which are
the instruments of acting it: and God by all the variety of his
Providence makes us see death every where, in all variety of
circumstances, and dressed up for all the fancies and the
expectation of every single person.
Nature hath given us one harvest every year, but death hath two: and
the spring and the autumn sends throngs of men and women to
charnel-houses; and all the summer long men are recovering from
their evils of the spring, till the dog-days come, and then the
Syrian star makes the summer deadly; and the fruits of autumn are
laid up for all the year’s provision, and the man that gathers them
eats and surfeits, and dies and needs them not, and himself is laid
up for eternity; and he that escapes till the winter only stays for
another opportunity, which the distempers of that quarter minister
to him with great variety. Thus death reigns in all the portions of
our time. The autumn with its fruits provides disorders for us, and
the winter’s cold turns them into sharp diseases, and the spring
brings flowers to strew our hearse, and the summer gives green turf
and brambles to bind upon our graves. Calentures and surfeit, cold
and agues, are the four quarters of the year, and all minister to
death; and you can go no whither but you tread upon a dead man’s
bones.