We attribute but one privilege and advantage to man's body above other
moving creatures, that he is not, as others, grovelling, but of an
erect, of an upright, form naturally built and disposed to the
contemplation of heaven. Indeed it is a thankful form, and recompenses
that soul, which gives it, with carrying that soul so many feet higher
towards heaven. Other creatures look to the earth; and even that is no
unfit object, no unfit contemplation for man, for thither he must come;
but because man is not to stay there, as other creatures are, man in his
natural form is carried to the contemplation of that place which is his
home, heaven. This is man's prerogative; but what state hath he in this
dignity? A fever can fillip him down, a fever can depose him; a fever
can bring that head, which yesterday carried a crown of gold five feet
towards a crown of glory, as low as his own foot to-day. When God came
to breathe into man the breath of life, he found him flat upon the
ground; when he comes to withdraw that breath from him again, he
prepares him to it by laying him flat upon his bed. Scarce any prison so
close that affords not the prisoner two or three steps. The anchorites
that barked themselves up in hollow trees and immured themselves in
hollow walls, that perverse man that barrelled himself in a tub, all
could stand or sit, and enjoy some change of posture. A sick bed is a
grave, and all that the patient says there is but a varying of his own
epitaph. Every night's bed is a type of the grave; at night we tell our
servants at what hour we will rise, here we cannot tell ourselves at
what day, what week, what month. Here the head lies as low as the foot;
the head of the people as low as they whom those feet trod upon; and
that hand that signed pardons is too weak to beg his own, if he might
have it for lifting up that hand. Strange fetters to the feet, strange
manacles to the hands, when the feet and hands are bound so much the
faster, by how much the cords are slacker; so much the less able to do
their offices, by how much more the sinews and ligaments are the looser.
In the grave I may speak through the stones, in the voice of my friends,
and in the accents of those words which their love may afford my memory;
here I am mine own ghost, and rather affright my beholders than instruct
them; they conceive the worst of me now, and yet fear worse; they give
me for dead now, and yet wonder how I do when they wake at midnight, and
ask how I do to-morrow. Miserable, and (though common to all) inhuman
posture, where I must practise my lying in the grave by lying still, and
not practise my resurrection by rising any more.