Natural men have conceived a twofold use of sleep; that it is a
refreshing of the body in this life; that it is a preparing of the soul
for the next; that it is a feast, and it is the grace at that feast;
that it is our recreation and cheers us, and it is our catechism and
instructs us; we lie down in a hope that we shall rise the stronger, and
we lie down in a knowledge that we may rise no more. Sleep is an opiate
which gives us rest, but such an opiate, as perchance, being under it,
we shall wake no more. But though natural men, who have induced
secondary and figurative considerations, have found out this second,
this emblematical use of sleep, that it should be a representation of
death, God, who wrought and perfected his work before nature began (for
nature was but his apprentice, to learn in the first seven days, and now
is his foreman, and works next under him), God, I say, intended sleep
only for the refreshing of man by bodily rest, and not for a figure of
death, for he intended not death itself then. But man having induced
death upon himself, God hath taken man's creature, death, into his hand,
and mended it; and whereas it hath in itself a fearful form and aspect,
so that man is afraid of his own creature, God presents it to him in a
familiar, in an assiduous, in an agreeable and acceptable form, in
sleep; that so when he awakes from sleep, and says to himself, "Shall I
be no otherwise when I am dead, than I was even now when I was asleep?"
he may be ashamed of his waking dreams, and of his melancholy fancying
out a horrid and an affrightful figure of that death which is so like
sleep. As then we need sleep to live out our threescore and ten years,
so we need death to live that life which we cannot outlive. And as death
being our enemy, God allows us to defend ourselves against it (for we
victual ourselves against death twice every day), as often as we eat, so
God having so sweetened death unto us as he hath in sleep, we put
ourselves into our enemy's hands once every day, so far as sleep is
death; and sleep is as much death as meat is life. This then is the
misery of my sickness, that death, as it is produced from me and is mine
own creature, is now before mine eyes, but in that form in which God
hath mollified it to us, and made it acceptable, in sleep I cannot see
it. How many prisoners, who have even hollowed themselves their graves
upon that earth on which they have lain long under heavy fetters, yet at
this hour are asleep, though they be yet working upon their own graves
by their own weight? He that hath seen his friend die to-day, or knows
he shall see it to-morrow, yet will sink into a sleep between. I cannot,
and oh, if I be entering now into eternity, where there shall be no more
distinction of hours, why is it all my business now to tell clocks? Why
is none of the heaviness of my heart dispensed into mine eye-lids, that
they might fall as my heart doth? And why, since I have lost my delight
in all objects, cannot I discontinue the faculty of seeing them by
closing mine eyes in sleep? But why rather, being entering into that
presence where I shall wake continually and never sleep more, do I not
interpret my continual waking here, to be a parasceve and a preparation
to that?