We have a convenient author,[234] who writ a discourse of bells when he
was prisoner in Turkey. How would he have enlarged himself if he had
been my fellow-prisoner in this sick bed, so near to that steeple which
never ceases, no more than the harmony of the spheres, but is more
heard. When the Turks took Constantinople, they melted the bells into
ordnance; I have heard both bells and ordnance, but never been so much
affected with those as with these bells. I have lain near a steeple[235]
in which there are said to be more than thirty bells, and near another,
where there is one so big, as that the clapper is said to weigh more
than six hundred pounds,[236] yet never so affected as here. Here the
bells can scarce solemnize the funeral of any person, but that I knew
him, or knew that he was my neighbour: we dwelt in houses near to one
another before, but now he is gone into that house into which I must
follow him. There is a way of correcting the children of great persons,
that other children are corrected in their behalf, and in their names,
and this works upon them who indeed had more deserved it. And when these
bells tell me, that now one, and now another is buried, must not I
acknowledge that they have the correction due to me, and paid the debt
that I owe? There is a story of a bell in a monastery[237] which, when
any of the house was sick to death, rung always voluntarily, and they
knew the inevitableness of the danger by that. It rung once when no man
was sick, but the next day one of the house fell from the steeple and
died, and the bell held the reputation of a prophet still. If these
bells that warn to a funeral now, were appropriated to none, may not I,
by the hour of the funeral, supply? How many men that stand at an
execution, if they would ask, For what dies that man? should hear their
own faults condemned, and see themselves executed by attorney? We scarce
hear of any man preferred, but we think of ourselves that we might very
well have been that man; why might not I have been that man that is
carried to his grave now? Could I fit myself to stand or sit in any
man's place, and not to lie in any man's grave? I may lack much of the
good parts of the meanest, but I lack nothing of the mortality of the
weakest; they may have acquired better abilities than I, but I was born
to as many infirmities as they. To be an incumbent by lying down in a
grave, to be a doctor by teaching mortification by example, by dying,
though I may have seniors, others may be older than I, yet I have
proceeded apace in a good university, and gone a great way in a little
time, by the furtherance of a vehement fever, and whomsoever these bells
bring to the ground to-day, if he and I had been compared yesterday,
perchance I should have been thought likelier to come to this
preferment then than he. God hath kept the power of death in his own
hands, lest any man should bribe death. If man knew the gain of death,
the ease of death, he would solicit, he would provoke death to assist
him by any hand which he might use. But as when men see many of their
own professions preferred, it ministers a hope that that may light upon
them; so when these hourly bells tell me of so many funerals of men like
me, it presents, if not a desire that it may, yet a comfort whensoever
mine shall come.