How ruinous a farm hath man taken, in taking himself! How ready is the
house every day to fall down, and how is all the ground overspread with
weeds, all the body with diseases; where not only every turf, but every
stone bears weeds; not only every muscle of the flesh, but every bone of
the body hath some infirmity; every little flint upon the face of this
soil hath some infectious weed, every tooth in our head such a pain as
a constant man is afraid of, and yet ashamed of that fear, of that sense
of the pain. How dear, and how often a rent doth man pay for his farm!
He pays twice a day, in double meals, and how little time he hath to
raise his rent! How many holidays to call him from his labour! Every day
is half holiday, half spent in sleep. What reparations, and subsidies,
and contributions he is put to, besides his rent! What medicines besides
his diet; and what inmates he is fain to take in, besides his own
family; what infectious diseases from other men! Adam might have had
Paradise for dressing and keeping it; and then his rent was not improved
to such a labour as would have made his brow sweat; and yet he gave it
over; how far greater a rent do we pay for this farm, this body, who pay
ourselves, who pay the farm itself, and cannot live upon it! Neither is
our labour at an end when we have cut down some weed as soon as it
sprung up, corrected some violent and dangerous accident of a disease
which would have destroyed speedily, nor when we have pulled up that
weed from the very root, recovered entirely and soundly from that
particular disease; but the whole ground is of an ill nature, the whole
soil ill disposed; there are inclinations, there is a propenseness to
diseases in the body, out of which, without any other disorder, diseases
will grow, and so we are put to a continual labour upon this farm, to a
continual study of the whole complexion and constitution of our body. In
the distempers and diseases of soils, sourness, dryness, weeping, any
kind of barrenness, the remedy and the physic is, for a great part,
sometimes in themselves; sometimes the very situation relieves them; the
hanger of a hill will purge and vent his own malignant moisture, and the
burning of the upper turf of some ground (as health from cauterizing)
puts a new and a vigorous youth into that soil, and there rises a kind
of phoenix out of the ashes, a fruitfulness out of that which was
barren before, and by that which is the barrenest of all, ashes. And
where the ground cannot give itself physic, yet it receives physic from
other grounds, from other soils, which are not the worse for having
contributed that help to them from marl in other hills, or from slimy
sand in other shores, grounds help themselves, or hurt not other grounds
from whence they receive help. But I have taken a farm at this hard
rent, and upon those heavy covenants, that it can afford itself no help
(no part of my body, if it were cut off, would cure another part; in
some cases it might preserve a sound part, but in no case recover an
infected); and if my body may have had any physic, any medicine from
another body, one man from the flesh of another man (as by mummy, or any
such composition), it must be from a man that is dead, and not as in
other soils, which are never the worse for contributing their marl or
their fat slime to my ground. There is nothing in the same man to help
man, nothing in mankind to help one another (in this sort, by way of
physic), but that he who ministers the help is in as ill case as he that
receives it would have been if he had not had it; for he from whose body
the physic comes is dead. When therefore I took this farm, undertook
this body, I undertook to drain not a marsh but a moat, where there was,
not water mingled to offend, but all was water; I undertook to perfume
dung, where no one part but all was equally unsavoury; I undertook to
make such a thing wholesome, as was not poison by any manifest quality,
intense heat or cold, but poison in the whole substance, and in the
specific form of it. To cure the sharp accidents of diseases is a great
work; to cure the disease itself is a greater; but to cure the body,
the root, the occasion of diseases, is a work reserved for the great
physician, which he doth never any other way but by glorifying these
bodies in the next world.