It is not in man's body, as it is in the city, that when the bell hath
rung, to cover your fire, and rake up the embers, you may lie down and
sleep without fear. Though you have by physic and diet raked up the
embers of your disease, still there is a fear of a relapse; and the
greater danger is in that. Even in pleasures and in pains, there is a
proprietary, a _meum et tuum_, and a man is most affected with that
pleasure which is his, his by former enjoying and experience, and most
intimidated with those pains which are his, his by a woful sense of
them, in former afflictions. A covetous person, who hath preoccupated
all his senses, filled all his capacities with the delight of gathering,
wonders how any man can have any taste of any pleasure in any openness
or liberality; so also in bodily pains, in a fit of the stone, the
patient wonders why any man should call the gout a pain; and he that
hath felt neither, but the toothache, is as much afraid of a fit of that
as either of the other of either of the other. Diseases which we never
felt in ourselves come but to a compassion of others that have endured
them; nay, compassion itself comes to no great degree if we have not
felt in some proportion in ourselves that which we lament and condole in
another. But when we have had those torments in their exaltation
ourselves, we tremble at relapse. When we must pant through all those
fiery heats, and sail through all those overflowing sweats, when we must
watch through all those long nights, and mourn through all those long
days (days and nights, so long as that Nature herself shall seem to be
perverted, and to have put the longest day, and the longest night, which
should be six months asunder, into one natural, unnatural day), when we
must stand at the same bar, expect the return of physicians from their
consultations, and not be sure of the same verdict, in any good
indications, when we must go the same way over again, and not see the
same issue, that is a state, a condition, a calamity, in respect of
which any other sickness were a convalescence, and any greater, less. It
adds to the affliction, that relapses are (and for the most part justly)
imputed to ourselves, as occasioned by some disorder in us; and so we
are not only passive but active in our own ruin; we do not only stand
under a falling house, but pull it down upon us; and we are not only
executed (that implies guiltiness), but we are executioners (that
implies dishonour), and executioners of ourselves (and that implies
impiety). And we fall from that comfort which we might have in our first
sickness, from that meditation, "Alas, how generally miserable is man,
and how subject to diseases" (for in that it is some degree of comfort
that we are but in the state common to all), we fall, I say, to this
discomfort, and self-accusing, and self-condemning: "Alas, how
improvident, and in that how unthankful to God and his instruments, am I
in making so ill use of so great benefits, in destroying so soon so long
a work, in relapsing, by my disorder, to that from which they had
delivered me": and so my meditation is fearfully transferred from the
body to the mind, and from the consideration of the sickness to that
sin, that sinful carelessness, by which I have occasioned my relapse.
And amongst the many weights that aggravate a relapse, this also is one,
that a relapse proceeds with a more violent dispatch, and more
irremediably, because it finds the country weakened, and depopulated
before. Upon a sickness, which as yet appears not, we can scarce fix a
fear, because we know not what to fear; but as fear is the busiest and
irksomest affection, so is a relapse (which is still ready to come) into
that which is but newly gone, the nearest object, the most immediate
exercise of that affection of fear.