i. There be MANY THINGS, FROM WHENCE WE MAY COLLECT

THE NECESSITY OF DYING.

I shall pretermit divers, and only speak to these following.

1. We may collect it, by those harbingers and forerunners of death, diseases, pains, and natural decays, which are incident to all men.

Man is compounded of the contrary and jarring qualities of heat and cold, drought and moisture; which are always waging an intestine war within him. Health is the equal balance of these contrarities; when they are so tempered together, the more active with the more resisting, that neither of them can get the victory over the other. And therefore some suppose, that Adam, who doubtless was created in the highest perfection of natural health and strength, had all these mixed ad pondus, in so even a temper, that none of them could naturally sway him to corruption; and that God then inflicted the death he threatened, when, upon the first transgression, he turned the evenness of his constitution, and thereby brought him into a mortal state. Sickness is nothing else, but a predominant faction in a man's temper, which, as rebellions use to do, raiseth itself upon the ruin of the whole. As God slackens the reins to some quality in the greater world, when he intends to bring a general calamity and destruction upon it (for thus we read, that he once destroyed the world by a dropsy, in the great deluge; and that he will again destroy it by a fever, in the last conflagration) so likewise in man, who is the lesser world, God doth sometimes let loose the reins, and gives some of his natural qualities an unnatural predominancy: and either floods him with dropsies; or burns him with fevers; or numbs him with palsies, lethargies, and epilepsies; and, by other innumerable diseases, so ravageth his health and vigour, his youth and beauty, that he becomes a ghost, before yet he be a corpse. Yea, those, who have had no such violent assaults as these, yet find their decays grow up together with their years: Solomon hath given us an elegant description of them, Eccl. xii. from the second to the seventh verse: dimness of sight, deafness of hearing, weakness and trembling of limbs, sluggishness of spirits, chillness of blood, loss of appetite and desire; and a whole hospital of other incurable diseases are the attendants of old age, which is itself the most incurable of all; that the very length of living, may be argument enough of the necessity of dying. This is that heavy burden, which bows down all on whom it lies; which

makes them go stooping to the ground, as if it would bid them contemplate what they are, in the dust, and consider their mortality in that earth into which they must shortly fall. All these are as so many harbingers of death, sent before to bid us prepare, for that the king of terrors cannot be long after.

2. The observation of death's universal empire over all other things, and over all other men, may give us a certain knowledge that we also must shortly die.

If we consider the vicissitudes of natural things, we shall find that death reigns in all of them, The day dies into night, summer into winter: time itself, which destroys all things, yet dies continually, nor can it exist one minute together. Our very life is nothing else but a succession of dying: every day and hour wears away part of it; and, so far as it is already spent, so far are we already dead and buried: so that the longest liver hath no more, but that he is longer a dying than others. This, indeed, is only to die successively; but that fatal and final stroke is coming, when we shall no more live nor die. All others have felt it, and therefore David calls death the way of all the earth: 1 Kings ii. 2. We need no other proof of this, than to search into the records of the grave: there lie the rich and poor, the noble and ignoble, the wise and foolish, the holy and profane, the rubbish of a thousand generations heaped one upon another; and this truth, that all must die, is written indelibly even in their dust. The whole world is but a great charnelhouse: our very graves were once living: we dig through our forefathers, and must shortly become earth ourselves, to bury our posterity: so thick sown are the carcasses of all the ages since the creation, as were enough to dung the whole face of the earth with their flesh, and pave it with their bones. Are not we of the same mould with them? hath not God's hand kneaded us out of the same clay, and may not his finger crumble us into the same dust? certainly, the cords of our earthly tabernacle may be as easily unloosed, or cut asunder, as theirs. We read but of two only of all mankind exempted, by a peculiar grace and privilege, from this law of death; and they were Enoch and Elias: God strangely tacked their temporal and eternal life together; and made their time flow into eternity, without any stop or interruption; like rivers, which glide along into the sea with a free and undisturbed course, while ours must first sink and find a passage under ground.

3. We may certainly know ourselves mortal, by knowing ourselves sinful creatures.

There is a double necessity of death upon the account of sin.
As a Punishment.

As a Purgation of it.

(1) It is necessary, as a Punishment of sin; that that primitive threatening might be fulfilled, Gen. ii. 17. In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.

Hereby the justice of God stands engaged to inflict death upon every transgressor: and to this it is, that the Apostle ascribes it: Rom. v. 12. By sin death entered into the world, and death passed upon all men, because that all have sinned. Death therefore is not so much a debt due to nature, as to the avenging justice of God; and befals us rather by his ordination and appointment, than by any natural necessity. It is appointed unto men once to die: Heb. ix. 27. and this appears, in that man was at first created in pure nature, yet in a deathless state. It is true, that Adam, even before he fell, had in him the contem- › peration of the same contrary qualities as now we have; and so, at least, had also the remote principles of death and dissolution: but, probably, either these were so harmoniously mixed, as that there was no tendency to a dissolution; or else he was created with such a privilege, that, by eating of the Tree of Life, or by the command of his own will to which all his inferior faculties were then perfectly subject, he might sway and overrule the jars and discords of an elemental constitution, and continue himself in life, so long as he should continue himself in obedience. So, then, it is not primarily man's nature, but man's sin, and the curse of the Law taking hold upon him, that hath brought in this necessity of dying. But yet the justice of God doth not inflict it as a punishment upon all; for death, under the strict notion of a punishment, is proper only to wicked men and unbelievers, who are left to bear the curse of the Law in their own persons, and to satisfy offended justice in their own sufferings: as to believers, Christ hath undertaken and eluctated for them all that was penal: he hath borne the whole curse of the law, being made a curse for us: Gal. iii. 13.

(2) So that now, to those, who believe, it is no more a punishment, but only a Purgation.

And, were it not that God hath thus altered the quality of it, making it the greatest means of sanctification in the world, thereby turning that which was a curse into a blessing, it might

probably be maintained, that faith in the death of Christ would supercede all necessity of dying, and make us not only righteous but immortal. But God hath other ends in the inflicting of death, besides the satisfaction of his justice: he makes use of it for the purging of his people from the relics of their corruption; and it is the only Purgatory, which they must ever undergo. Sin hath taken a lease of our souls, and holds them by our own lives: it will be in us to the last gasp; and, as the heart is the last which dies, so is that corruption which lodgeth in it: but, then, die it must: God hath so graciously ordered it, that, though death came into the world by sin, yet sin itself shall he abolished out of it by death. And, as sea-water loseth its brackishness when percolated through the earth, and becomes sweet and wholesome; so a Christian, when he is strained through the grave, loseth all his brackishness, all his dregs and scum, and becomes pure and holy, fit for the enjoyment of a pure and holy God. This is his final victory: this is the deciding stroke between him and all his spiritual enemies: when he hath been long struggling, with too little success, against sin and Satan; and is ready to faint and despond, in the conflict; death comes in, sent as an auxiliary from God, and gives him both the day and the triumph: certainly, he cannot but count it a good office done him, to have his earthly house pulled down upon so many of his uncircumcised foes, though it crush him too in the fall. Thus hath God brought over death, which was before a formidable enemy, to be of a believer's party: so that, though it had its sting and strength, its very being from sin; yet it proves the most effectual means for the destruction of sin. As worms, when they creep into their holes, leave a slimy dirt about them; so is it with a Christian: when he dies, he leaves his sin, his filth and corruption, all at the grave's mouth: there he leaves them; and his soul, got free from that clog, mounts up into a blessed eternity, where it is for ever fixed and perfected in holiness, where there is no object to tempt, nor corruption to betray: no steam of any lust shall there rise to cloud our beatifical vision of God, such as do here too oft darken the eye both of our reason and our faith: we shall no more cast kind glances upon our sins, nor no more know a wavering and hovering desire after them. O blessed necessity! when the soul shall be for ever tied up to one all-satisfying good! when it shall, with as natural a proneness and vehement ardour, love and delight in God, as it loves itself, and delights in its own happi

ness! And why then should we desire to linger here below, and to spin out a miserable life, whereof sin and sorrow will still have the greatest share? Here, the best of us are engaged in perpetual quarrels between sin and grace: the one will not yield, and the other cannot: corruption compels one way, and grace commands another. Haste, therefore, O Christian! out of this scuffle: make haste to heaven, and there this controversy shall be for ever decided. There, we shall no more live in fear of new sins, nor in sorrow for old; but all sorrow and sighing shall cease: all tears shall be wiped from our eyes, and all sin rooted out of our hearts. And, upon this account, death is necessary.

ii. Now though, by these and other such like considerations, we may arrive at a certain knowledge that we shall die; yet THE

PARTICULAR CIRCUMSTANCES OF THE TIME AND MANNER OF OUR DEATH ARE KNOWN TO GOD ONLY.

Some have, a little before their decease, given secret presages of these things, as I am informed this Honourable Person did. Whence these proceed, it will not be necessary here to enquire. Possibly, they may be only fortuitous and casual: the event may make those things pass for predictions, which were only spoken at random. Or, if they seem too punctual to be such, the best account, which I can give, is this: that death, being about to unloose those secret and sweet bands, those vital knots which tie our souls and bodies together, we begin to grow more unconfined in our knowledge, as well as our being; and receive intelligences of things after another way, than by the dull conveyance of sense. There is now, that dust and ashes in the eye of the soul, which hinders it from discovering futurities: but, when death is blowing this away, it begins to know after its own manner; and receives at least some obscure and glimmering hints of those objects, which sense could never administer. And hence, possibly, may proceed those strange prophetic speeches, which many have given out concerning their own death. But, whencesoever they are, God doth ordinarily reserve the exact knowledge of these things to himself.

1. He only knows the critical and punctual Time of our Death; for he hath determined it, to a very moment.

It is God, who turns up our glass; who puts such a measure of sand into it, and no more; and hath prefixed that it shall run such a time, and no longer. It is he, who hath written our names upon`so many days and hours as we shall live, as upon so