religion,<62> I should be of his desires, and wish rather to
go off at one blow, than to be sawed in pieces by the
grating torture of a disease. Men that look no further
than their outsides, think health an appurtenance unto
life, and quarrel with their constitutions for being sick;
but I, that have examined the parts of man, and know
upon what tender filaments that fabrick hangs, do
wonder that we are not always so; and, considering the
thousand doors that lead to death, do thank my God
that we can die but once. 'Tis not only the mischief
of diseases, and the villany of poisons, that make an
end of us; we vainly accuse the fury of guns, and the
new inventions of death:--it is in the power of every
hand to destroy us, and we are beholden unto every
one we meet, he doth not kill us. There is therefore
but one comfort left, that though it be in the power of
the weakest arm to take away life, it is not in the
strongest to deprive us of death. God would not ex-
empt himself from that; the misery of immortality
in the flesh he undertook not, that was immortal.
Certainly there is no happiness within this circle of
flesh; nor is it in the opticks of these eyes to behold
felicity. The first day of our jubilee is death; the
devil hath therefore failed of his desires; we are hap-
pier with death than we should have been without it:
there is no misery but in himself, where there is no
end of misery; and so indeed, in his own sense, the
stoic is in the right.<63> He forgets that he can die, who
complains of misery: we are in the power of no calamity
while death is in our own.