Man ashiv le-Yahoweh, or, A serious enquiry for a suitable return for continued life,…

7 ¹Keep upon your heart a constant, daily sense of your own mortality, and of your nearness to another world: What is the reason that men under sickness are more apt to purpose to forsake sin, and to promise to mend and to reform, than in time of health, but because they have greater apprehensions of death in its nearer approaches unto them; and things as near do more affect, than things apprehended as further off; and was it not the thoughts of the nearness of death, and your daily danger of it, that did quicken you to resolve against sin, and for God, and to wind up your resolutions something higher than at other times? Why you have reason still to walk in daily expectation of your dissolution, though the plague be stayed. If the plague be removed out of your habitation, yet sin is not removed out of your heart; there is the meritorious cause of death still in you, and there are natural causes of death still in you, and you must as surely dye, as if the Plague were raging, and you may as soon dye; we dye a thousand ways: death might be as near to you by some other disease, ⟨p. 123⟩and you may fall by some other disease, as so many have done by the Pestilence; though you were not one of those that dyed eight thousand in a week; yet you may be one of those that dye eight, or five hundred in a week. Do not say the bitterness of death is past, that now there is no danger; do not put far from thee the evil day. What if so many do not dye every week as when thou resolvedst to be better, yet thou mightest dye every week. An Apoplexy, or a Fever, or Dropsy might fetched thee to thy grave, who hast (through Mercy and Patience) escaped death by the Plague; think with thy self, when thy heart is negligent of thy former purpose, When? and why was it that I resolved to give my self more to a holy, heavenly life? When the Plague did come nigh unto my dwelling, and because I thought every day I might have dyed: Why it is my daily danger, if not by the Plague, yet by some other disease, that will as certainly be the cause of my dissolution, as if it were the Plague. Thou didst purpose, because thou thoughtest death was near, then perform, because death is still as near, yea it is nearer to thee now, then when thou madest this resolution; for the more days thou hast lived since, the fewer now thou hast to live; it was near then, but to thee it is nearer now.