Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions; Together with Death's DuelDonne, John
Religion
Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions; Together with Death's Duel
Donne, John
Meditations
The arts and sciences are most properly referred to the head; that is
their proper element and sphere; but yet the art of proving, logic, and
the art of persuading, rhetoric, are deduced to the hand, and that
expressed by a hand contracted into a fist, and this by a hand enlarged
and expanded; and evermore the power of man, and the power of God,
himself is expressed so. All things are in his hand; neither is God so
often presented to us, by names that carry our consideration upon
counsel, as upon execution of counsel; he oftener is called the Lord of
Hosts than by all other names, that may be referred to the other
signification. Hereby therefore we take into our meditation the slippery
condition of man, whose happiness in any kind, the defect of any one
thing conducing to that happiness, may ruin; but it must have all the
pieces to make it up. Without counsel, I had not got thus far; without
action and practice, I should go no farther towards health. But what is
the present necessary action? Purging; a withdrawing, a violating of
nature, a farther weakening. O dear price, and O strange way of
addition, to do it by subtraction; of restoring nature, to violate
nature; of providing strength, by increasing weakness. Was I not sick
before? And is it a question of comfort to be asked now, did your physic
make you sick? Was that it that my physic promised, to make me sick?
This is another step upon which we may stand, and see farther into the
misery of man, the time, the season of his misery; it must be done now.
O over-cunning, over-watchful, over-diligent, and over-sociable misery
of man, that seldom comes alone, but then when it may accompany other
miseries, and so put one another into the higher exaltation, and better
heart. I am ground even to an attenuation and must proceed to
evacuation, all ways to exinanition and annihilation.
XX. EXPOSTULATION.
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