It is the exaltation of misery to fall from a near hope of happiness. And in that vehement imprecation, the prophet expresses the highest of God's anger, _Give them, O Lord, what wilt thou give them? give them a miscarrying womb._ Therefore as soon as we are men (that is, inanimated, quickened in the womb), though we cannot ourselves, our parents have to say in our behalf, _Wretched man that he is, who shall deliver him from this body of death?_[352] if there be no deliverer. It must be he that said to Jeremiah, _Before I formed thee I knew thee, and before thou camest out of the womb I sanctified thee_. We are not sure that there was no kind of ship nor boat to fish in, nor to pass by, till God prescribed Noah that absolute form of the ark.[353] That word which the Holy Ghost, by Moses, useth for the ark, is common to all kind of boats, _thebah_; and is the same word that Moses useth for the boat that he was exposed in, that his mother laid him in an ark of bulrushes. But we are sure that Eve had no midwife when she was delivered of Cain, therefore she might well say, _Possedi virum à Domino, I have gotten a man from the Lord_,[354] wholly, entirely from the Lord; it is the Lord that enabled me to conceive, the Lord that infused a quickening soul into that conception, the Lord that brought into the world that which himself had quickened; without all this might Eve say, my body had been but the house of death, and _Domini Domini sunt exitus mortis, To God the Lord belong the issues of death_. But then this _exitus à morte_ is but _introitus in mortem_; this issue, this deliverance, from that death, the death of the womb, is an entrance, a delivering over to another death, the manifold deaths of this world; we have a winding-sheet in our mother's womb which grows with us from our conception, and we come into the world wound up in that winding-sheet, for we come to seek a grave. And as prisoners discharged of actions may lie for fees, so when the womb hath discharged us, yet we are bound to it by cords of hestæ, by such a string as that we cannot go thence, nor stay there; we celebrate our own funerals with cries even at our birth; as though our threescore and ten years' life were spent in our mother's labour, and our circle made up in the first point thereof; we beg our baptism with another sacrament, with tears; and we come into a world that lasts many ages, but we last not. _In domo Patris_, says our Saviour, speaking of heaven, _multæ mansiones_, divers and durable; so that if a man cannot possess a martyr's house (he hath shed no blood for Christ), yet he may have a confessor's, he hath been ready to glorify God in the shedding of his blood. And if a woman cannot possess a virgin's house (she hath embraced the holy state of marriage), yet she may have a matron's house, she hath brought forth and brought up children in the fear of God. _In domo Patris, in my Father's house_, in heaven, there _are many