beseech thee, my life from me, for it is better to die than to live_.[364] And when God asked him, _Dost thou well to be angry for this?_ he replies, _I do well to be angry, even unto death_. How much worse a death than death is this life, which so good men would so often change for death! But if my case be as Saint Paul's case, _quotidiè morior_, that I die daily, that something heavier than death fall upon me every day; if my case be David's case, _tota die mortificamur; all the day long we are killed_, that not only every day, but every hour of the day, something heavier than death fall upon me; though that be true of me, _Conceptus in peccatis, I was shapen in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me_ (there I died one death); though that be true of me, _Natus filius iræ_, I was born not only the child of sin, but the child of wrath, of the wrath of God for sin, which is a heavier death: yet _Domini Domini sunt exitus mortis, with God the Lord are the issues of death_; and after a Job, and a Joseph, and a Jeremiah, and a Daniel, I cannot doubt of a deliverance. And if no other deliverance conduce more to his glory and my good, yet he hath the keys of death,[365] and he can let me out at that door, that is, deliver me from the manifold deaths of this world, the _omni die_, and the _tota die_, the every day's death and every hour's death, by that one death, the final dissolution of body and soul, the end of all. But then is that the end of all? Is that dissolution of body and soul the last death that the body shall suffer (for of spiritual death we speak not now). It is not, though this be _exitus à morte_: it is _introitus in mortem_; though it be an issue from manifold deaths of this world, yet it is an entrance into the death of corruption and putrefaction, and vermiculation, and incineration, and dispersion in and from the grave, in which every dead man dies over again. It was a prerogative peculiar to Christ, not to die this death, not to see corruption. What gave him this privilege? Not Joseph's great proportion of gums and spices, that might have preserved his body from corruption and incineration longer than he needed it, longer than three days, but it would not have done it for ever. What preserved him then? Did his exemption and freedom from original sin preserve him from this corruption and incineration? It is true that original sin hath induced this corruption and incineration upon us; if we had not sinned in Adam, _mortality had not put on immortality_[366] (as the apostle speaks), nor _corruption had not put on incorruption_, but we had had our transmigration from this to the other world without any mortality, any corruption at all. But yet since Christ took sin upon him, so far as made him mortal, he had it so far too as might have made him see this corruption and incineration, though he had no original sin in himself; what preserved him then? Did the hypostatical union of both