—Immediately a place Before his eyes appear’d, sad, noisome, and dark; A lazar house it seem’d, wherein were laid Numbers of all diseas’d; all maladies, Of ghastly spasm, or racking torture, qualms Of heart-sick agony, all feverous kinds, Convulsions, epilepsies, fierce catarrhs, Intestine stone and ulcer, colic-pangs, Demoniac phrensy, moping melancholy, And moon-struck madness, pining atrophy, Marasmus, and wide-wasting pestilence, Dropsies, and asthmas, and joint-racking rheums. Dire was the tossing, deep the groans; despair Tended the sick, busiest from couch to couch; And over them triumphant death his dart Shook, but delay’d to strike, though oft invok’d With vows, as their chief good, and final hope. Sight so deform’d what heart of rock could long Dry-ey’d behold? Adam could not, but wept, Though not of woman born; compassion-quell’d His best of man, and gave him up to tears. From this sight let us turn, likewise, and consider the infinite love and condescension of God our dear Saviour, who took all our infirmities, bore our sickness, and knows how to sympathize with our poor natures in all their sorrows; and such an High Priest became us; such a Saviour is exactly adapted for all our miseries; and hence he is called a Physician of value, he healeth all our diseases, and surely the mind is awfully diseased with sin, nothing but his skill can penetrate into the depth of the diseases of the mind; whatever may be the ailments of the body, they are but emblems of the diseases of the soul; the blindness of ignorance, the deafness of spiritual unconcern, the fever of concupiscence, the jaundice of malice, the swelling tympany of pride, the vertigo of inconstancy, the quinsey of cursing and blasphemy, the dropsy of covetousness, the palsey of stupidity, the pleurisy of envy, the rheumatism of discontent, the delirium of constant levity, the moon-struck madness of passion and rage, with unbelief, hardness of heart, temptations of Satan, and the stings of conscience, of whatever disease we may feel we have got; these the adorable Physician heals. Let us carry all our hard cases to him—_See Brown’s Tropology_. We are always welcome to him, and though he may not seem to notice our case for a season, yet he will in his own appointed time. This text has often been very precious to my soul, _Therefore will the Lord wait that he may be gracious to you—and therefore will he be exalted that he may have mercy upon you_.