habits of reflection be not distracted, and his heart broken by hard and ignorant treatment, and if his soul have not been wedded to care by a love of gold without the possibility of divorce, and mammon have not branded his spirit with indelible misery, then is the old man ready to enter on a purely spiritual existence with alacrity and joy. --------------------- Footnote 67: _The Use of the Body to the Mind._ ---------------------------- PREPARATORY TO DEATH. Jeremy Taylor, in his _Holy Dying_ (General Considerations Preparatory to Death), has this memorable passage, in which he illustrates the daily experiences of every thoughtful mind: And because this consideration is of great usefulness and of great necessity to many purposes of wisdom and the spirit, all the succession of time, all the changes in nature, all the varieties of light and darkness, the thousand thousands of accidents in the world, and every contingency to every man and to every creature, doth preach our funeral sermon, and calls us to look and see how the old sexton Time throws up the earth and digs a grave where we must lay our sins or our sorrows, and sow our bodies till they rise again in a fair or in an intolerable eternity. Every revolution which the sun makes about the world divides between life and death; and death possesses both those portions by the next morrow, and we are dead to all those months which we have already lived, and we shall never live them over again: and still God makes little periods of our age. First we change our world, when we come from the womb to feel the warmth of the sun. Then we sleep and enter into the image of death, in which state we are unconcerned in all the changes of the world [who hath not felt this when stretched upon his bed at the close of day?]: and if our mothers or our nurses die, or a wild boar destroy our vineyards, or our king be sick, we regard it not, but during that state are as disinterested as if our eyes were closed with the clay that weeps in the bowels of the earth. At the end of seven years our teeth fall and die before us, representing a formal prologue to the tragedy; and still every seven years it is odds but we shall finish the last scene: and when nature, or chance, or vice, takes our bodies in pieces, weakening some parts and loosing others, we _taste the grave_ and the solemnities of our own funerals, first in those parts that ministered to vice, and next in them that served for ornament; and in a short time even they that served for necessity become useless, and entangled like the wheels of a broken clock. _Baldness_ is but a dressing to our funerals, the proper ornament of mourning, and of a person entered very far into the regions and possession of death: and we have many more of the same signification: gray hairs, rotten teeth, dim eyes, trembling joints,