There is therefore
but one comfort left, that though it be in the power of
the weakest arm to take away life, it is not in the
strongest to deprive us of death. God would not ex-
empt himself from that; the misery of immortality
in the flesh he undertook not, that was immortal.
Certainly there is no happiness within this circle of
flesh; nor is it in the opticks of these eyes to behold
felicity. The first day of our jubilee is death; the
devil hath therefore failed of his desires; we are hap-
pier with death than we should have been without it:
there is no misery but in himself, where there is no
end of misery; and so indeed, in his own sense, the
stoic is in the right.<63> He forgets that he can die, who
complains of misery: we are in the power of no calamity
while death is in our own.
Sect. 45.--Now, besides this literal and positive kind
of death, there are others whereof divines make men-
tion, and those, I think, not merely metaphorical, as
mortification, dying unto sin and the world.
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