in all distempers of his body,
in all anxieties of spirit, in all holy sadnesses of soul, such a
physician in thy proportion, who are the greatest in heaven, as he hath
been in soul and body to me, in his proportion, who is the greatest upon
earth.

FOOTNOTES:

[122] Ecclus. xiii. 23.

[123] 2 Sam. xix. 12.

[124] 2 Sam. xxiv. 17.

[125] 2 Sam. xxiv. 22, 23.

[126] 2 Chron. xix. 8.

IX. MEDICAMINA SCRIBUNT.

_Upon their consultation they prescribe._

IX. MEDITATION.

They have seen me and heard me, arraigned me in these fetters and
received the evidence; I have cut up mine own anatomy, dissected myself,
and they are gone to read upon me. O how manifold and perplexed a thing,
nay, how wanton and various a thing, is ruin and destruction! God
presented to David three kinds, war, famine and pestilence; Satan left
out these, and brought in fires from heaven and winds from the
wilderness. If there were no ruin but sickness, we see the masters of
that art can scarce number, not name all sicknesses; every thing that
disorders a faculty, and the function of that, is a sickness; the names
will not serve them which are given from the place affected, the
pleurisy is so; nor from the effect which it works, the falling sickness
is so; they cannot have names enough, from what it does, nor where it
is, but they must extort names from what it is like, what it resembles,
and but in some one thing, or else they would lack names; for the wolf,
and the canker, and the polypus are so; and that question whether there
be more names or things, is as perplexed in sicknesses as in any thing
else; except it be easily resolved upon that side that there are more
sicknesses than names. If ruin were reduced to that one way, that man
could perish no way but by sickness, yet his danger were infinite; and
if sickness were reduced to that one way, that there were no sickness
but a fever, yet the way were infinite still; for it would overload and
oppress any natural, disorder and discompose any artificial, memory, to
deliver the names of several fevers; how intricate a work then have they
who are gone to consult which of these sicknesses mine is, and then
which of these fevers, and then what it would do, and then how it may be
countermined. But even in ill it is a degree of good when the evil will
admit consultation. In many diseases, that which is but an accident, but
a symptom of the main disease, is so violent, that the physician