for so many ages: but subject to infirmities,
miseries, interrupted, tossed and tumbled up and down, carried about with
every small blast, often molested and disquieted upon each slender
occasion, [936]uncertain, brittle, and so is all that we trust unto. [937]
"And he that knows not this is not armed to endure it, is not fit to live
in this world (as one condoles our time), he knows not the condition of it,
where with a reciprocalty, pleasure and pain are still united, and succeed
one another in a ring." _Exi e mundo_, get thee gone hence if thou canst
not brook it; there is no way to avoid it, but to arm thyself with
patience, with magnanimity, to [938]oppose thyself unto it, to suffer
affliction as a good soldier of Christ; as [939]Paul adviseth constantly to
bear it. But forasmuch as so few can embrace this good council of his, or
use it aright, but rather as so many brute beasts give away to their
passion, voluntary subject and precipitate themselves into a labyrinth of
cares, woes, miseries, and suffer their souls to be overcome by them,
cannot arm themselves with that patience as they ought to do, it falleth
out oftentimes that these dispositions become habits, and "many affects
contemned" (as [940]Seneca notes) "make a disease. Even as one
distillation, not yet grown to custom, makes a cough; but continual and
inveterate causeth a consumption of the lungs;" so do these our melancholy
provocations: and according as the humour itself is intended, or remitted
in men, as their temperature of body, or rational soul is better able to
make resistance; so are they more or less affected. For that which is but a
flea-biting to one, causeth insufferable torment to another; and which one
by his singular moderation, and well-composed carriage can happily
overcome, a second is no whit able to sustain, but upon every small
occasion of misconceived abuse, injury, grief, disgrace, loss, cross,
humour, &c. (if solitary, or idle) yields so far to passion, that his
complexion is altered, his digestion hindered, his sleep gone, his spirits
obscured, and his heart heavy, his hypochondries misaffected; wind,
crudity, on a sudden overtake him, and he himself overcome with melancholy.
As it is with a man imprisoned for debt, if once in the gaol, every
creditor will bring his action against him, and there likely hold him. If
any discontent seize upon a patient, in an instant all other perturbations
(for--_qua data porta ruunt_) will set up