Poetical Works of John Oldham/A Sunday-Thought in Sickness
A SUNDAY-THOUGHT IN SICKNESS.
LORD, how dreadful is the prospect of death, at the remotest distance! How the smallest apprehension of it can pall the most gay, airy, and brisk spirits! Even I, who thought I could have been merry in sight of my coffin, and drink a health with the sexton in my own grave, now tremble at the least envoy of the king of terrors. To see but the shaking of my glass makes me turn pale, and fear is like to prevent and do the work of ray distemper. All the jollity of my humour and conversation in turned on a sudden to chagrin and melancholy, black in despair, and dark as the grave. My soul and body seem at once laid out, and I fancy all the plummets of eternal night already hanging upon my temples. But whence proceed these fears? Certainly they are not idle dreams, nor the accidental product of my disease, which disorders the brains, and fills ’em with odd chimeras. Why should my soul be averse to its enlargement? Why should it be content to be knit up in two yards of skin, when it may have all the world for its purlieu? 'Tis not that I'm unwilling to leave my relations and present friends: I'm parted from the first already, and could be severed from both the length of the whole map, and live with my body as far distant from them as my soul must when I'm dead. Neither is it that I'm loth to leave the delights and pleasures of the world; some of them I have tried, and found empty, the others covet not, because unknown. I'm confident I could despise 'em all by a greatness of soul, did not the Bible oblige me, and divines tell me, 'tis my duty. It is not neither that I'm unwilling to go hence before I've established a reputation, and something to make me survive myself. I could have been content to be still-born, and have no more than the register or sexton to tell that I've never been in the land of the living. In fine, 'tis not from a principle of cowardice, which the schools have called self-preservation, the poor effect of instinct and dull pretence of a brute as well as me. This unwillingness, therefore, and aversion to undergo the general fate, must have a juster original, and flow from a more important cause. I'm well satisfied that this other being within, that moves and actuates my frame of flesh and blood, has a life beyond it and the grave; and something in it prompts me to believe its immortality. A residence it must have somewhere else, when it has left this carcase, and another state to pass into, unchangeable and everlasting as itself, after its separation. This condition must be good or bad, according to its actions and deserts in this life ; for as it owes its being to some infinite power that created it, I well suppose it his vassal, and obliged to live by his law; and as certainly conclude, that according to the keeping or breaking of that law, 'tis to be rewarded or punished hereafter. This diversity of rewards and punishments makes the two places, heaven and hell, so often mentioned in Scripture, and talked of in pulpits. Of the latter my fears too cruelly convince me, and the anticipation of its torment, which I already feel in my own conscience. There is, there is a hell, and damned fiends, and a never dying worm, and that sceptic that doubts of it, may find 'em all within my single breast. I dare not any longer, with the atheist, disbelieve them, or think 'em the clergy’s bugbears, invented as nurses do frightful names for their children, to scare 'em into quietness and obedience. How oft have I triumphed in my unconcerned and seared insensibility? How oft boasted of that unhappy suspected calm, which, like that of the Dead Sea, proved only my curse, and a treacherous ambush to those storms, which at present (and will for ever, I dread,) shipwreck my quiet and hopes? How oft have I rejected the advice of that bosom friend, and drowned its alarms in the noise of a tumultuous debauch, or by stupifying wine (like some condemned malefactor) armed myself against the apprehensions of my certain doom?
Now, now the tyrant awakes, and comes to pay at once all arrears of cruelty. At last, but too late, (like drowning mariners) I see the gay monsters which inveigled me. into my death and destruction. Oh, the gnawing remorse of a rash, unguarded, unconsidering sinner! Oh, how the ghosts of former crimes affright my haunted imagination, and make me suffer a thousand racks and martyrdoms! I see, methinks, the jaws of destruction gaping wide to swallow me; and I (like one sliding on ice), though I see the danger, cannot stop from running into it. My fancy represents to me a whole legion of devils, ready to tear me in pieces, numberless as my sins or fears; and whither, alas! whither shall I fly for refuge? Where shall I retreat and take sanctuary? Shall I call the rocks and mountains to cover me, or bid the earth yawn wide to its centre, and take me in? Poor shift of escaping Almighty justice! Distracting frenzy! that would make me believe contradictions, and hope to fly out of the reach of him whose presence is everywhere, not excluding hell itself; for he is there in the effects of his vengeance. Shall I invoke some power infinite as that that created me, to reduce me to nothing again, and rid me at once of my being and all that tortures it? Oh no, 'tis in vain; I must be forced into being, to keep me fresh for torment, and retain sense only to feel pain. I must be dying to all eternity, and live ever, to live ever wretched. Oh that Nature had placed me in the rank of things that have only a bare existence, or, at best, an animal life, and never given me a soul and reason, which now must contribute to my misery, and make me envy brutes and vegetables! Would the womb that bore me had been my prison till now, or I stept out of it into my grave, and saved the expenses and toil of a long and tedious journey, where life affords nothing of accommodations to invite one's stay! Happy had I been if I had expired with my first breath, and entered the Bill of Mortality as soon as the world; happy if I had been drowned in my font, and that water which was to and give me new life, had proved mortal in another sense! I had then died without any guilt of my own, but what I brought into the world with me, and that too atoned for; I mean that which I contracted from my first parents, my unhappiness rather than fault, inasmuch as I was fain to be born of a sinning race: then I had never enhanced it with acquired guilt, never added those innumerable crimes which must make up my indictment at the grand audit. Ungrateful wretch! I've made my sins as numerous as those blessings and mercies the Almighty bounty has conferred upon me, to oblige and lead me to repentance. How have I abused and misemployed those parts and talents which might have rendered me serviceable to mankind, and repaid an interest of glory to their donor! How ill do they turn to account which I have made the patrons of debauchery, and pimps and panders to vice! How oft have I broke my vows to my great Creator, which I would be conscientious of keeping to a silly woman, a creature beneath myself! What has all my religion been but an empty parade and show? Either an useful hypocrisy taken up for interest, or a gay specious formality worn in complaisance to custom and the mode, and as changeable as my clothes and their fashion. How oft have I gone to church (the place where we are to pay Him homage and duty) as to an assignation or play, only for diversion; or at best, as I must ere long (for aught I know) with my soul severed from my body? How I tremble at the remembrance! as if I could put the sham upon Heaven, or a God were to be imposed on like my fellow-creature. And dare I, convicted of these high treasons against the King of Glory, dare I expect a reprieve or pardon? Has He thunder, and are not all his bolts levelled at my head, to strike me through the very centre? Yes, I dare appeal to thee, boundless pity and compassion! My own instances already tell me, that Thy mercy is infinite; for I've done enough to shock long-sufferance itself, and weary out an eternal patience. I beseech Thee by Thy soft and gentle attributes of mercy and forgiveness, by the last dying accents of my suffering Deity, have pity on a poor, humble, prostrate and confessing sinner; and Thou, great ransom of lost mankind, who offered'st thyself a sacrifice to atone our guilt, and redeem our mortgaged happiness, do Thou be my Advocate, and intercede for me with the angry Judge.
My prayers are heard, a glorious light now shone,
And, lo! an angel-post comes hastening down
From heaven; I see him cut the yielding air,
So swift, he seems at once both here and there;
So quick, my sight in the pursuit was slow,
And thought could scarce so soon the journey go.
No angry message in his look appears,
His face no signs of threatening vengeance wears;
Comely his shape, of heavenly mien and air,
Kinder than smiles of beauteous virgins are.
Such he was seen by the blessed maid of old,
When he the Almighty Infant's birth foretold.
A mighty volume in one hand is borne,
Whose opened leaves the other seems to turn;
Vast annals of my sins in scarlet writ,
But now erased, blot out, and cancelled quite.
Hark! how the heavenly whisper strikes mine ear,
Mortal, behold thy crimes all pardoned here!
Hail, sacred envoy of the Eternal King!
Welcome as the blessed tidings thou dost bring;
Welcome as heaven from whence thou cam'st but now;
Thus low to thy great God and mine I bow,
And might I here, O might I ever grow,
Fixed and unmoved, an endless monument
Of gratitude to my Creator sent!
the end.