God is absent [1] And seeing I would give life to the dead body if I could, there is no reason but that I should procure the life of the soul by those means that God has given me to that end, before body and soul die together without remedy.
Colloquy. — O eternal God, permit me not to carry in a living body a dead soul, but quicken it with Thy grace, that when the body dies the soul may obtain life everlasting! Amen.
(This consideration shall be spoken of more at large in the third part in the meditations 39, 40, and 41, on those three that Christ raised from death.)
MEDITATION XI.
ON THE REMEMBRANCE OF DEATH, AND ON THE DUST INTO WHICH WE SHALL BE CONVERTED IN THE GRAVE.
For Ash-Wednesday.
This meditation shall be grounded upon those words which the Church uses on Ash-Wednesday, "Memento, homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris;" "Remember, man, that thou art dust, and to dust thou shall return"[2] which words our Lord spoke to Adam after he had sinned, intimating to him the sentence of death which his sin deserved; and, by the way, declaring unto us what we were, what we shall be, and what we are, saying that all is but dust
POINT. I.
1. First, we are to consider that God our Lord, though he might have created the body of Adam of nothing, as he created his soul, yet he would not, but made it of a matter of the one side most vile and gross, and on the other visible and
