Howbeit, what need we to make any such comparison between the
natural death and the violent, for the matter that we are in hand
with here? Without doubt, he who forsaketh the faith of Christ for
fear of the violent death, putteth himself in peril to find his
natural death a thousand times more painful. For his natural death
hath his everlasting pain so instantly knit to it, that there is
not one moment of time between, but the end of the one is the
beginning of the other, which never after shall have an end.
And therefore was it not without great cause that Christ gave us so
good warning before, when he said, as St. Luke in the twenty-second
chapter rehearseth, "I say to you that are my friends, be not
afraid of them that kill the body, and when that is done are able
to do no more. But I shall show you whom you should fear. Fear him
who, when he hath killed, hath in his power further to cast him
whom he killeth into everlasting fire. So I say to you, be afraid
of him." God meaneth not here that we should not dread at all any
man who can but kill the body, but he meaneth that we should not in
such wise dread any such man that we should, for dread of them,
displease him who can everlastingly kill both body and soul with a
death ever-dying and that shall yet never die. And therefore he
addeth and repeateth in the end again, the fear that we should have
of him, and saith, "So I say to you, fear him."
O good God, cousin, if a man would well weigh those words and let
them sink down deep into his heart as they should do, and often
bethink himself on them, it would (I doubt not) be able enough to
make us set at naught all the great Turk's threats, and esteem him
not a straw. But we should be well content to endure all the pain
that all the world could put upon us, for so short a while as all
they were able to make us dwell in it, rather than, by shrinking
from those pains (though never so sharp, yet but short), to cast
ourselves into the pain of hell--a hundred thousand times more
intolerable, and of which there shall never come an end. A woeful
death is that death, in which folk shall evermore be dying and
never can once be dead! For the scripture saith, "They shall call
and cry for death, and death shall fly from them."
O, good Lord, if one of them were not put in choice of both, he
would rather suffer the whole year together the most terrible death
that all the Turks in Turkey could devise, than to endure for the
space of half an hour the death that they lie in now. Into what
wretched folly fall, then, those faithless or feeble-faithed folk,
who, to avoid the pain that is so far the less and so short, fall
instead into pain a thousand thousand times more horrible, and
terrible torment of which they are sure they shall never have an
end!
This matter, cousin, lacketh, I believe, only full faith or
sufficient minding. For I think, on my faith, that if we have the
grace verily to believe it and often to think well on it, the fear
of all the Turk's persecution--with all this midday devil were able
to do in the forcing of us to forsake our faith--should never be
able to turn us.
VINCENT: By my troth, uncle, I think it is as you say. For surely,
if we would often think on these pains of hell--as we are very loth
to do, and purposely seek us childish pastimes to put such heavy
things out of our thought--this one point alone would be able
enough, I think, to make many a martyr.