But in Abraham, cousin, I suppose is all your chief hold, because
you not only show riches and prosperity perpetual in him through
the course of all his whole life in this world, but after his death
also. Lazarus, that poor man, who lived in tribulation and died for
pure hunger and thirst, had after his death his place of comfort
and rest in Abraham's--that wealthy man's--bosom. But here must you
consider that Abraham had not such continual prosperity but what it
was discontinued with divers tribulations.
Was it nothing to him, think you, to leave his own country, and at
God's sending to go into a strange land, which God promised him and
his seed forever, but in all his life he gave him never a foot? Was
it no trouble, that his cousin Loth and himself were fain to part
company, because their servants could not agree together? Though he
recovered Loth again from the three kings, was his capture no
trouble to him, think you, in the meanwhile? Was the destruction of
the five cities no heaviness to his heart? Any man would think so,
who readeth in the story what labour he made to save them. His
heart was, I daresay, in no little sorrow, when he was fain to let
Abimelech the king have his wife. Though God provided to keep her
undefiled and turned all to wealth, yet it was no little woe to him
in the meantime.
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