For
while it could not lightly be otherwise that the man were rocked
and sung asleep by the devil's craft, and his mind occupied as it
were in a delectable dream, he should never have good audience of
him who would rudely and boisterously shog him and wake him, and
so shake him out of it. Therefore must you fair and easily touch
him, and with some pleasant speech awake him, so that he wax not
wayward, as children do who are waked ere they wish to rise.
But when a man hath first begun with his praise (for if he be
proud you shall much better please him with a commendation than
with a dirge) then, after favour won therewith, a man may little
by little insinuate the doubt of such revelations--not at first as
though it were for any doubt of his, but of some other man's, that
men in some other places talk of. And peradventure it shall not
miscontent him to say that great perils may fall therein, in
another man's case than his own, and he shall begin to preach upon
it. Or, if you were a man that had not so very great scrupulous
conscience of a harmless lie devised to do good with (the kind
which St. Austine, though he take it always for sin, yet he taketh
but for venial; and St. Jerome, as by divers places in his books
appeareth, taketh not fully for that much), then may you feign
some secret friend of yours to be in such a state.
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