Paul
saith, "If we suffer with him, we shall reign with him."
How many Romans, how many noble hearts of other sundry countries,
have willingly given their own lives and suffered great deadly
pains and very painful deaths for their countries, to win by their
death only the reward of worldly renown and fame! And should we,
then, shrink to suffer as much for eternal honour in heaven and
everlasting glory? The devil hath also some heretics so obstinate
that they wittingly endure painful death for vain glory. And is it
not then more than shame that Christ shall see his Catholics
forsake his faith rather than suffer the same for heaven and true
glory?
Would God, as I many times have said, that the remembrance
of Christ's kindness in suffering his passion for us, the
consideration of hell that we shall fall in by forsaking him, and
the joyful meditation of eternal life in heaven that we shall win
with this short temporal death patiently taken for him, had so deep
a place in our breast as reason would that they should--and as, if
we would strive toward it and labour for it and pray for it, I
verily think they would. For then should they so take up our mind
and ravish it all another way, that, as a man hurt in a fray
feeleth not sometimes his wound nor yet is aware of it, until his
mind fall more thereon (so much so that sometimes another man
telleth him that he hath lost a hand before he perceive it
himself), so the mind ravished in the thinking deeply of those
other things--Christ's death, hell, and heaven--would be likely to
diminish and put away four parts of the feeling of our painful
death--either of the death or the pain.
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