For myself, this is my consolation, and all that I can offer to others, that the sorrows of this life are but of two sorts:  whereof the one hath respect to God, the other, to the world.  In the first we complain to God against ourselves, for our offences against Him; and confess, “Et Tu Justus es in omnibus quae venerunt super nos.”  “And Thou, O Lord, are just in all that hath befallen us.”  In the second we complain to ourselves against God:  as if he had done us wrong, either in not giving us worldly goods and honors, answering our appetites:  or for taking them again from us having had them; forgetting that humble and just acknowledgment of Job, “the Lord hath given, and the Lord hath taken.”  To the first of which St. Paul hath promised blessedness; to the second, death.  And out of doubt he is either a fool, or ungrateful to God, or both, that doth not acknowledge, how mean soever his estate be, that the same is yet far greater than that which God oweth him:  or doth not acknowledge, how sharp soever his afflictions be, that the same are yet far less, than those which are due unto him.  And if an heathen wise man call the adversities of the world but “tributa vivendi,” “the tributes of living;” a wise Christian man ought to know them, and bear them, but as the tributes of offending.  He ought to bear them manlike, and resolvedly; and not as those whining soldiers do, “qui gementes sequuntur imperatorem."[20]

For seeing God, who is the author of all our tragedies, hath written out for us and appointed us all the parts we are to play:  and hath not, in their distribution, been partial to the most mighty princes of the world:  that gave unto Darius the part of the greatest emperor, and the part of the most miserable beggar, a beggar begging water of an enemy, to quench the great drought of death:  that appointed Bajazet to play the Grand Signior of the Turks in the morning, and in the same day the footstool of Tamerlane (both which parts Valerian had also played, being taken by Sapores):  that made Belisarius play the most victorious captain, and lastly the part of a blind beggar:  of which examples many thousands may be produced:  why should other men, who are but as the least worms, complain of wrong?  Certainly there is no other account to be made of this ridiculous world, than to resolve, that the change of fortune on the great theatre, is but as the change of garments on the less.  For when on the one and the other, every man wears but his own skin, the players are all alike.  Now, if any man out of weakness prize the passages of this world otherwise (for saith Petrarch, “Magni ingenii est revocare mentem a sensibus"[21]) it is by reason of that unhappy phantasy of ours, which forgeth in the brains of man all the miseries (the corporal excepted) whereunto he is subject.  Therein it is, that misfortunes and adversity work all that they work.  For seeing Death, in the end of the play, takes from all whatsoever Fortune or Force takes from any one; it were a foolish madness in the shipwreck of worldly things, where all sinks but the sorrow, to save it.  That were, as Seneca saith, “Fortunae succumbere, quod tristius est omni fato:”  “To fall under Fortune, of all other the most miserable destiny.”