VINCENT:  That must I needs jeopard, for other surety can there none be had.

ANTHONY:  An unwise jeoparding, to put your soul in peril of damnation for the keeping of your bodily pleasures, and yet without surety to jeopard them too!

But yet go a little further, lo.  Suppose me that you might be very sure that the Turk would break no promise with you.  Are you then sure enough to retain all your substance still?

VINCENT:  Yea, then.

ANTHONY:  What if a man should ask you how long?

VINCENT:  How long?  As long as I live.

ANTHONY:  Well, let it be so, then.  But yet, as far as I can see, though the great Turk favour you never so much and let you keep your goods as long as ever you live, yet if it hap that you be this day fifty years old, all the favour he can show you cannot make you one day younger tomorrow.  But every day shall you wax older than the day before, and then within a while must you, for all his favour, lose all.

VINCENT:  Well, a man would be glad, for all that, to be sure not to lack while he liveth.

ANTHONY:  Well, then, if the great Turk give you your goods, can there then in all your life none other take them from you again?

VINCENT:  Verily, I suppose not.

ANTHONY:  May he not lose this country again unto Christian men, and you, with the taking of this way, fall in the same peril then that you would now eschew?

VINCENT:  Forsooth, I think that if he get it once, he will never lose it after again in our days.

ANTHONY:  Yes, by God’s grace.  But yet if he lose it after our day, there goeth your children’s inheritance away again!  But be it now that he could never lose it; could none take your substance from you then?

VINCENT:  No, in good faith, none.

ANTHONY:  No, none at all?  Not God?

VINCENT:  God?  Why, yes, perdy.  Who doubteth of that?

ANTHONY:  Who?  Marry, he who doubteth whether there be any God or no.  And that there lacketh not some such, the prophet testifieth where he said, “The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God.”  With the mouth the most foolish will forbear to say it unto other folk, but in the heart they forbear not to say it softly to themselves.  And I fear me there be many more such fools than every man would think.  And they would not hesitate to say it openly, too, if they forbore it not more for dread or for shame of men than for any fear of God.  But now those who are so frantic foolish as to think there were no God, and yet in their words confess him, though (as St. Paul saith) in their deeds they deny him—­we shall let them pass till it please God to show himself unto them, either inwardly, in time, by his merciful grace, or else outwardly, but over-late for them, by his terrible judgment.