And this I say to give you warning of the truth, to the intent that when a man feeleth such a horror of death in his heart, he should not thereby stand in outrageous fear that he were falling.  For many such a man standeth, for all that fear, full fast, and finally better abideth the brunt, when God is so good unto him as to bring him to it and encourage him therein, than doth some other man who in the beginning feeleth no fear at all.  And yet may he never be brought to the brunt, and most often so it is.  For God, having many mansions, and all wonderful wealthful, in his Father’s house, exalteth not every good man up to the glory of a martyr.  But foreseeing their infirmity, that though they be of good will before and peradventure of right good courage too, they would yet play St. Peter if they were brought to the point, and thereby bring their souls into the peril of eternal damnation, he provideth otherwise for them before they come there.  And he findeth a way that men shall not have the mind to lay any hands upon them, as he found for his disciples when he himself was willingly taken.  Or else, if they set hands on them, he findeth a way that they shall have no power to hold them, as he found for St. John the Evangelist, who let his sheet fall from him, upon which they caught hold, and so fled himself naked away and escaped from them.  Or, though they hold them and bring them to prison too, yet God sometimes delivereth them hence, as he did St. Peter.  And sometimes he taketh them to him out of the prison into heaven, and suffereth them not to come to their torment at all, as he hath done by many a good holy man.  And some he suffereth to be brought into the torments and yet suffereth them not to die in them, but to live many years afterward and die their natural death, as he did by St. John the Evangelist and by many another more, as we may well see both by sundry stories and in the epistles of St. Ciprian also.  And therefore, which way God will take with us, we cannot tell.

But surely, if we be true Christian men, this can we well tell:  that without any bold warranty of ourselves or foolish trust in our own strength, we are bound upon pain of damnation not to be of the contrary mind but what we will with his help, however loth we feel in our flesh thereto, rather than forsake him or his faith before the world—­which if we do, he hath promised to forsake us before his Father and all his holy company of heaven—­rather, I say, than we would do so, we would with his help endure and sustain for his sake all the tormentry that the devil with all his faithless tormentors in this world would devise.  And then, if we be of this mind, and submit our will unto his, and call and pray for his grace, we can tell well enough that he will never suffer them to put more upon us than his grace will make us able to bear, but will also with their temptation provide for us a sure way.  For “God is faithful,” saith St. Paul, “who suffereth you not to be tempted above what