so highly reward us with everlasting wealth.  Oh, if he who is content to die for his love, of whom he looketh afterward for no reward, and yet by his death goeth from her, might by his death be sure to come to her and ever after in delight and pleasure to dwell with her—­such a love would not stint here to die for her twice!  And what cold lovers are we then unto God, if, rather than die for him once, we will refuse him and forsake him forever—­him who both died for us before, and hath also provided that, if we die here for him, we shall in heaven everlastingly both live and also reign with him!  For as St. 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.  For of this am I very sure:  If we had the fifteenth part of the love for Christ that he both had and hath for us, all the pain of this Turk’s persecution could not keep us from him, but there would be at this day as many martyrs here in Hungary as there have been before in other countries of old.

And I doubt not but that, if the Turk stood even here with all his whole army about him; and if every one of them all were ready at hand with all the terrible torments that they could imagine, and were setting their torments to us unless we would forsake the faith; and if to the increase of our terror they fell all at once in a shout, with trumpets, tabrets, and timbrels all blown up at once, and all their guns let go therewith