First, as for your double comfort, cousin, you may cut off the one!  For a man in prosperity, though he be bound to thank God for his gifts, wherein he feeleth ease, and may be glad also that he giveth thanks to God; yet hath he little cause of comfort in that he taketh his ease here, unless you wish to call by the name of comfort the sensual feeling of bodily pleasure.  I deny not that sometimes men so take it, when they say, “This good drink comforteth well mine heart.”  But comfort, cousin, is properly taken, by them that take it right, rather for the consolation of good hope that men take in their heart, of some good growing toward them, than for a present pleasure with which the body is delighted and tickled for a while.

Now, though a man without patience can have no reward for his pain, yet when his pain is patiently taken for God’s sake and his will conformed to God’s pleasure therein, God rewardeth the sufferer in proportion to his pain.  And this thing appeareth by many a place in scripture, some of which I have showed you and yet shall I show you more.  But never found I any place in scripture that I remember in which, though a rich man thanked God for his gifts, our Lord promised him any reward in heaven for the very reason that he took his ease and his pleasures here.  And therefore, since I speak only of such comfort as is true comfort indeed, by which a man hath hope of God’s favour and remission of his sins, with diminishing of his pain in purgatory or else reward in heaven; and since such comfort cometh of tribulation well taken, but not of pleasure even though it be well taken; therefore of your comfort that you double by prosperity, you may, as I told you, very well cut away the half.

Now, why I give prerogative in comfort unto tribulation far above prosperity, though a man may do well in both, of this will I show you causes two or three.  First, as I before have at length showed you out of all question, continual wealth interrupted with no tribulation is a very discomfortable token of everlasting damnation.  Thereupon it followeth that tribulation is one cause of comfort unto a man’s heart, in that it dischargeth him of the discomfort that he might of reason take of overlong-lasting wealth.  Another is, that the scripture much commendeth tribulation as occasion of more profit than wealth and prosperity, not only to those who are therein but to those who resort unto them too.  And therefore saith Ecclesiastes, “Better is it to go to the house of weeping and wailing for some man’s death, than to the house of a feast; for in that house of heaviness is a man put in remembrance of the end of every man, and while he liveth he thinketh what shall come after.”  And after yet he further saith, “The heart of wise men is where heaviness is, and the heart of fools is where there is mirth and gladness.”  And verily, where you shall hear worldly mirth seem to be commended in scripture, it is either commonly spoken, as in the person of some worldly-disposed people, or else understood of spiritual rejoicing, or else meant of some small moderate refreshing of the mind against a heavy and discomfortable dullness.