But now, whereas you desire of me some plenty of comforting things, which you may put in remembrance, to comfort your company with—­verily, in the rehearsing and heaping of your manifold fears, I myself began to feel that there would be much need, against so many troubles, of many comforting counsels.  For surely, a little before you came, as I devised with myself upon the Turk’s coming, it happened that my mind fell suddenly from that to devising upon my own departing.  Now, albeit that I fully put my trust in God and hope to be a saved soul by his mercy, yet no man is here so sure that without revelation he may stand clean out of dread.  So I bethought me also upon the pain of hell, and afterward, then, I bethought me upon the Turk again.  And at first methought his terror nothing, when I compared with it the joyful hope of heaven.  Then I compared it on the other hand with the fearful dread of hell, casting therein in my mind those terrible fiendish tormentors, with the deep consideration of that furious endless fire.  And methought that if the Turk with his whole host, and all his trumpets and timbrels too, were to come to my chamber door and kill me in my bed, in respect of the other reckoning I would regard him not a rush.  And yet, when I now heard your lamentable words, laying forth as though it were present before my face that heap of heavy sorrowful tribulations that (besides those that are already befallen) are in short space likely to follow, I waxed myself suddenly somewhat dismayed.  And therefore I well approve your request in this behalf, since you wish to have a store of comfort beforehand, ready by you to resort to, and to lay up in your heart as a remedy against the poison of all desperate dread that might arise from occasion of sore tribulation.  And I shall be glad, as my poor wit shall serve me, to call to mind with you such things as I before have read, heard, or thought upon, that may conveniently serve us to this purpose.

I

First shall you, good cousin, understand this:  The natural wise men of this world, the old moral philosophers, laboured much in this matter.  And many natural reasons have they written by which they might encourage men to set little by such goods—­or such hurts, either—­the going and coming of which are the matter and cause of tribulation.  Such are the goods of fortune, riches, favour, friends, fame, worldly honour, and such other things:  or of the body, as beauty, strength, agility, liveliness, and health.  These things, as you know, coming to us, are matter of worldly wealth.  And, taken from us by fortune or by force or the fear of losing them, they are matter of adversity and tribulation.  For tribulation seemeth generally to signify nothing else but some kind of grief, either pain of the body or heaviness of the mind.  Now that the body should not feel what it feeleth, all the wit in the world cannot bring that about.  But that the mind should not be grieved either with the pain that the body feeleth or with occasions of heaviness offered and given unto the soul itself, this thing the philosophers laboured very much about.  And many goodly sayings have they toward strength and comfort against tribulation, exciting men to the full contempt of all worldly loss and the despising of sickness and all bodily grief, painful death and all.