of heaven, or as one who had his breast stuffed full of tediousness and weariness of the world.  If he were found to be of the first fashion, it would be a token that the devil had, by his fantastical apparitions, puffed him up in such a childish pride that he hath finally persuaded him, by some illusion showed him for the proof, that God’s pleasure is that he shall for his sake with his own hands kill himself.

Vincent:  Now, if a man so found it, uncle, what counsel should he give him then?

Anthony:  That would be somewhat out of our purpose, cousin, since (as I told you before) the man would not be in sorrow and tribulation, of which our matter speaketh, but in a perilous merry mortal temptation.  So that if we should, beside our matter that we have in hand, enter into that too, we might make a longer work between both than we could well finish this day.  Howbeit, to be short, it is soon seen that in such a case the sum and effect of the counsel must (in a manner) rest in giving him warning of the devil’s sleights.  And that must be done under such a sweet pleasant manner that the man should not abhor to hear it.  For while it could not lightly be otherwise that the man were rocked and sung asleep by the devil’s craft, and his mind occupied as it were in a delectable dream, he should never have good audience of him who would rudely and boisterously shog him and wake him, and so shake him out of it.  Therefore must you fair and easily touch him, and with some pleasant speech awake him, so that he wax not wayward, as children do who are waked ere they wish to rise.

But when a man hath first begun with his praise (for if he be proud you shall much better please him with a commendation than with a dirge) then, after favour won therewith, a man may little by little insinuate the doubt of such revelations—­not at first as though it were for any doubt of his, but of some other man’s, that men in some other places talk of.  And peradventure it shall not miscontent him to say that great perils may fall therein, in another man’s case than his own, and he shall begin to preach upon it.  Or, if you were a man that had not so very great scrupulous conscience of a harmless lie devised to do good with (the kind which St. Austine, though he take it always for sin, yet he taketh but for venial; and St. Jerome, as by divers places in his books appeareth, taketh not fully for that much), then may you feign some secret friend of yours to be in such a state.  And you may say that you yourself somewhat fear his peril, and have made of charity this voyage for his sake, to ask this good father’s counsel.