is great and terrible, and
yet so inevitable, evil of death. This evil even the saints
dreaded, and Christ submitted to it with trembling and bloody
sweat. [Luke 22:44] So that the divine Mercy hath been nowhere
more concerned to comfort our little faith than in the matter of
this evil, as we shall see below.[16]

But all these things are common to all men, even as the blessings
of salvation under these evils are common to all. For
Christians, however, there is another and a particular reason for
dreading the evils to come, which easily surpasses all the evils
that have been mentioned. It is that which the Apostle portrays
in I. Corinthians x, when he says, "He that standeth, let him
take heed lest he fall." [1 Cor. 19:12] So unstable is our
footing, and so powerful our foe, armed with our own strength
(that is, the weapons of our flesh and all our evil lusts),
attended by the countless armies of the world, its delights and
pleasures on the right hand, its hardships and the plots of
wicked men on the left, and, besides all this, master himself of
the art of doing us harm, seducing us, and bringing us down to
destruction by a thousand different ways. Such is our life that
we are not safe for one moment in our good intentions. Cyprian,
who in his _De Mortalitate_[17] touches on many of these matters,
teaches that death is to be desired as a swift means of escape
from these evils. And truly, wherever there have been
high-hearted men, who brought their minds steadily to bear on
these infinite perils of hell, we find them, with contempt of
life and death (that is, all the aforesaid evils), desiring to
die, that so they might be delivered at one and the same time
from this evil of the sins in which they now are (of which we
spoke in the previous chapter), and of the sins into which they
might fall (of which we are treating now). And these are, indeed,
two most weighty reasons why we should not only desire death, but
also despise all evils, to say nothing of lightly bearing a
single evil; if the Lord grant us to be moved thereby. For it is
God's gift that we are moved thereby. For what true Christian
will not even desire to die, and much more to bear sickness,
seeing that, so long as he lives and is in health, he is in sin,
and is constantly prone to fall, yea, is falling every day, into
more sins; and is thus constantly thwarting the most loving will
of his most loving Father! To such a heat of indignation was St.
Paul mo