they would to an idle tale, rather for a
pastime or for the sake of manners than for any substantial intent
and purpose to follow good advice and take any fruit by it. But
verily, if we would lay not only our ear but also our heart to it,
and consider that the saying of our Saviour Christ is not a poet's
fable or a harper's song but the very holy word of almighty God
himself, we would be full sore ashamed of ourselves--and well we
might! And we would be full sorry too, when we felt in our
affection those words to have in our hearts no more strength and
weight but what we remain still of the same dull mind as we did
before we heard them.

This manner of ours, in whose breasts the great good counsel of God
no better settleth nor taketh no better root, may well declare to
us that the thorns and briars and brambles of our worldly substance
grow so thick and spring up so high in the ground of our hearts
that they strangle, as the Gospel saith, the word of God that was
sown therein. And therefore is God a very good lord unto us, when
he causeth, like a good husbandman, his folk to come on the
field--for the persecutors are his folk, to this purpose--and with
their hooks and their stocking-irons to grub up these wicked weeds
and bushes of our earthly substance and carry them quite away from
us, that the word of God sown in our hearts may have room there,
and a glade round about for the warm sun of grace to come to it and
make it grow. For surely those words of our Saviour shall we find
full true, "Where thy treasure is, there is also thine heart." If
we lay up our treasure in earth, in earth shall be our hearts. If
we send our treasure into heaven, in heaven shall we have our
hearts. And surely, the greatest comfort any man can have in his
tribulation is to have his heart in heaven.

If thine heart were indeed out of this world and in heaven, all the
kinds of torments that all this world could devise could put thee
to no pain here. Let us then send our hearts hence thither in such
a manner as we may, by sending hither our worldly substance hence.
And let us never doubt but we shall, that once done, find our
hearts so conversant in heaven, with the glad consideration of our
following the gracious counsel of Christ, that the comfort of his
Holy Spirit, inspired in us for that, shall mitigate, diminish,
assuage, and (in a manner) quench the great furious fervour of the
pain that we shall happen to have by his loving sufferanc