re falling. For many
such a man standeth, for all that fear, full fast, and finally
better abideth the brunt, when God is so good unto him as to bring
him to it and encourage him therein, than doth some other man who
in the beginning feeleth no fear at all. And yet may he never be
brought to the brunt, and most often so it is. For God, having many
mansions, and all wonderful wealthful, in his Father's house,
exalteth not every good man up to the glory of a martyr. But
foreseeing their infirmity, that though they be of good will before
and peradventure of right good courage too, they would yet play St.
Peter if they were brought to the point, and thereby bring their
souls into the peril of eternal damnation, he provideth otherwise
for them before they come there. And he findeth a way that men
shall not have the mind to lay any hands upon them, as he found for
his disciples when he himself was willingly taken. Or else, if they
set hands on them, he findeth a way that they shall have no power
to hold them, as he found for St. John the Evangelist, who let his
sheet fall from him, upon which they caught hold, and so fled
himself naked away and escaped from them. Or, though they hold them
and bring them to prison too, yet God sometimes delivereth them
hence, as he did St. Peter. And sometimes he taketh them to him out
of the prison into heaven, and suffereth them not to come to their
torment at all, as he hath done by many a good holy man. And some
he suffereth to be brought into the torments and yet suffereth them
not to die in them, but to live many years afterward and die their
natural death, as he did by St. John the Evangelist and by many
another more, as we may well see both by sundry stories and in the
epistles of St. Ciprian also. And therefore, which way God will
take with us, we cannot tell.

But surely, if we be true Christian men, this can we well tell:
that without any bold warranty of ourselves or foolish trust in our
own strength, we are bound upon pain of damnation not to be of the
contrary mind but what we will with his help, however loth we feel
in our flesh thereto, rather than forsake him or his faith before
the world--which if we do, he hath promised to forsake us before
his Father and all his holy company of heaven--rather, I say, than
we would do so, we would with his help endure and sustain for his
sake all the tormentry that the devil with all his faithless
tormentors in this world would devise. And