hell, with which he
should beset much of his time--even all his whole life in his best
health. Yet is that manner of comfort to my mind more than mad when
it is used to a man of mine age. For as we well know that a young
man may die soon, so are we very sure that an old man cannot live
long. And yet there is (as Tully saith) no man so old but that, for
all that, he hopeth yet that he may live one year more, and of a
frail folly delighteth to think thereon and comfort himself
therewith. So other men's words of such comfort, adding more sticks
to that fire, shall (in a manner) quite burn up the pleasant
moisture that should most refresh him--the wholesome dew, I mean,
of God's grace, by which he should wish with God's will to be
hence, and long to be with him in Heaven.

Now, as for your taking my departing from you so heavily (as that
of one from whom you recognize, of your goodness, to have had here
before help and comfort), would God I had done to you and to others
half so much as I myself reckon it would have been my duty to do!
But whensoever God may take me hence, to reckon yourselves then
comfortless, as though your chief comfort stood in me--therein
would you make, methinketh, a reckoning very much as though you
would cast away a strong staff and lean upon a rotten reed. For God
is, and must be, your comfort, and not I. And he is a sure
comforter, who (as he said unto his disciples) never leaveth his
servants comfortless orphans, not even when he departed from his
disciples by death. But he both sent them a comforter, as he had
promised, the Holy Spirit of his Father and himself, and he also
made them sure that to the world's end he would ever dwell with
them himself. And therefore, if you be part of his flock and
believe his promise, how can you be comfortless in any tribulation,
when Christ and his Holy Spirit, and with them their inseparable
Father, if you put full trust and confidence in them, are never
either one finger-breadth of space nor one minute of time from you?

VINCENT: O, my good uncle, even these selfsame words, with which
you prove that because of God's own gracious presence we cannot be
left comfortless, make me now feel and perceive how much comfort we
shall miss when you are gone. For albeit, good uncle, that while
you tell me this I cannot but grant it for true, yet if I had not
now heard it from you, I would not have remembered it, nor would it
have fallen to my mind. And moreover, as our