id before, that if we
desire grace, God is at such reasoning always present and very
ready to give it. And unless men will afterward willingly cast it
away, he is ever ready still to keep it and glad from time to time
to increase it. And therefore our Lord biddeth us, by the mouth of
the prophet, that we should not be like such brutish and
unreasonable beasts as were those harts, and as are horses and
mules: "Be not you like a horse and a mule, that hath no
understanding." And therefore, cousin, let us never dread but what,
if we will apply our minds to the gathering of comfort and courage
against our persecutions, and hear reason and let it sink into our
heart and cast it not out again (nor vomit it up, nor even there
choke it up and stifle it with pampering in and stuffing up our
stomachs with a surfeit of worldly vanities), God shall so well
work with it that we shall feel strength therein. And so we shall
not in such wise have all such shameful cowardous hearts as to
forsake our Saviour and thereby lose our own salvation and run into
eternal fire for fear of death joined therein--though bitter and
sharp, yet short for all that, and (in a manner) a momentary pain.

VINCENT: Every man, uncle, naturally grudgeth at pain, and is very
loth to come to it.

ANTHONY: That is very true, and no one biddeth any man to go run
into it, unless he be taken and cannot flee. Then, we say that
reason plainly telleth us that we should rather suffer and endure
the less and the shorter pain here, than in hell the sorer and so
far the longer too.

VINCENT: I heard of late, uncle, where such a reason was made as
you make me now, which reason seemed undoubted and inevitable to
me. Yet heard I lately, as I say, a man answer it thus: He said
that if a man in this persecution should stand still in the
confession of his faith and thereby fall into painful tormentry, he
might peradventure happen, for the sharpness and bitterness of the
pain, to forsake our Saviour even in the midst of it, and die there
with his sin, and so be damned forever. Whereas, by the forsaking
of the faith in the beginning, and for the time--and yet only in
word, keeping it still nevertheless in his heart--a man might save
himself from that painful death and afterward ask mercy and have
it, and live long and do many good deeds, and be saved as St. Peter
was.

ANTHONY: That man's reason, cousin, is like a three-footed
stool--so tottering on every side that whos