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prosperity; for Solomon was, you know, in both.

As for Job, since our question hangeth upon prosperity that is
perpetual, the wealth of Job, which was interrupted with so great
adversity, can, as you yourself see, serve you for no example. And
that God gave him here in this world all things double that he
lost, little toucheth my matter, which denieth not prosperity to be
God's gift, and given to some good men, too; namely, to such as
have tribulation too.

But in Abraham, cousin, I suppose is all your chief hold, because
you not only show riches and prosperity perpetual in him through
the course of all his whole life in this world, but after his death
also. Lazarus, that poor man, who lived in tribulation and died for
pure hunger and thirst, had after his death his place of comfort
and rest in Abraham's--that wealthy man's--bosom. But here must you
consider that Abraham had not such continual prosperity but what it
was discontinued with divers tribulations.

Was it nothing to him, think you, to leave his own country, and at
God's sending to go into a strange land, which God promised him and
his seed forever, but in all his life he gave him never a foot? Was
it no trouble, that his cousin Loth and himself were fain to part
company, because their servants could not agree together? Though he
recovered Loth again from the three kings, was his capture no
trouble to him, think you, in the meanwhile? Was the destruction of
the five cities no heaviness to his heart? Any man would think so,
who readeth in the story what labour he made to save them. His
heart was, I daresay, in no little sorrow, when he was fain to let
Abimelech the king have his wife. Though God provided to keep her
undefiled and turned all to wealth, yet it was no little woe to him
in the meantime. What continual grief was it to his heart, many a
long day, that he had no child begotten of his own body? He that
doubteth thereof shall find in Genesis Abraham's own moan made to
God. No man doubteth but Ismael was great comfort unto him at his
birth; and was it no grief, then, when he must cast out the mother
and the child both? As for Isaac, who was the child of the promise,
although God kept his life, that was unlooked for. Yet while the
loving father bound him and went about to behead him and offer him
up in sacrifice, who but himself can conceive what heaviness his
heart had then? I should suppose (since you speak of Lazarus) that
Lazarus' own death pa