ive: true, I am so afflicted,
as might make Me sometime even desire to die, if I did not consider,
That it is the greatest glory of a Christians life to _die daily_,
in conquering by a lively faith, and patient hopes of a better life,
those partiall and quotidian deaths, which kill us (as it were)
by piece-meales, and make us overlive our own fates: while we are
deprived of health, honour, liberty, power, credit, safety, or estate;
and those other comforts of dearest relations, which are as the life
of our lives.

Though, as a KING, I think My self to live in nothing temporall so
much, as in the love and good-will of my People; for which, as I have
suffered many deaths, so I hope I am not in that point as yet wholly
dead: notwithstanding; My Enemies have used all the poyson of falsity
and violence of hostility to destroy, first the love and Loyalty,
which is in my Subjects; and then all that content of life in me,
which from these I chiefly enjoyed.

Indeed, they have left me but little of life, and only the husk
and shell (as it were) which their further malice and cruelty can take
from me; having bereaved me of all those worldly comforts, for which
life it self seems desirable to men.

But, O my Soul! think not that life too long, or tedious, wherein God
gives thee any opportunities, if not to do, yet to suffer with such
Christian patience and magnanimity, in a good Cause, as are the
greatest honour of our lives, and the best improvement of our deaths.

_I_ know that in point of true Christian valor, it argues
pusillanimity to desire to dye out of weariness of life, and a want
of that heroick greatness of Spirit which becoms a Christian in the
patient and generous sustaining those afflictions, which as shadows
necessarily attend us, while we are in this body: and which are
lessned or enlarged as the Sun of our prosperity moves higher, or
lower: whose totall absence is best recompensed with the Dew of
Heaven.

The assaults of affliction may be terrible, like _Sampsons_ Lyon, but
they yeild much sweetness to those that dare to encounter and overcome
them; who know how to overlive the witherings of their Gourds without
discontent or peevishness, while they may yet converse with God.

That _I_ must die as a man, is certain; that _I_ may die a King, by
the hands of my own Subjects, a violent, sodain, barbarous death; in
the strength of my years, in the midst of my Kingdoms; my Friends
and loving Subjects being he