as on
a road or rather indeed in a short deviation out of the road, bears
whatever befalls it with great ease and indifference. But now, as to
those to whom life ends in insensibility and dissolution,--death brings
to them no removal of evils, though it is afflicting in both conditions,
yet is it more so to those that live prosperously than to such as
undergo adversity? For it cuts the latter but from an uncertain hope of
doing better hereafter; but it deprives the former of a certain good, to
wit, their pleasurable living. And as those medicinal potions that are
not grateful to the palate but yet necessary give sick men ease, but
rake and hurt the well; just so, in my opinion, doth the philosophy
of Epicurus; it promises to those that live miserably no happiness in
death, and to those that do well an utter extinction and dissolution of
the mind, while it quite obstructs the comfort and solace of the grave
and wise and those that abound with good things, by throwing them down
from a happy living into a deprivation of both life and being. From
hence then it is manifest, that the contemplation of the loss of good
things will afflict us in as great a measure as either the firm hope or
present enjoyment of them delights us.

Yea, themselves tell us, that the thought of future dissolution leaves
them one most assured and complacent good, freedom from anxious surmises
of incessant and endless evils, and that Epicurus's doctrine effects
this by stopping the fear of death through the soul's dissolution. If
then deliverance from the expectation of infinite evils be a matter of
greatest complacence, how comes it not to be afflictive to be bereft
of eternal good things and to miss of the highest and most consummate
felicity? For not to be can be good for neither condition, but is on the
contrary both against nature and ungrateful to all that have a being.
But those being eased of the evils of life through the evils of death
have, it is very true, the want of sense to comfort them, while they, as
it were, make their escape from life. But, on the other hand, they that
change from good things to nothing seem to me to have the most dismaying
end of all, it putting a period to their happiness. For Nature doth not
fear insensibility as the entrance upon some new thing, but because it
is the privation of our present good things. For to declare that the
destruction of all that we call ours toucheth us not is untrue for it
toucheth us alr