O good God, cousin, if a man would well weigh those words and let them sink down deep into his heart as they should do, and often bethink himself on them, it would (I doubt not) be able enough to make us set at naught all the great Turk’s threats, and esteem him not a straw.  But we should be well content to endure all the pain that all the world could put upon us, for so short a while as all they were able to make us dwell in it, rather than, by shrinking from those pains (though never so sharp, yet but short), to cast ourselves into the pain of hell—­a hundred thousand times more intolerable, and of which there shall never come an end.  A woeful death is that death, in which folk shall evermore be dying and never can once be dead!  For the scripture saith, “They shall call and cry for death, and death shall fly from them.”

O, good Lord, if one of them were not put in choice of both, he would rather suffer the whole year together the most terrible death that all the Turks in Turkey could devise, than to endure for the space of half an hour the death that they lie in now.  Into what wretched folly fall, then, those faithless or feeble-faithed folk, who, to avoid the pain that is so far the less and so short, fall instead into pain a thousand thousand times more horrible, and terrible torment of which they are sure they shall never have an end!

This matter, cousin, lacketh, I believe, only full faith or sufficient minding.  For I think, on my faith, that if we have the grace verily to believe it and often to think well on it, the fear of all the Turk’s persecution—­with all this midday devil were able to do in the forcing of us to forsake our faith—­should never be able to turn us.

VINCENT:  By my troth, uncle, I think it is as you say.  For surely, if we would often think on these pains of hell—­as we are very loth to do, and purposely seek us childish pastimes to put such heavy things out of our thought—­this one point alone would be able enough, I think, to make many a martyr.

XXVI

ANTHONY:  Forsooth, cousin, if we were such as we should be, I would scant, for very shame, speak of the pains of hell in exhortation to the keeping of Christ’s faith.  I would rather put us in mind of the joys of heaven, the pleasure of which we should be more glad to get than we should be to flee and escape all the pains of hell.

But surely God is marvellous merciful to us in the thing in which he may seem most rigorous.  And that is (which many men would little think) in that he provided hell.  For I suppose very surely, cousin, that many a man—­and woman, too—­of whom some now sit, and more shall hereafter sit, full gloriously crowned in heaven, had they not first been afraid of hell, would never have set foot toward heaven.