and died a very good man. Yet, if he had never come in tribulation,
he would have been in peril never haply to have had just remorse in
all his whole life, but might have died wretchedly and gone to the
devil eternally. And thus made this thief a good medicine of his
well-deserved pain and tribulation.

Consider well the converted thief who hung on Christ's right hand.
Did not he, by his meek sufference and humble knowledge of his
fault, asking forgiveness of God and yet content to suffer for his
sin, make of his just punishment and well-deserved tribulation a
very good special medicine to cure him of all pain in the other
world, and win him eternal salvation?

And thus I say that this kind of tribulation, though it seem the
most base and the least comfortable, is yet, if the man will so
make it, a very marvellous wholesome medicine. And it may therefore
be, to the man who will so consider it, a great cause of comfort
and spiritual consolation.


IX

VINCENT: Verily, mine uncle, this first kind of tribulation have
you to my mind opened sufficiently. And therefore, I pray you,
resort now to the second.

ANTHONY: The second kind, you know, was of such tribulation as is
so sent us by God that we know no certain cause deserving that
present trouble, as we certainly know that upon such-and-such a
surfeit we fell in such-and-such a sickness, or as the thief