sorry comfortless orphans. For to all of us your good help,
comfort, and counsel hath long been a great stay--not as an uncle
to some, and to others as one further of kin, but as though to us
all you had been a natural father.

ANTHONY: Mine own good cousin, I cannot much deny but what there
is indeed, not only here in Hungary but also in almost all places
in Christendom, such a customary manner of unchristian comforting.
And in any sick man it doth more harm than good, by drawing him in
time of sickness, with looking and longing for life, from the
meditation of death, judgment, heaven, and hell, with which he
should beset much of his time--even all his whole life in his best
health. Yet is that manner of comfort to my mind more than mad when
it is used to a man of mine age. For as we well know that a young
man may die soon, so are we very sure that an old man cannot live
long. And yet there is (as Tully saith) no man so old but that, for
all that, he hopeth yet that he may live one year more, and of a
frail folly delighteth to think thereon and comfort himself
therewith. So other men's words of such comfort, adding more sticks
to that fire, shall (in a manner) quite burn up the pleasant
moisture that should most refresh him--the wholesome dew, I mean,
of God's grace, by which he should wish with God's will to be
hence, and long to be with him in Heaven.

Now, as for your taking my departing from you so heavily (as that
of one from whom you recognize, of your goodness, to have had here
before help and comfort), would God I had done to you and to others
half so much as I myself reckon it would have been my duty to do!
But whensoever God may take me hence, to reckon yourselves then
comfortless, as though your chief comfort stood in me--therein