enjoyment, free from all anxiety, of the eternal happiness of the righteous. Men suffer themselves to be cut and burnt, that the pains not of eternity, but of some more lasting sore than usual, may be bought off at the priceof severer pain. For a languid and uncertain period of a very short repose, and that too at the end of life, the soldier is worn down by all the hard trials of war, restless it may be for more years in his labours, than he will have to enjoy his rest in ease. To what storms and tempests, to what a fearful and tremendous raging of sky and sea, do the busy merchantmen expose themselves, that they may acquire riches inconstant as the wind, and full of perils and tempests, greater even than those by which they were ac- quired! What heats, and colds, what perils, from horses, from ditches, from precipices, from rivers, from wild beasts, do huntsmen undergo, what pain of hunger and thirst, what straitened allowances of the cheapest and meanest meat and drink, that they may catch a beast! and sometimes after all, the flesh of the beast for which they endure all this is of no use for the table. And although a boar or a stag be caught, it is more sweet to the hunter’s mind because it has been caught, than it is to the eater’s palate because it is dressed. By what sharp corrections of almost daily stripes is the tender age of boys brought under! By what great pains even of watching and abstinence in the schools are they exercised, not to learn true wisdom, but for the sake of riches, and the honours of an empty show, that they may learn arithmetic,2328 and other literature, and the deceits of eloquence! 3. Now in all these instances, they who do not love these things feel them as great severities; whereas they who love them endure the same, it is true, but they do not seem to feel them severe. For love makes all, the hardest and most distressing things, altogether easy, and almost nothing. How much more surely then and easily will charity do with a view to true blessedness, that which mere desire does as it can, with a view to what is but misery? How easily is any temporal adversity endured, if it be that eternal punishment may be avoided, and eternal rest procured! Not without good reason did that vessel of election say with exceeding joy, “The sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.”2329 See then how it is that that “yoke is easy, and that burden light.” And if it be strait to the few who choose it, yet is it easy to all who love 318 it. The Psalmist saith, “Because of the words of Thy lips I have kept hard ways.”2330 But the things which are hard to those who labour, lose their roughness2331 to those same men when they love. Wherefore it has been so arranged by the dispensation of the Divine good- ness, that to “the inner man who is renewed from day to day,”2332 placed no longer under 2328 Numeros. 2329 Rom. viii. 18. 2330 Ps. xvi. 4, Sept. (xvii. English version). 2331 Mitescunt. 2332 2 Cor. iv. 16. 671 Again on the words of the Gospel, Matt. xi. 28, ‘Come unto me, all ye that…