Yea, and very unmeaning is this saying, to suppose that it gives comfort to be punished with all men, to say, “As all, so I too.” For why should I speak of hell? Think, I pray you, of those that are seized with gout, how, when they are racked by sharp pain, though you show them ten thousand suffering worse, they do not so much as take it into their mind. For the intensity of their anguish allows not their reason any leisure for thinking of others, and so finding consolation. Let us not then feed ourselves with these cold hopes. For to receive consolation from the ills of our neighbors, takes place in ordinary sufferings; but when the torment is excessive, and all our inward parts full of tempest, and the soul is now come to be unable so much as to know itself, whence shall it derive consolation? So that all these sayings are an absurdity, and fables of foolish children. For this, of which thou speakest, takes place in dejection, and in moderate dejection, when we are told, “the same thing hath befallen such an one;” but sometimes not even in dejection: now if in that case it hath no strength, much less in the anguish and burden unspeakable, which “the gnashing of teeth” indicates.