Page:Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation.djvu/29

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Against Tribulation.
3

(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 where you take my departing from you so heavily, as of him of whom you recognize of your goodness to have had herebefore help and comfort; would God I had to you and other more half so much done, as myself reckoneth had been my duty to do. But whensoever God take me hence, to reckon yourselves then comfortless, as though your chief comfort stood in me, therein make you (methinketh) a reckoning very much like as though you would cast away a strong staff and lean upon a rotten reed. For God is, and must be your comfort, and not I. And he is a sure comforter, that (as he said unto his disciples)[1] never leaveth his servants in case of comfortless orphans, not even when he departeth from his disciples by death; but both, as he promised,[2] sent them a comforter, the Holy Spirit of his Father and himself, and them also made sure, that to the world’s end, he would ever dwell with them himself. And, therefore, if you be part of his flock, and believe his promise, how can you be comfortless in any tribulation, when Christ and his Holy Spirit, and with them their inseparable Father (if you put full trust and confidence in them) be never neither one finger breadth of space, nor one minute of time from you?

Vincent.—Oh! my good uncle, even these same self words, wherewith you well prove that because of God’s own gracious presence we cannot be left comfortless, make me now feel and perceive what a miss of much comfort we shall have when you be gone. For albeit, good uncle, that while you do tell me this, I cannot but grant it for true; yet if I now had not heard it of you, I had not remembered it, nor it had not fallen in my mind. And over that, like as our tribulations shall in weight and number increase, so shall we need, not only such a good word or twain, but a great heap thereof, to stable and strength the walls of our hearts against the great scourges

of this tempestuous sea.

B 2

  1. ↑ John xiv.
  2. ↑ Matth. ult.
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