The Institution of Christian Religion

In this point doth the inestimable felicity of a godly mind show forth it self. Innumerable are the evils that do besiege mans life, & do threaten him so many deaths. As, not to go further than our selves: forasmuch as our body is a receptacle of a thousand diseases, yea ha•h enclosed and doth nourish within it the causes of diseases, man can not carry him self but he must needs also carry about with him many forms of his own destruction, & draw forth a life as it were entangled with death. For what may it else be called, where he neither is cold, nor sweateth without peril? Now whether soever y• turn thee, all things that are about thee are not only untrusty friends to thee, but do in manner openly threaten & seem to show thee present death. Go into a ship, there is but a foot thickness between thee & death. Sit on horseback in the slipping of one foot thy life is in danger. Go through the streets of the city: even how many tiles are upon the houses to so many perils art thou subject. If there be an iron toll in thy hand or thy friends, the harm is ready prepared. How many wild beasts y• seest, they are all armed to thy destruction. If thou mean to shut up thy self, even in a garden well fenced, where may appear nothing but pleasantness of air & ground, there sometime locketh a Serpent. The house which is continually subject to fire doeth in the day time threaten thee with poverty, & in the night time with falling upon thy head. Thy field forasmuch as it lieth open to hail, frost, drought & other tempests it warneth thee of barrenness, & thereby famine. I speak not of prysonninges, treasons, robberies, open violence, of which part do besiege us at home, & part do follow us abroad. In these straits must not man needs be most miserable, which even in life half dead doth painfully draw forth a careful & fainting breath as if he had a sword continually hanging over his neck. But thou wilt say that these things chance seldom, or at least not always, nor to all men, and never all at ones. I grant but seeing we are put in ⟨p. 66⟩mind by the examples of other, that the same things may happen to our selves, and that our life ought of duty no more to be free than theirs, it can not be but that we must dread and fear them as things that may light upon us. Now what can a man imagine more miserable than such a fearfulness?