ANTHONY: This may be, methinketh, good cousin, great comfort in tribulation: that every tribulation which any time falleth unto us is either sent to be medicinable, if men will so take it; or may become medicinable, if men will so make it; or is better than medicinable, unless we will forsake it. VINCENT: Surely this is very comforting--if we can well perceive it! ANTHONY: There three things that I tell you, we shall consider thus: Every tribulation that we fall in, either cometh by our own known deserving deed bringing us to it, as the sickness that followeth our intemperate surfeit or the imprisonment or other punishment put upon a man for his heinous crime; or else it is sent us by God without any certain deserving cause open and known to ourselves, either for punishment of some sins past (we know not certainly which) or for preserving us from sin in which we would otherwise be like to fall; or finally it is not due to the man's sin at all but is for the proof of his patience and increase of his merit. In all the former cases tribulation is, if we will, medicinable. In this last case of all, it is better than medicinable. VIII VINCENT: This seemeth to me very good, good uncle, save that it seemeth somewhat brief and short, and thereby methinketh somewhat obscure and dark. ANTHONY: We shall therefore, to give it light withal, touch upon every member of it somewhat more at large. One member is, as you know, of them that fall in tribulation through their own certain well-deserving deed, open and known to themselves, as when we fall in a sickness following upon our own gluttonous feasting, or when a man is punished for his own open fault. These tribulations, and others like them, may seem not to be comfortable, in that a man may be sorry to think himself the cause of his own harm. Yet hath he good cause of comfort in them, if he consider that he may make them medicinable for himself if he will. For whereas there was due to that sin, unless it were purged here, a far greater punishment after this world in another place, this worldly tribulation of pain and punishment, by God's good provision for him put upon him here in this world before, shall by the mean of Christ's passion, if the man will in true faith and good hope by meek and patience sufferance of his tribulation so make it, serve him for a sure medicine to cure him. And it shall clearly discharge him of all the sickness and disease of those pains that he should otherwise suffer afterward. For such is the great goodness of almighty God that he punisheth not the same thing twice.