If we would well consider these words of our Saviour Christ, methinketh we should need no more counsel at all, nor no more comfort either, concerning the loss of our temporal substance in this Turk's persecution for the faith. For here our Lord in these words teacheth us where we may lay up our substance safe, before the persecution come. If we put it into the poor men's bosoms, there shall it lie safe, for who would go search a beggar's bag for money? If we deliver it to the poor for Christ's sake, we deliver it unto Christ himself. And then what persecutor can there be, so strong as to take it out of his hand? VINCENT: These things, uncle, are undoubtedly so true that no man can with words wrestle therewith. But yet ever there hangeth in a man's heart a lothness to lack a living! [YOU ARE HERE] ANTHONY: There doth indeed, in theirs who either never or but seldom hear any good counsel against it, or who, when they hear it, hearken to it but as they would to an idle tale, rather for a pastime or for the sake of manners than for any substantial intent and purpose to follow good advice and take any fruit by it. But verily, if we would lay not only our ear but also our heart to it, and consider that the saying of our Saviour Christ is not a poet's fable or a harper's song but the very holy word of almighty God himself, we would be full sore ashamed of ourselves--and well we might! And we would be full sorry too, when we felt in our affection those words to have in our hearts no more strength and weight but what we remain still of the same dull mind as we did before we heard them. This manner of ours, in whose breasts the great good counsel of God no better settleth nor taketh no better root, may well declare to us that the thorns and briars and brambles of our worldly substance grow so thick and spring up so high in the ground of our hearts that they strangle, as the Gospel saith, the word of God that was sown therein. And therefore is God a very good lord unto us, when he causeth, like a good husbandman, his folk to come on the field--for the persecutors are his folk, to this purpose--and with their hooks and their stocking-irons to grub up these wicked weeds and bushes of our earthly substance and carry them quite away from us, that the word of God sown in our hearts may have room there, and a glade round about for the warm sun of grace to come to it and make it grow. For surely those words of our Saviour shall we find full true, "Where thy treasure is, there is also thine heart." If we lay up our treasure in earth, in earth shall be our hearts. If we send our treasure into heaven, in heaven shall we have our hearts. And surely, the greatest comfort any man can have in his tribulation is to have his heart in heaven.