Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation: With Modifications To Obsolete Language By Monica StevensMore, Thomas, Saint
Religion
Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation: With Modifications To Obsolete Language By Monica Stevens
More, Thomas, Saint
Consolation
Now, tell some carnal-minded man of this manner of pleasure, and he
shall take little pleasure in it, and say he careth not to have his
flesh shine, he, nor like a spark of fire to skip about in the sky.
Tell him that his body shall be impassible and never feel harm, and
he will think then that he shall never be ahungered or athirst, and
shall thereby forbear all his pleasure of eating and drinking, and
that he shall never wish for sleep, and shall thereby lose the
pleasure that he was wont to take in lying slug-abed. Tell him that
men and women shall there live together as angels without any
manner of mind or motion unto the carnal act of generation, and he
will think that he shall thereby not use there his old filthy
voluptuous fashion. He will say then that he is better at ease
already, and would not give this world for that. For, as St. Paul
saith, "A carnal man feeleth not the things that be of the spirit
of God, for it is foolishness to him."
But the time shall come when these foul filthy pleasures shall be
so taken from him that it shall abhor his heart once to think on
them. Every man hath a certain shadow of this experience in the
fervent grief of a sore painful sickness, when his stomach can
scant abide to look upon any meat, and as for the acts of the other
foul filthy lust, he is ready to vomit if he hap to think thereon.
When a man shall after this life feel in his heart that horrible
abomination, of which sickness hath here a shadow, at the
remembrance of these voluptuous pleasures, for which he would here
be loth to change with the joys of heaven: when he shall, I say,
after this life, have his fleshly pleasures in abomination, and
shall have there a glimmering (though far from a perfect sight) of
those heavenly joys which here he set so little by--O, good God,
how fain will he then be, with how good will and how gladly would
he then give this whole world, if it were his, to have the feeling
of some little part of those joys!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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