For as in hell pain serveth only for punishment without any manner of purging, because all possibility of purging is past; and as in purgatory punishment serveth only for purging, because the place of deserving is past; so while we are yet in this world in which is our place and our time of merit and well-deserving, the tribulation that is sent us for our sin here shall, if we faithfully so desire, beside the cleansing and purging of our pain, serve us also for increase of reward. And so shall, I suppose and trust in God's goodness, all such penance and good works as a man willingly performeth, enjoined by his ghostly father in confession, or which he willingly further doth of his own devotion beside. For though man's penance, with all the good works that he can do, be not able to satisfy of themselves for the least sin that we do, yet the liberal goodness of God, through the merit of Christ's bitter passion--without which all our works could never satisfy so much as a spoonful to a great vesselful in comparison with the merit and satisfaction that Christ has merited and satisfied for us himself--this liberal goodness of God, I say, shall yet at our faithful instance and request cause our penance and tribulation patiently taken in this world to serve us in the other world both for release and reward, tempered after such rate as his high goodness and wisdom shall see best for us, whereof our blind mortality cannot here imagine nor devise the stint. And thus hath yet even the first and most base kind of tribulation, though not fully so great as the second and very far less than the third, far greater cause of comfort yet than I spoke of before. XII VINCENT: Verily, good uncle, this pleaseth me very well. But yet are there, you know, some of these things now brought in question. For as for any pain due for our sin, to be diminished in purgatory by the patient sufferance of tribulation here, there are, you know, many who utterly deny that, and affirm for a sure truth that there is no purgatory at all. And then, if they say true, is the cause of the comfort gone, if the comfort that we should take be but in vain and needless. They say, you know, also that men merit nothing at all, but God giveth all for faith alone, and that it would be sin and sacrilege to look for reward in heaven either for our patience and glad suffering for God's sake, or for any other good deed. And then is there gone, if this be thus, the other cause of our further comfort too.