it in a sheet; and even those of the house, and the dearest friends, hold it a kind of piety to despatch it quickly, and to carry it out of doors.
2. From this consideration I will gather how safe a thing it is in my lifetime to do by degrees somewhat of that which shall afterwards be done perforce and without profit, carrying myself as dead to the world, and to all that is flesh and blood, endeavouring to imitate death in three other things like to the aforenamed: i. mortifying my senses and depriving myself of their delights, not only of the unlawful, but even of some of those which are lawful and not necessary. So that, like a dead man, I am to have neither feet, nor hands, nor eyes, nor ears, nor taste, nor tongue for anything that is sin, or is against the perfection I profess, ii. And for this reason the beautiful and pleasing things of this life are to be to me as if they were not, putting them under my feet, beholding (as St, Gregory [1] says) not what they are now, but what they shall quickly be; for though you attire flesh in cloth of gold and in silk ever so much or so gorgeously, yet still it is flesh. And what is " flesh" but "grass?" and what is " the glory thereof' but "the flower of the field," that " is withered" [2] by a passing wind? iii. Finally, I must follow virtue with a generous mind, that, as a dead man complains not that ail fly from him and forsake him, so it should be nothing to me that the world forsakes me, flies from me, and abhors me like one dead and crucified: rather I am to hold as a happiness what is described by the prophet David, " Those that saw me without fled from me; I am become as a vessel that is destroyed. For I have heard the blame of many that dwell round about." [3]
Colloquy. — Oh that I were dead in earth, that I might not perceive that men used me like one dead! Oh that
