And what, O Lord, shall I say of thyself? Didst thou not seem to have a dread of death, when, in the garden, for the anguish of thy Heart, thy Sweat became like drops of Blood trickling down upon the ground? And when thou saidst, My soul is sorrowful even unto death, and prayedst that this chalice might be removed from thee?
§ 5. Remedy against the dread of death, and the shrinking from it.
Christ. That was because I had taken upon myself your infirmities, that thou mightst know how much I suffered for you, and how truly I carried your sorrows. But it was less death than sin that I abhorred; the destruction of which, by my death, was before my eyes. But I allowed the fear of death so far to enter in, that thou mightst fear the less to die, as one to whom, by the merit of my death, death is become the end of sin, and the entrance into life.
But now consider why many of you fear death; for the causes of this are various; and yet, if thou examine them well, not one of them are reasonable or adequate. Rather wilt thou acknowledge that, although this world’s children are perceptibly actuated by the opposite feeling, who live on securely in their vices, at the same time that they are in a horrible fear of death as the greatest of evils; yet not death, in which is no evil, but a bad life is above all evils to be dreaded, for the reason that it produces the evils which are eternal. For so it is, that the foolish people, who walk in darkness, fear where there is no fear,[1] and where there is fear, they walk securely; by which I mean, that they fear unreal dangers, and despise the true. For what is the death of which men are so afraid, else than the separation of the soul from the body? But the death of which they are not afraid is the separation of the soul from God; a death which is so much the more to be feared, as it is worse for the soul than for the body to perish.
But say, my son, what is there to be feared and to be shrunk from in death? Is not the day of death better than the day of one’s birth? [2] Believe me, or rather acknowledge from thy own experience, that man born of a woman, living for a short time, is filled with many miseries: who comes forth like a flower and is destroyed, and flees as a shadow, and never continues in the same state.[3] As long as he lives he walks in the midst of snares, in the world, I mean, the whole of which is seated in wicked-
