many which now I lose in sleeping, playing and talking for pastime and recreation, and it will not be granted me. Then it shall afflict me that I have not frequented the holy sacraments nor the exercises of prayer; that I have not answered divine inspirations, nor heard sermons, nor exercised works of penance; that I have not given alms to the poor to gain friends to receive me in the eternal habitations; and that I have not been devoted to the saints, who in that narrow strait might be my mediators and advocates. Then shall I make great resolutions to do that which when I might I did not, desiring to live to accomplish them, and all perhaps without profit, like those of the wretched King Antiochus, the cruel persecutor of the Jews, who being at the point of death, though he made great promises and prayers to God — yet, says the Scripture, " This wicked man prayed to the Lord, of whom he was not to obtain mercy [1] not that mercy was wanting in Almighty God, but because there was wanting in this wretch a true disposition to receive it; for all those resolutions of his sprung merely from servile fear and were but to recover his bodily health, as if he could deceive Almighty God as he deceived men.
3. From this consideration I must collect, that the hour of death is the hour of undeceiving, in which I shall judge of all things differently from what I do now: holding (as Ecclesiastes says) for " vanity" [2] that which before I held for wisdom, and contrariwise holding for wisdom that which before I esteemed as vanity. And therefore the truest wisdom is to resolve effectually upon that which then I would do, and forthwith to accomplish it. For the ordinary law is, that he that lives well dies well; and he that lives very evilly seldom happens to die well. And especially will I make a full resolution to lose no iota of time, nor to let slip any occasion of my profit, remembering that of
