"Ay, sure, Mors omnibus
communis: but there is a great difference between dying in one's bed a
great many years hence, like a good Christian, with all our friends
crying about us, and being shot to-day or to-morrow, like a mad dog;
or, perhaps, hacked in twenty pieces with the sword, and that too
before we have repented of all our sins. O Lord, have mercy upon us!
to be sure the soldiers are a wicked kind of people. I never loved
to have anything to do with them. I could hardly bring myself ever
to look upon them as Christians. There is nothing but cursing and
swearing among them. I wish your honour would repent: I heartily
wish you would repent before it is too late; and not think of going
among them.- Evil communication corrupts good manners. That is my
principal reason. For as for that matter, I am no more afraid than
another man, not I; as to matter of that. I know all human flesh
must die; but yet a man may live many years, for all that. Why, I am a
middle-aged man now, and yet I may live a great number of years. I
have read of several who have lived to be above a hundred, and some
a great deal above a hundred. Not that I hope, I mean that I promise
myself, to live to any such age as that, neither.- But if it be only
to eighty or ninety. Heaven be praised, that is a great ways off yet;
and I am not afraid of dying then, no more than another man; but,
surely, to attempt death before a man's time is come seems to me
downright wickedness and presumption.
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