And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.
Ver. 3. Though I bestow all my goods] Unless I draw out my soul as well as my sheaf to the hungry, Isaiah 58:10. Many shrink up charity to a handbreadth, to giving of alms.
And though I give my body, &c.] As Servetus the heretic did at Geneva, A. D. 1555. So Mauzius the Anabaptist gave his body to be drowned at Tigure, A. D. 1527 (Scultet. Annal.); Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, to be beheaded for holding the pope's supremacy; Friar Forest, to be hanged for the same cause. And how many of our popish martyrs (malefactors or traitors, I should say) have worn the Tyburn tippet, a as Father Latimer phraseth it! And more of them must, for they be some of them knaves all, as the L. Audley, chancellor of England, once said to the thirteen Calais prisoners for religion, whom he discharged; and like bells they will never be well tuned till well hanged. For what reason? they are flabella et flagella Reip., &c.
a A jocular name for a hangman's rope: usually Tyburn tippet. ŒD