About the Author:
Long before his own martyrdom, the great humanist thinker Saint Thomas More (1478 – 1535) was enjoying great worldly success at the court of King Henry VIII. But shortly after he was made a knight, in 1522, More wrote his short book On The Four Last Things. More commends those who look on the paintings of the Dance of Death at Saint Paul’s in London, but introspection paints an even clearer picture.
“For those pictures express only the loathly figure of our dead bony bodies, bitten away the flesh, which though it be ugly to behold, yet neither the sight thereof nor the sight of all the dead heads in the charnel house, nor the apparition of a very ghost, is half so grisly as the deep-conceived fantasy of death in his nature by the lively imagination graven in thine own heart.”
In this excerpt, Saint Thomas More, who would die for the faith himself, reminds us that our life is a journey toward death.
And surely me thinketh that in likewise a man is not only dying, that is to say, going in his- way out of this life, while he lieth drawing on, but also all the while that he is going toward his end, which is by all the whole time of his life, since the first moment to the last finished, that is, to wit, sith the first moment in which he began to live until the last moment of his life, or rather the first in which he is full dead.
Now if this he thus, as me seemeth that reason proveth, a man is always dying from afore his birth ; and every hour of our age, as it passeth by, cutteth his own length out of our life, and maketli it shorter by so much, and our death so much the nearer. Which measuring of time and minishing of life, with approaching toward death, is nothing else but, from our beginning to our ending, one continual dying ; so that wake we, sleep we, eat we, drink we, mourn we, sing we, in what wise soever live we, all the same while die we.
So that we never ought to look toward death as a thing far off, considering that although he made no haste toward us, yet we never cease ourselves to make haste toward him.
Now, if thou thinkest this reason but a sophistical subtlety, and thinkest while thou art a young man thou mayest for all this think thy death far off, that is to wit as far as thou hast by likelihood of nature many years to live, then will I put thee an homely example, not very pleasant, but nathless very true and very fit for the matter.
If there were two, both condemned to death, both carried out at once toward execution, of which two the one were sure that the place of his execution were within one mile, the other twenty miles off — yea, an hundred, an ye will — he that were in the cart to be carried a hundred miles would not take much more pleasure than his fellow in the length of his way, notwithstanding that it were a hundred times as long as his fellow’s, and that he had thereby a hundred times as long to live, being sure and out of all question to die at the end.
Reckon me now yourself a young man in your best lust [i.e. in vigorous health] — twenty years of age if ye will. Let there be another, ninety. Both must ye die, both be ye in the cart carrying forward. His gallows and death standeth within ten mile at the farthest, and yours within eighty. I see not why ye should reckon much less of your death than he, though your way be longer, since ye be sure ye shall never cease riding till ye come at it.
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