My lords, if I have been free and plain with you in this matter, I beg your pardon; for it concerns me to be so, and something more than ordinarily urgent, where both my estate and life are in such eminent peril; nay, more than my life, the concerns of thousands of lives are in it, not only of those that are in their graves already, but of all posterity in time to come. Had nothing been in it but the care to preserve my own life, I needed not have stayed in England, but might have taken my opportunity to withdraw myself into foreign parts, to provide for my own safety. Nor needed I to have been put upon pleading, as now I am, for an arrest of judgment; but might have watched upon advantages that were visible enough to me, in the managing of my trial, if I had consulted only the preservation of my life or estate.
No, my lords, I have otherwise learned Christ, than to fear them that can but kill the body, and have no more that they can do. I have also taken notice, in the little reading that I have had of history, how glorious the very heathen have rendered their names to posterity in the contempt they have showed of death—when the laying down of their lives has appeared to be their duty—from the love which they have owed to their country.
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