rld, useth any
such prisonly fashion of punishment, that point must I needs deny.
For I see him neither lay any man in the stocks, nor strike fetters
on his legs, nor so much as shut him up in a chamber, neither.

ANTHONY: Is he no minstrel, cousin, who playeth not on a harp?
Maketh no man melody but he who playeth on a lute? He may be a
minstrel and make melody, you know, with some other instrument--a
strange-fashioned one, peradventure, that never was seen before.

God, our chief jailor, as he himself is invisible, so useth he in
his punishments invisible instruments. And therefore are they not
of like fashion as those the other jailors use, but yet of like
effect, and as painful in feeling as those. For he layeth one of
his prisoners with a hot fever as ill at ease in a warm bed as the
other jailor layeth his on the cold ground. He wringeth them by the
brows with a migraine; he collareth them by the neck with a quinsy;
he bolteth them by the arms with a palsy, so that they cannot lift
their hands to their head; he manacleth their hands with the gout
in their fingers; he wringeth them by the legs with the cramp in
their shins; he bindeth them to the bed with the crick in the
back; and he layeth one there at full length, as unable to rise as
though he lay fast by the feet in the stocks.

A prisoner of another jail may sing and dance in his two fetters,
and fear not his feet for stumbling at a stone, while God's
prisoner, who hath his one foot fettered with the gout, lieth
groaning on a couch, and quaketh and crieth out if he fear that
there would fall on his foot no more than a cushion.

And therefore, cousin, as I said, if we consider it well, we shall
find this general prison of this whole earth a place in which the
prisoners are as sore handled as they are in the other. And even in
the other some make as merry too as there do some in this one, who
are very merry at large out of that. And surely as we think
ourselves out of prison now, so if there were some folk born and
brought up in a prison, who never came on the wall or looked out at
the door or heard of another world outside, but saw some, for ill
turns done among themselves, locked up in a straiter room; and if
they heard them alone called prisoners who were so served and
themselves ever called free folk at large; the like opinion would
they have there of themselves then as we have here of ourselves
now. And when we take ourselves for other than prisoners