On the End of this Temporal Life

They say that many persons, including Christians, were laid low by the protracted famine. This also, however, the good and faithful turned to right use by bearing it with godliness. For those whom the famine slew it rescued from the ills of this life, as does bodily sickness, and those whom it did not slay it taught to live more moderately; it taught them to fast more diligently.

But many Christians were slaughtered, and many were consumed by a great variety of dreadful deaths. If this is hard to bear, however, it is at any rate common to all who have been born into this life. I know this: that no one has ever died who had not been going to die eventually. The end of life makes a long life the same as a short one; for the one is not better and the other worse, and the one is not greater and the other less, when both no longer exist. But what does it matter what kind of death has put an end to this life, as long as he whose life has ended is not compelled to die a second time? And when, under the daily contingencies of this life, every moral man is, so to speak, threatened with innumerable deaths, and it is uncertain which one of them will overtake him, is it, I ask, better to suffer one and die, or to live and fear them all? I do not overlook the fact that a man would rather live long and fear many deaths than die once and dread none of them thereafter. But it is one thing to consider death as something that the fearful instinct of the flesh seeks in its infirmity to flee from, and another to contemplate it carefully with the reason of the mind. Death is not to be deemed an evil when a good life precedes it; nor is death made an evil except by what follows death. Therefore, those who are of necessity bound to die need not care greatly by what means they will eventually die, but into what place they will be brought by dying. Since, then, Christians know how much better was the death of the godly pauper licked by the tongues of dogs than that of the impious rich man clad in purple and fine linen, what harm did those terrible deaths do to the dead who had lived well?

~City of God Bk. 1, Chs. 10-11