Final Letter to his Beloved Daughter Margaret Roper

That you fear your own frailty, Marget [sic], nothing misliketh me. God give us both twain the grace of our own self, and whole to depend and hang upon the hope and strength of God. The blessed apostle Saint Paul found such lack of strength in himself that in his own temptation he was fain twice to call and cry out unto God, to take that temptation from him. And yet sped he not of his prayer, in the manner that he required. For God of his high wisdom, seeing that it was (as himself saith) necessary for him to keep him from pride that else he might peradventure have fallen in, would not at his thrice praying, by and by take it from him, but suffered him to be panged in the pain and thereof, giving him yet at the last this comfort against his fear of falling.

The more weak a man is, the more is the strength of God in safeguard declared.

St. Thomas More (1478–1535) is a Catholic saint who lost his life after falling out of favor with his good friend King Henry VIII. The epitome of the Renaissance Man, More was a lawyer, a social philosopher, a statesman, a humanist, and a scholar. He served as Lord Chancellor of England from 1529 to 1532 — the first layman to hold the office, which many considered only second to the king himself in power and influence. A fierce opponent of the Protestant Revolt — particularly Martin Luther and William Tyndale — More became a martyr of Catholic witness against the Revolt when it came to the shores of England. Imprisoned in London Tower — from where he wrote the letter to his daughter — and eventually executed for refusing to acknowledge the validity of Henry VIII’s divorce and remarriage, he famously claimed from the scaffold where he would lose his head that he was “the King’s good servant but God’s first.”