Vita clarissimi viri D. Iosiae Simleri Tigurini, S. Theologiae in Schola Tigurina Professoris fidelissimi

wife was Magdalena, daughter of Rodolphus Gualtherus, the successor to Bullinger, a most worthy and famous man. She was not inferior to the former in the virtues of body or mind, married him in the year 1566, and made him blessed with beautiful offspring, three sons and one daughter. May God, the Best and Greatest, the most faithful guardian of widows and orphans, console and protect this widowhood and sad, fatal orphanage of his most adorned wife and children, and grant the children the will and ability to imitate their fatherly and ancestral piety and virtue. The brother of Simler’s wife, Rodolphus Gualtherus Jr., a youth of great promise, not long after died himself in the Lord; therefore, we have added to this narrative certain poems written by learned men on the death of both. He used and enjoyed a manner of dress and diet that was neither too sumptuous nor sordid, but clean and elegant. He attributed as much to domestic affairs as a father of a family who is not needy and dissolute should. He shared the use of the patrimony, which he received moderately from his parents, most liberally with friends and relatives, as well as with the poor and travelers. For he was by nature very liberal and beneficent. He gladly received into his home and board those travelers who came here for the sake of their studies, and he treated them with singular humanity and kindness. He took great pleasure in the gathering and conversations of his countrymen friends, of whom he had an abundance. He often received many at banquets, nor was he lacking at the banquets of his friends, and he seasoned them with the wit and urbanity of his own speech. He was otherwise very sparing of speech, and most averse to garrulity. His most intimate and closest relationship and custom, above all his other friends, was with his kinsman Ludovicus Lavater, with whom he shared all his studies and counsels from boyhood; to his faith, indeed, he committed his testament, as a declaration of his final will, a little before his death. In body, he was quite tall, plump, fair, robust, and strong, which the unhappy gout podagra gout gradually weakened more and more. He was of such a liberal and lovable face and countenance that one could observe his sweetest manners in him, as if in a mirror. He was of such a modest, easy, gentle, meek, and placid nature that he seemed to be clearly devoid of ἀοργησίαν lack of anger/irascibility, that is, of anger and bile. From this leniency and singular meekness of his nature, not even the most severe pains of the gout (a disease that usually renders men difficult, morose, sad, angry, and impatient) or of the stone could move him, or move him to any impatient word (a thing we very often admired). Nay, rather, fortified and armed with a singular strength of mind, he endured all the torment of both diseases most patiently. This gout disease was hereditary to him, from which his father suffered while still a young man, though he was later freed from it when he became older. Hence it appears that what Pliny says is true, who says that the gout is not an incurable disease, since in some (as in the father of our Simler) it ceases of its own accord, and in others it is cured. But our Simler did not have the same fortune in this matter as his father; but rather, the diseases of gout and stone, together with his advancing age, gradually increasing at the same time, enervated his bodily strength more and more, so that we were tormented by no slight anxiety for his life and the fear of a premature death. At length, therefore, because of excessive vigils and insomnia, which the pains of gout and stone, as well as his constant meditations and night studies, had produced, many crudities were accumulated in his body. Because he could not digest these with any exercises due to his bodily heaviness and the immense force of his diseases, at last, by the force of those, nature’s power was clearly conquered and prostrated, and death was accelerated for him. He predicted this for himself, after trying in vain the baths and certain medicines he had used, and he gave no sign of fear, even the slightest, commending his body and soul to God with constant prayers. On the day of July 2, in the year 1576, around the fifth hour, he rested in the Lord and fell asleep in a most blessed slumber. Entirely as his manners were, so his death (of which, alas, I was an eyewitness) was so gentle and placid that it bore the appearance of one sleeping rather than dying. On the same day that he departed, at the fourth hour in the afternoon, funeral rites were held for him according to the custom of his fatherland, with a great concourse of citizens and much lamentation, and his body was buried in the same tomb where Martyr was laid fourteen years earlier, surely by the will of God, so that those who had always been most closely connected in spirit might also be united in body. True was also the prophecy of Martyr regarding his Simler, in which, when near death, he is said to have predicted with a groan that he would not long survive him; for he survived him only about fourteen years, although by reason of his age (for he was only forty-five years old when he died) he could have lived much longer. Let someone ask here, and indeed rightly ask, what reason there might be why God, the wisest moderator of the world, often grants a longer enjoyment of this life to impious and stupid men, whom you would most truly call useless, nay, even pernicious burdens of the earth, than to pious, wise, and most useful men to the human race, when on the contrary it seems that it ought to be done the other way by God in His infinite wisdom? The reason is at hand, and it is twofold. One is the