When, therefore, anything evil tortures us, without in turn extorting evil from us, not only do we possess our souls through patience, but, when through suffering the body itself is afflicted or lost temporarily, it actually regains lasting stability and happiness, and through death and pain it secures inviolable health and endless happiness. Hence, when our Lord Jesus exhorted His martyrs to patience, He even promised them integrity of the body without the loss, not of a limb, let me say, but even of a single hair of their heads. ‘Amen, I say to you,’ were His words, ‘not a hair of your head shall perish.’1 And ‘since no one,’ as the Apostle says, ‘ever hated his own flesh,’2 a faithful man more by patience than impatience keeps vigilant watch over the state of his flesh and sees compensation for the losses of this present life, however serious they may be, in the inestimable gain of future incorruption.

Augustine of Hippo, Treatises on Various Subjects, 1952, 16, 242.