much and earnest

The knowledge of ourselves no doubt ought to be most precious to us: and therein the Holy Scriptures, if not the only, are certainly the incomparable lantern in this fleshly darkness of ours. For (alas!) what is all knowledge, if in the end of this little and wearisome pilgrimage, Hell become our schoolmaster? They, therefore, are diligently to be read.

- from a letter to his friend Sir Edward Denny, dated 22 May 1580. Text  (modernized) taken from Katherine Duncan-Jones’s Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet, which I’m reading.