1 Peter 3:17

For it is better. — There is a kind of ironical suppression in this comparison.

If the will of God be so. — A strikingly reverent phrase in the original, If the will of God should will it. This is, of course, to be taken only with the word “suffer,” which itself means, as in 1 Peter 3:14, to suffer capitally. St. Peter is thinking of the legal process of 1 Peter 3:15, coming to a verdict of “guilty.” He was himself daily expecting such a death.

For well doing. — Better, perhaps, as well doers. It does not necessarily mean, in the Greek, that the well doing was the reason of the suffering, but simply that it accompanied it.