of vanity:  what is it other than an universal dissimulation?  We profess that we know God:  but by works we deny him.  For beatitude doth not consist in the knowledge of divine things, but in a divine life:  for the Devils know them better than men.  “Beatitudo non est divinorum cognitio, sed vita divina.”  And certainly there is nothing more to be admired, and more to be lamented, than the private contention, the passionate dispute, the personal hatred, and the perpetual war, massacres, and murders for religion among Christians:  the discourse whereof hath so occupied the world, as it hath well near driven the practice thereof out of the world.  Who would not soon resolve, that took knowledge but of the religious disputations among men, and not of their lives which dispute, that there were no other thing in their desires, than the purchase of Heaven; and that the world itself were but used as it ought, and as an inn or place, wherein to repose ourselves in passing on towards our celestial habitation? when on the contrary, besides the discourse and outward profession, the soul hath nothing but hypocrisy.  We are all (in effect) become comedians in religion:  and while we act in gesture and voice, divine virtues, in all the course of our lives we renounce our persons, and the parts we play.  For Charity, Justice, and Truth have but their being in terms, like the philosopher’s Materia prima.

Neither is it that wisdom, which Solomon defineth to be the “Schoolmistress of the knowledge of God,” that hath valuation in the world:  it is enough that we give it our good word:  but the same which is altogether exercised in the service of the world as the gathering of riches chiefly, by which we purchase and obtain honor, with the many respects which attend it.  These indeed be the marks, which (when we have bent our consciences to the highest) we all shoot at.  For the obtaining whereof it is true, that the care is our own; the care our own in this life, the peril our own in the future:  and yet when we have gathered the greatest abundance, we ourselves enjoy no more thereof, than so much as belongs to one man.  For the rest, he that had the greatest wisdom and the greatest ability that ever man had, hath told us that this is the use:  “When goods increase (saith Solomon) they also increase that eat them; and what good cometh to the owners, but the beholding thereof with their eyes?” As for those that devour the rest, and follow us in fair weather:  they again forsake us in the first tempest of misfortune, and steer away before the sea and wind; leaving us to the malice of our destinies.  Of these, among a thousand examples, I will take but one out of Master Danner, and use his own words:  “Whilest the Emperor Charles the Fifth, after the resignation of his estates, stayed at Flushing for wind, to carry him his last journey into Spain; he conferred on a time with Seldius, his brother Ferdinand’s Ambassador, till the deep of the night.  And when