to condemn such a care:  provided, that worldly goods be well gotten, and that we raise not our own buildings out of other men’s ruins.  For, as Plato doth first prefer the perfection of bodily health; secondly, the form and beauty; and thirdly, “Divitias nulla fraude quaesitas":[15] so Jeremiah cries, “Woe unto them that erect their houses by unrighteousness, and their chambers without equity”:  and Isaiah the same, “Woe to those that spoil and were not spoiled.”  And it was out of the true wisdom of Solomon, that he commandeth us, “not to drink the wine of violence; not to lie in wait for blood, and not to swallow them up alive, whose riches we covet:  for such are the ways (saith he) of everyone that is greedy of gain.”

And if we could afford ourselves but so much leisure as to consider, that he which hath most in the world, hath, in respect of the world, nothing in it:  and that he which hath the longest time lent him to live in it, hath yet no proportion at all therein, setting it either by that which is past, when we were not, or by that time which is to come, in which we shall abide forever:  I say, if both, to wit, our proportion in the world, and our time in the world, differ not much from that which is nothing; it is not out of any excellency of understanding, that we so much prize the one, which hath (in effect) no being:  and so much neglect the other, which hath no ending:  coveting those mortal things of the world, as if our souls were therein immortal; and neglecting those things which are immortal, as if ourselves after the world were but mortal.

But let every man value his own wisdom, as he pleaseth.  Let the rich man think all fools, that cannot equal his abundance:  the revenger esteem all negligent, that have not trodden down their opposites; the politician, all gross that cannot merchandise their faith:  yet when we once come in sight of the port of death, to which all winds drive us, and when by letting fall that fatal anchor, which can never be weighed again, the navigation of this life takes end; then it is, I say, that our own cogitations (those sad and severe cogitations, formerly beaten from us by our health and felicity) return again, and pay us to the uttermost for all the pleasing passages of our lives past.  It is then that we cry out to God for mercy; then when our selves can no longer exercise cruelty to others; and it is only then, that we are strucken through the soul with this terrible sentence, “That God will not be mocked.”  For if according to St. Peter, “The righteous scarcely be saved:  and that God spared not his angels”; where shall those appear, who, having served their appetites all their lives, presume to think, that the severe commandments of the all-powerful God were given but in sport; and that the short breath, which we draw when death presseth us, if we can but fashion it to the sound of mercy (without any kind of satisfaction or amends) is sufficient?  “O quam multi,” saith a reverend father,