Holy St. Austine telleth of a physician who gave a man in a certain disease a medicine that helped him.  The selfsame man at another time in the selfsame disease took the selfsame medicine himself, and had of it more harm than good.  This he told the physician, and asked him how the harm should have happened.  “That medicine,” quoth he, “did thee no good but harm because thou tookest it when I gave it thee not.”  This answer St. Austine very well approveth, because, though the medicine were the same, yet might there be peradventure in the sickness some such difference as the patient perceived not—­yea, or in the man himself, or in the place, or in the time of the year.  Many things might make the hindrance, for which the physician would not then have given him the selfsame medicine that he gave him before.

To peruse every circumstance that might, cousin, in this matter be touched, and were to be considered and weighed, would indeed make this part of this devil of Business a very busy piece of work and a long one!  But I shall open a little the point that you speak of, and shall show you what I think therein, with as few words as I conveniently can.  And then will we go to dinner.

First, cousin, he who is a rich man and keepeth all his goods, he hath, I think, very good cause to be very afraid indeed.  And yet I fear me that such folk fear the least.  For they are very far from the state of good men, since, if they keep all, they are then very far from charity, and do, as you know well, either little alms or none at all.

But now our question, cousin, is not in what case that rich man standeth who keepeth all, but whether we should suffer men to stand in a perilous dread and fear for the keeping of any great part.  For if, by the keeping of so much as maketh a rich man still, they stand in the state of damnation, then are the curates bound to tell them so plainly, according to the commandment of God given unto them all in the person of Ezechiel:  “If, when I say to the wicked man, ‘Thou shalt die,’ thou do not show it unto him, nor speak unto him that he may be turned from his wicked way and live, he shall soothly die in his wickedness and his blood shall I require of thine hand.”

But, cousin, though God invited men unto the following of himself in wilful poverty, by the leaving of everything at once for his sake—­as the thing by which, being out of solicitude of worldly business and far from the desire of earthly commodities, they may the more speedily get and attain the state of spiritual perfection, and the hungry desire and longing for celestial things—­yet doth he not command every man to do so upon the peril of damnation.  For where he saith, “He that forsaketh not all that ever he hath, cannot be my disciple,” he declareth well, by other words of his own in the selfsame place a little before, what he meaneth.  For there saith he more, “He that cometh to me, and hateth not his father, and his mother, and his wife, and his