and your improvidence, and your ignorance of and indifference to your own business, than to pity you.  That so many garrisoned houses have been undone whereas this of mine remains, makes me apt to believe that they were only lost by being guarded; this gives an enemy both an invitation and colour of reason; all defence shows a face of war.  Let who will come to me in God’s name; but I shall not invite them; ’tis the retirement I have chosen for my repose from war.  I endeavour to withdraw this corner from the public tempest, as I also do another corner in my soul.  Our war may put on what forms it will, multiply and diversify itself into new parties; for my part, I stir not.  Amongst so many garrisoned houses, myself alone amongst those of my rank, so far as I know, in France, have trusted purely to Heaven for the protection of mine, and have never removed plate, deeds, or hangings.  I will neither fear nor save myself by halves.  If a full acknowledgment acquires the Divine favour, it will stay with me to the end:  if not, I have still continued long enough to render my continuance remarkable and fit to be recorded.  How?  Why, there are thirty years that I have thus lived.

CHAPTER XVI

OF GLORY

There is the name and the thing:  the name is a voice which denotes and signifies the thing; the name is no part of the thing, nor of the substance; ’tis a foreign piece joined to the thing, and outside it.  God, who is all fulness in Himself and the height of all perfection, cannot augment or add anything to Himself within; but His name may be augmented and increased by the blessing and praise we attribute to His exterior works:  which praise, seeing we cannot incorporate it in Him, forasmuch as He can have no accession of good, we attribute to His name, which is the part out of Him that is nearest to us.  Thus is it that to God alone glory and honour appertain; and there is nothing so remote from reason as that we should go in quest of it for ourselves; for, being indigent and necessitous within, our essence being imperfect, and having continual need of amelioration, ’tis to that we ought to employ all our endeavour.  We are all hollow and empty; ’tis not with wind and voice that we are to fill ourselves; we want a more solid substance to repair us:  a man starving with hunger would be very simple to seek rather to provide himself with a gay garment than with a good meal:  we are to look after that whereof we have most need.  As we have it in our ordinary prayers: 

          “Gloria in excelsis Deo, et in terra pax hominibus.”

We are in want of beauty, health, wisdom, virtue, and such like essential qualities:  exterior ornaments should, be looked after when we have made provision for necessary things.  Divinity treats amply and more pertinently of this subject, but I am not much versed in it.