Consider, dear child, the shame of wretches in love with wealth, who will not follow the lights that nature gives them to win the sovereign and everlasting Good. This was not beyond the pagan philosophers, who for love of knowledge cast riches from them; they saw them to be a hindrance. Yet the men I speak of wish to make riches their god, witness their greater grief to lose temporal wealth and substance than to lose me, the sovereign eternal riches. All manner of evil, if you but think a little, issues from this ungoverned will and desire for wealth.

Pride issues from it—the desire to be the greater; injustice to self and others; greed, which in lust for money rriakes no scruple to rob a brother or steal what belongs to Holy Church, bought though it is with the blood of my Son, my Word, my only-begotten. There issues also the trafficking in time and in neighbours’ flesh and blood (so with usurers, who sell like thieves what is not their own). Gluttony issues from it, with excess of foods and ungoverned eating; licentiousness too, for if a man had no wealth to spend, he would often not keep such sorry company. There are murders too; hatred and uncharitableness; cruelty; faithlessness towards me; and selfpresumption, as though it were thanks to themselves that men had wealth. Unperceiving that it is through me alone that they either get or keep it, they lose trust in me and trust only in it—idly, for it drops from them unawares, whether lost in this life by my provision and for their good, or whether lost at their death; thus they learn at length the hollowness and the fickleness of wealth.