Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal. But lay up for yourselves treasures in Heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal. Though on earth you may live in squalor, poverty, and disease, yet "in my Father's house are many mansions." Poverty, indeed, became in the Middle Ages one of the vows of monastic orders. In the New Testament it is prescribed, "Blessed are the poor in spirit" and the doctrine was in many cases literally accepted. If any one of you will know whether he is really poor in spirit, let him consider whether he loves the ordinary consequences and effects of poverty, which are hunger, thirst, cold, fatigue, and the denudation of all conveniences. See if you are glad to wear a worn-out habit full of patches. See if you are glad when something is lacking to your meal, when you are passed by in serving it, when what you receive is distasteful to you, when your cell is out of repair. If you are not glad of these things, if instead of loving them you avoid them, then there is proof that you have not attained the perfection of poverty of spirit.[2] [Footnote 2: Alfonso Rodriguez: _Pratique de la Perfection Chretienne_, part III, treatise III, chap. VI; quoted in James's _Varieties of Religious Experience_, p. 315.] Contempt for this world's goods, when generalized, promotes an attitude of indifference to the social conditions in which men live. The history of the saints is filled with references to their endurance of pain, ill health, poverty, and disease. And the "world, the flesh, and the devil" are for some types of religious mind all one. For such, to be engaged in social betterment is an irrelevant business, it is to be lost in the world. People's souls must be saved; not their bodies.