behoves us all the more to take the same lesson now to heart. Together with these considerations, we must admit that many things happen to us, which are not according to His judgment, but the result of our own wickedness. Say not, then, ‘Why is it that a man is rich, being bad, and another man is poor, being just?’ We may easily explain this, and say that neither does the just man suffer any harm from his poverty, which is a source of greater merit to him, and that the unjust man, unless he be converted, possesses in his riches a store of wrath, and that, in place of chastisement, the riches of many men have often been the cause of evil to them, and led them into a thousand abysses. But God leaves them these riches, showing everywhere the free action of divine choice, everywhere teaching other men not to fight nor to strive for money. ‘What, then,’ you say, ‘if a bad man becomes rich, and suffers no harm? If a righteous man were to become rich, it would be just, but what are we to say when a bad man does?’ That on this account he is to be pitied. For wealth added to wickedness increases the intensity of passions. But a man is just, and he is starving. Well, it does him no harm. But he is bad, and starving. Well, he has his just deserts, or, rather, what is for his good. ‘But so and so,’ you say, ‘received his wealth from ancestors, and has squandered it on bad women and parasites, and he is none the worse.’ How is this? Will you call him a dissolute man, and say he is none the worse? He is a drunkard, and do you call it enjoyment? He wastes for no good purpose, and do you look upon him as enviable? What could a man do worse than to be making his soul an ignominy? If a body were to be distorted or maimed, you would think it the saddest matter in the world; yet, contemplating that man’s soul wholly maimed, do you consider him a happy man? ‘But,’ you say, ‘he does not feel it.’ And for this very reason he is the more to be pitied, just as men who lose their wits are. For he who knows that he is ill will seek the physician honestly and apply remedies; whereas he who does not know it will be beyond cure. Tell me, then, is this the man you consider happy? But this is not astonishing, for the majority of men are devoid of a right estimate of things. So it is that, when chastised, we pay the extreme penalty, and are not freed from wrath; hence come desires and despondencies and perpetual anxieties, since, when God shows us a painless life, that of goodness, by removing ourselves from it, we choose another road, the way of riches and money, which is productive of a thousand evils. We act as a man would act, who, not being able to judge of physical beauty, but, ascribing everything to clothes and adornment, should pass over a young woman, possessing comeliness of body, and take to himself an ugly one, deformed and crippled, merely for her fine dress. The great mass of men now do something of this kind in