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| God's Distribution Must Regulate Our Desires, Otherwise We Become the Prey of Ambition and Its Attendant Evils. PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP
Chapter IX.—God’s
Distribution Must Regulate Our Desires, Otherwise We Become the Prey of
Ambition and Its Attendant Evils.
For, as some particular things distributed by God over
certain individual lands, and some one particular tract of sea, are mutually
foreign one to the other, they are reciprocally either neglected or
desired: (desired) among foreigners, as being rarities; neglected
(rightly), if anywhere, among their own compatriots, because in
them there is no such fervid longing for a glory which, among
its own home-folk, is frigid. But, however, the rareness and
outlandishness which arise out of that distribution of possessions
which God has ordered as He willed, ever finding favour in the eyes of
strangers, excites, from the simple fact of not having what God
has made native to other places, the concupiscence of having
it. Hence is educed another vice—that of immoderate
having; because although, perhaps, having may be permissible,
still a limit132 is bound (to be
observed). This (second vice) will be ambition; and hence, too,
its name is to be interpreted, in that from concupiscence
ambient in the mind it is born, with a view to the desire of
glory,—a grand desire, forsooth, which (as we have said) is
recommended neither by nature nor by truth, but by a vicious passion of
the mind,—(namely,) concupiscence. And there are other
vices connected with ambition and glory. Thus they have withal
enhanced the cost of things, in order that (thereby) they might
add fuel to themselves also; for concupiscence becomes proportionably
greater as it has set a higher value upon the thing which it has
eagerly desired. From the smallest caskets is produced an ample
patrimony. On a single thread is suspended a million of
sesterces. One delicate neck carries about it forests and
islands.133
133 “Saltus et
insulæ,” i.e., as much as would purchase them. | The slender
lobes of the ears exhaust a fortune; and the left hand, with its every
finger, sports with a several money-bag. Such is the strength of
ambition—(equal) to bearing on one small body, and that a
woman’s, the product of so copious wealth.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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