*19. To animate a lady with the same spirit, he wrote to her thus: “I wonder how a thing so little as man, drawn out of nothing in his original, infected with his first parent’s sin, and the addition of his own: when he is raised to so high a degree of honour, as to be one with Christ the Son of God; can continue to esteem the world, or make any account of its vanities! Shall the things of the earth waste the little time we have to secure the treasures of heaven; things that will all pass away like a dream: as we see our fathers are gone already, and there is no more remembrance of them: their joys and griefs, their pleasures and pains, are they not all vanished away? And are we not sure they were out of their senses, if they considered any thing but God in their ways? The same will befall us: Every thing else will pass away, and God alone will abide.”
*The same lady, in another letter, he encourages thus: “Courage, all is well! We must die to the world, and search out the hindrances it brings to our perfection. We must live in the world as not living there; possess it, as not possessing it. Let us drive out of our minds the affection to our fine houses; let us ruin the delights of our gardens; let us burn our groves; let us banish these vain images which we have of our children; approving in them what we condemn in ourselves, the show and glitter of the world.”
*I know there is a difference of conditions; but all ought to reject those intailments on noble blood, (as men account them) those principles of aspiring to the highest, and of bearing nothing. Let us take from them this vanity of mind, this stateliness of behaviour. Let us arm them against the pernicious examples of those grandees in story, whose punishments are as eminent in hell, as their presumption was upon earth.
*“My design is not, that you should demolish your walk, or let your gardens run into a wilderness. The ruins I speak of must be made in our own minds, not executed on things insensible. When I say, we must set all on fire, my thoughts were, to follow that admirable spirit of the apostle, who would that we have poverty amidst our riches, and divestment in the midst of our possessions: he means, that our spirit be thoroughly purified and separated from all creatures; because a Christian does himself great wrong, if he entertains in his heart any other inclinations than those of Jesus Christ, who saw all the world without destroying it, but withal without cleaving to it.”
20. It is to bring us to this spirit, that God permits us to meet so many pains and troubles in the world; as when a man sets thorns in a way, to make men take another. “God has his ends, says M. _De Renty_, in all these contrarieties, _viz._ that those who are his, should be yet more his, and despise more and more all that is in the world. By these the confusion and vanity of the world are made known to them that are not of it; who being in the spirit of death, wait for nothing more there but death; bringing forth, in the mean while, the fruits of life eternal.”