content.[1] Oh, blessed poverty (exclaimed St. Laurence Justinian), which possesses nothing and fears nothing; she is ever joyous and ever in abundance, since she turns every inconvenience into advantage for the soul.[2] St. Bernard said: "The avaricious man hungers after earthly things as a beggar, the poor man despises them as a lord."[3] The miser is always hungry as a beggar, because he is never satiated with the possessions he desires; the poor man, on the contray, despises them all as a rich lord, inasmuch as he desires nothing.
One day Jesus Christ thus spoke to the Blessed Angela of Foligno: "If poverty were not of great excellence, I would not have chosen it for myself, nor have bequeathed it to my elect." And, in fact, the saints, seeing Jesus poor, had therefore a great affection for poverty. St. Paul says, that the desire of growing rich is a snare of Satan, by which he has wrought the ruin of innumerable souls: They that will become rich, fall into temptation, and into the snare of the devil, and into many unprofitable and hurtful desires, which drown men into destruction and perdition.[4] Unhappy beings who, for the sake of vile creatures of earth, forfeit an infinite good, which is God! St. Basil the Martyr was quite in the right, when the Emperor Licinius proposed to make him the chief among his priests, if he would renounce Jesus Christ; he was right, I say, to reply: "Tell the emperor, that were he to give me his whole kingdom, he would not give me as much as he would rob me of, by depriving me of God."[5]
- ↑ "Habentes autem alimenta et quibus tegamur, his contenti sumus."—1 Tim. vi. 8.
- ↑ De Disc. mon. c. 2.
- ↑ "Avarus terrena esurit ut mendicus, fidelis contemnit ut dominus."—In Cant. s. 21.
- ↑ "Qui volunt divites fieri, incidunt … in laqueum diaboli et desideria … nociva, quæ mergunt homines in interitum et perditionem."—1 Tim. vi. 9.
- ↑ Boll. April 26, Act. n. 11.
