judgment of the piety and merit, the lawfulness and warrantableness of their profession and obligations without any purpose of reproaching the memory of the founders of those orders, or of the persons of those who have professed; of whom there have been very many learned and very pious men whose devotion, and virtue, and integrity of life, deserve to be reverenced and imitated, though they were not without those weaknesses and infirmities and defects, which keep them from being the objects of adoration which is assigned to many of them.

The vows then that these men make, and which constitute their religion, and without making which no man can be admitted to it, are three; of poverty, of chastity, and of obedience; and these are common to all religious orders, though they have not all the same signification: which is a wonderful latitude in a vow, and is explained either by some original determination by the founder, or by a more modern indulgence or reformation by some buil from the bishop of Rome, who hath power to disp. nse with and absolve them from all their vows: and so there is a great difference between the po. verty of the Benedictines or the Jesuits, and the poverty of the Capuchins; and yet the vow is the same, and in the same terms, and without any gloss upon it, that is taken by all three; but the two

former wisely interpret their vow of poverty to oblige them singly to have no property of their own, but they may enjoy all the effects of wealth and plenty out of the stock of the community; the other poor men literally affect poverty in the highest degree that life can be preserved, with what uneasiness soever, insomuch as it is not lawful for them to provide or retain what may be necessary for to-morrow, nor to have two habits nor two pair of shoes. Let us now examine the nature and the effect of every one of these vows; and from thence examine the benefit and advantage that redounds from thence to the church of Christ, or to the prosperity of nations. And in the first place, what is the virtue, and where is the beauty of this poverty, that we should so much affect it, be so solicitous for it as to bind ourselves by an oath, a vow to live in poverty? Indeed, to behave our selves honestly, and decently, and patiently in poverty, when it shall please God to inflict it upon us, is a virtue and duty the Christian religion obliges us to; not to despair whilst it is upon us, nor to despair of overcoming and getting out of it, but to submit to God's good will and pleasure, and to wait his time for our delivery, as we do or must do in all other punishments and diseases with which he pleases to visit us: for poverty is a punishment, and poverty is a disease, from which we

may as lawfully pray to be preserved or delivered as from the plague; I say, it is a punishment, a judgment inflicted by God; "The drunkard and the glutton shall come to poverty, and drousiness shall clothe a man with rags," says Solomon, Prov. xxiii, 21. It is the legacy bequeathed to vice and luxury and idleness; and therefore how it comes to be so desirable, as to be attained by a vow, to be a foundation in religion, and a proper means to advance it, is very hard to comprehend, and had need of better arguments than are contained in ́any of the founder's rules, or the bulls which confirm them. If you will believe Solomon, "The destruction of the poor is their poverty," Prov. x. 15, how it should be a necessary ingredient to salvation, may be worthy of question. It was indeed frequently practised in the infancy of Christianity, to sell all that they had and give it to the poor; but it was never a precept or injunction of Christianity. It is true, that our Saviour, to convince the vanity and hypocrisy of a Pharisee, who bragged as if he had performed the whole law, bid him "sell all he had," &c. which he knew he would not do, but went away melancholy. Poverty will never make a man a Christian; nor when he is one, can he do as much good as if he were rich. The giving all they had to the poor, which was, I say, practised much in the infancy of religion, was

a very efficacious argument to get credit to the persons who preached, not a principle of the doctrine which they preached: when most men were so transported with the vanity and pleasure and wealth of the world, and their hearts so much set upon it that they loved nothing else; men who despised all that, and gave that away which would have given them all that, and imposed those severities upon themselves which were most contrary to what all others affected, could not but be conceived to find some inward pleasure and joy in the doctrine which they professed: yet I say it was never a precept, an injunction of Christianity; there were as good Christians, who did not sell all they had, but kept it and enjoyed it, and it is probable did much more good than they who had nothing. We may believe that the expression of "selling all that they had and giving to the poor," which was never done in our Saviour's own time, is not clearly understood; that the distribution was not in their own power, but brought to the apostles to be distributed as they thought fit, we have reason to believe; and if it were possible to believe the large volume of the history of their saints, we shall find that all they who are remembered chiefly for selling all they had, and giving it to the poor, are mentioned after their sale to have built churches and founded religious houses;

which men who had nothing could never have done: so that the most natural understanding of those expressions is, that they suffered not their estates to descend to their heirs, but disposed it to pious uses. Poverty never made such alms.

Sure we are, that they who sold or gave all they had, never lived themselves afterwards by begging; many laboured and took pains for their living, it may be were contented to receive alms from a charitable hand; but how men came to be enjoined to beg for their living, how begging came to be of the essence, to be a badge of religion, we shall not find till those times in which religion was degenerated, and private men took upon them to contradict the laws of God and man in the institution of orders, which they called religion, and prescribed rules to be observed which contradict nature, deprive them of the most precious treasure of health, and of the liberty that God hath not only permitted, but directed to be used: "The sluggard will not plough by reason of the cold, therefore shall he beg in harvest, and have nothing," Prov. xx. 4. is the judgment the spirit of God hath inflicted upon laziness, upon men who will not labour for their living. It is a strange presumption, a contradiction of the will and mind of God himself, to erect societies, and constitute fraternities, whose religion obliges them not to