Good-hearted reader.

The just-mentioned Jesus Sirach writes of this point in the 40th chapter: It is a miserable, pitiable thing about the life of all men, from the mother's womb until they are finally buried in the earth, which is the mother of us all. There is always worry, fear, hope, and finally death, as much for him who sits in high honor as for the lowest on earth, as much for him who wears silk and crown as for him who wears a coarse smock; there is always anger, adversity, zeal, discord, and mortal danger, envy and strife. And when one should rest and sleep on his bed at night, many kinds of thoughts fall upon him, etc. And in the 18th chapter, he describes the misery of man quite artfully, and compares the years of man against eternity to a drop of water against the sea, and a grain of sand against the sand of the sea. Just as he also preaches finely at the end of the 14th chapter and elsewhere about mortality.

What else is in the Old and New Testaments regarding this cannot all be cited at this place at this time.

We must mention one or two more from the ancient teachers. Chrysostom says in his commentary on Matthew, chapter 10: Quaelibet bestia unum habet & proprium malum, homo autem omnia. Every beast has one misfortune or defect which is its own, but man has them all together. Thus Hugo laments in Book 1 of Didascalicon the poverty of man, where he compares him with other animals, and indeed with other creatures on earth, to each of which nature has given something that is as its own, and is assigned to it for use, protection, and defense, as bark to the tree,