PROSPERITY

OF GERMANY.

PREFACE.

If the proverbs of the ancients are to be accepted as salutary doctrines, then this one surely is not to be rejected among the least: That which one does not wish to hear, one must feel afterward. The meaning is: If anyone ignores a faithful warning and is subsequently afflicted by loss, he is noted by everyone who cries out these words: he has been struck by the deserved and earned reward because he did not obey the faithful admonition; who will help him now? This happens to many who, living a secure life free from cares, see only what is before their feet and do not worry about what is to come, until, suddenly seized and oppressed by evil, they try too late to remedy the same with salutary counsel. But no one is so unskilled or inept as not to see in what a dangerous age we live today, not weighing the doctrine of the ancients who say and teach: It is not the act of a wise man to allow, when his affairs have collapsed, for him to have to say, "I did not think": which, however, in the present time, alas, happens very frequently, and proceeds from too much