Epistolary Garden

along with many others, who recognize my labor and diligence to be useful; notwithstanding that I, as mentioned above, am loaded with more than desired business: nevertheless, I have not wished to show myself like the overloaded camels, which signify enough by standing up; but rather I have endeavored to imitate the palm branch.

But ah, would to God! I just did not have to experience: that I myself have built the altar with the stones of my flesh, upon which the well-meaning is turned into ashes, and that the iron of the chains, with which I would be closed to the pillar of slander, was made glowing: which I, however, do not believe to find in any sincere soul. Although I have long since considered these annorum revolutiones revolutions of the years: that meanwhile nothing is set so high by the hand of the wise, which would not have been given to the price of slander and the punishment-seeking After-World: Then, if a bad interpreter, no good words help. That I, as one who—without concealing the truth—must admit to learning from every child, and attempt to teach others, should expect much more: yet I comfort myself that a true God-loving heart—to whom I promise to serve in all occurring eventualities according to utmost possibility—will grasp into deep-thinking consideration that our souls, which are plunged into dark error-gloom, which grasp nothing perfect in this feeble mortality—under the appearance of fairness, and many defects under the appearance of virtue—but that all our knowledge and doing is purely patchwork; and therefore, if I should have erred beyond hope, cover such, as God the Almighty covers his faultless errors, and spread over it with the mantle of Christ-laudable well-inclination and love.

But as for those whose none is what he wants to be; and none wants to be what he is; who are badly furnished in the house of the brain, and to whom the tiles in the roof of the understanding are smashed by the thunder of ignorance, who will highly puff up all my doing, make an elephant out of a fly, and look at a spider as if it were a crocodile, whose anger and long-heard gossip I regard as little as the moon regards the barking of the dog,