Speculum amatorum mundi

found, nor do all who find it enter through it, because, held captive by the age, they turn back. Even few find it, and fewer strive to enter through it. No one enters without labor and without purity of mind. It is sufficiently narrow to forgo all things, to love only one, to seek one, to knock daily at one, not to covet prosperity, not to fear adversity. This in the gloss mentioned above, which, alas, the lovers of this world do not heed, but, glued to the age and unable to recede from it, they wander as if insane. Which blessed Bernard, or Jerome, declares well: To laugh and rejoice with this world is not of a sensible man, but of a madman, for the heart is not joyful and pleasant with this world, but with God, because worldly joy is brief, fragile, and fleeting. Also Bernard: There is no truer insanity than the joy of the age. Augustine: The joy of worldlings is the joy of madmen. The same: The joy of the age is unpunished wickedness, namely, to luxuriate in spectacles, to trifle in drunkenness, to be gorged, to stink of filth, and to suffer no evil. Whoever loves God flees these. The reason, however, why many enter into the perdition of eternal damnation through the wide gate and spacious way is that, as Ecclesiastes 1 writes: Children are difficult to correct, and the number of fools is infinite, who, alas, look more to the present life than to the end that follows. To whom John Chrysostom speaks: Do not look at how rough the road is, but attend to where it leads; nor consider that it is narrow, but where it ends. From which one thing is elicited which is greatly to be feared, namely, that while the state of the modern world lasts, with infinite evils demanding it, which, alas, run everywhere in the world, few will be of the number of the saved. Which the Savior hints at with the grave sentence which he delivered in Matthew 20: Many are called, but few are chosen. Not that from the beginning to the end of the world few are saved,