formerly laughed at! Ah, would I had thought of this before!
Now we are disgusted at many things. Shown by an example. Truly, my dear brethren, now is the time to think and to weigh everything carefully in the balance of death. Now, while we are still in life and have no fear of death, we often fear and avoid what we shall at the end wish to have eagerly embraced; now we long and yearn for and look on as a great happiness what we shall then wish we had avoided as the greatest evil. Solitude, humiliation, self-denial, mortification of the senses, poverty, crosses and misery, the bare idea of such things fills us now with aversion and disgust; but how differently death will speak to us of those things! And here I can best explain my meaning by a story that Plutarch relates of a certain queen. Mark what I am about to say, my dear brethren, not for the sake of the story, which I bring forward only as a simile, but on account of the application of it to our subject. Berenice, wife of King Deiotarus, and a model of beauty, heard that there was, in a certain village, a peasant girl who resembled her in every particular, features, gait, and gesture, so that if she were clad in royal robes she might be mistaken for the queen. The king, and especially the queen, were very anxious to see this girl and sent for her to come to court. And now comes the wonderful part of the story. The queen and the girl entered the hall of the palace by different doors at the same time; but hardly had they come together when the queen held her nose tightly with her fingers, the peasant girl flung her hands up above her head and both fled precipitately without greeting each other. The fact of the matter was that the queen, being delicately reared, could not bear the odor of hay, straw, and cow-dung that came from the peasant girl, while the latter on her part, being unused to perfumes, could not stand the smell of the balsams and other scents with which the queen’s garments were saturated, so that to avoid fainting, she had to hold her head with both hands and escape as quickly as possible. Thus they went away, having the same opinion of each other; the queen thinking the girl smelt ill and the girl having the same opinion of the queen;, both were right in their own imagination, according to the training they had received.
Now the pious and worldly differ in their opinions. Now for the application of this. It sometimes happens that two women of equal age and standing go to church together; the one pious, humble, modest, according to the Christian law; the other worldly, vain, light-minded, bold. In the same way two young men meet; the one quiet, well-reared, inclined to piety
