gain and
again to "vanity and vexation of spirit." [Eccl. 1:2, 14] How
many of our plans come to naught! How oft our hopes are deceived!
How many things that are not to our liking must we see and bear!
And the very things that fall out according to our wish fall out
also against our wish! So that there is nothing perfect and
complete. Finally, all these things are so much greater, the
higher one rises in rank and station;[11] for such a one will of
necessity be driven about by far more and greater billows,
floods, and tempests, than others who labor in a like case. As it
is truly said in Psalm ciii,[12] "In the sea of this world there
are things creeping innumerable, both small and great beasts,"
[Ps. 104:25] that is, an infinite number of trials. And Job, for
this reason, calls the life of man a "trial." [13]

These evils do not, indeed, cease to be evils because they are
less sharply felt by us; but we have grown accustomed to them
from having them constantly with us, and through the goodness of
God our thoughts and feelings concerning them have become
blunted. That is why they move us the more deeply when we do feel
them now and then, since we have not learned through familiarity
to despise them. So true is it, therefore, that we feel scarce a
thousandth part of our evils, and also that we estimate them and
feel them or do not feel them, not as they are in themselves, but
only as they exist in our thoughts and feelings.[14]

CHAPTER II

THE SECOND IMAGE

THE FUTURE EVIL, OR THE EVIL BEFORE US

It will tend in no small degree to lighten any present evil if a
man turn his mind to the evils to come. These are so many, so
diverse, and so great, that out of them has arisen one of the
strongest emotions of the soul; namely, fear. For fear has been
defined by some as the emotion caused by coming evil. Even as the
Apostle says in Romans xi, "Be not highminded, but fear." [Rom.
11:30] This evil is all the greater because of our uncertainty in
what form and with what force it may come; so that there goes a
popular saying, "No age is proof against the itch," although this
is but a little children's disease. Even so, no man is safe from
the evils that befall any other; for what one has suffered
another may suffer also. Here belong all the tragic histories of
the ages, and all the lamentations of the world. Here belong the
more than three hundred diseases--which some have observed--with
which the human body may be vexed.