least wish to adorn them with some books to
give the visitors a better opinion of our scholarship."[192]

[192] Rodriguez: Op. cit., Part iii, Treatise iii., chaps. vi., vii.

Since Hindu fakirs, Buddhist monks, and Mohammedan dervishes unite with
Jesuits and Franciscans in idealizing poverty as the loftiest
individual state, it is worth while to examine into the spiritual
grounds for such a seemingly unnatural opinion. And first, of those
which lie closest to common human nature.

The opposition between the men who HAVE and the men who ARE is
immemorial. Though the gentleman, in the old- fashioned sense of the
man who is well born, has usually in point of fact been predaceous and
reveled in lands and goods, yet he has never identified his essence
with these possessions, but rather with the personal superiorities, the
courage, generosity, and pride supposed to be his birthright. To
certain huckstering kinds of consideration he thanked God he was
forever inaccessible, and if in life's vicissitudes he should become
destitute through their lack, he was glad to think that with his sheer
valor he was all the freer to work out his salvation. "Wer nur selbst
was hatte," says Lessing's Tempelherr, in Nathan the Wise, "mein Gott,
mein Gott, ich habe nichts!" This ideal of the well-born man without
possessions was embodied in knight-errantry and templardom; and,
hideously corrupted as it has always been, it still dominates
sentimentally, if not practically, the military and aristocratic view
of life. We glorify the soldier as the man absolutely unincumbered.
Owning nothing but his bare life, and willing to toss that up at any
moment when the cause commands him, he is the representative of
unhampered freedom in ideal directions. The laborer who pays with his
person day by day, and has no rights invested in the future, offers
also much of this ideal detachment. Like the savage, he may make his
bed wherever his right arm can support him, and from his simple and
athletic attitude of observation, the property-owner seems buried and
smothered in ignoble externalities and trammels, "wading in straw and
rubbish to his knees." The claims which THINGS make are corrupters of
manhood, mortgages on the soul, and a drag anchor on our progress
towards the empyrean.

"Everything I meet with," writes Whitefield, "seems to carry this voice
with it--'Go thou and preach the Gospel; be a pilgrim on earth; have no
party or certain d