The Lives of the Saints Volume 1 - St. Patrick's Basilica

hundred years, ignorant of all that passed in the world, both the
progress of sciences, the establishment of religion, and the revolutions
of states and empires; indifferent even as to those things without which
he could not live, as the air which he breathed, the water he drank, and
the miraculous bread with which he supported life. What did he do? say
the inhabitants of this busy world, who think they could not live
without being in a perpetual hurry of restless projects; what was his
employment all this while? Alas! ought we not rather to put this
question to them; what are you doing while you are not taken up in doing
the will of God, which occupies the heavens and the earth in all their
motions? Do you call that doing nothing which is the great end God {154}
proposed to himself in giving us a being, that is, to be employed in
contemplating, adoring, and praising him? Is it to be idle and useless
in the world to be entirely taken up in that which is the eternal
occupation of God himself, and of the blessed inhabitants of heaven?
What employment is better, more just, more sublime, or more advantageous
than this, when done in suitable circumstances? To be employed in any
thing else, how great or noble soever it may appear in the eyes of men,
unless it be referred to God, and be the accomplishment of his holy
will, who in all our actions demands our heart more than our hand, what
is it, but to turn ourselves away from our end, to lose our time, and
voluntarily to return again to that state of nothing out of which we
were formed, or rather into a far worse state?
Footnotes:
1. Pliny recounts thirty-nine different sorts of palm-trees, and says
that the best grow in Egypt, which are ever green, have leaves thick
enough to make ropes and a fruit which serves in some places to make
bread.
2. Pliny, l. 7, c. 3, and others, assure us that such monsters have
been seen. Consult the note of Rosweide.
3. The heathens might feign their gods of the woods, from certain
monsters sometimes seen. Plutarch, in his life of Sylla, says, that
a satyr was brought to that general at Athens; and St. Jerom tells
us, that one was shown alive at Alexandria, and after its death was
salted and embalmed, and sent to Antioch that Constantine the Great
might see it.
4. See the whole history of this translation, published from an
original MS. by F. Gamans, a Jesuit, inserted by Bollandus in his
collection.
5. F. Ambrose de Lombez, Capucin, Tr. de la Paix Intérieure, (Paris,
1758,) p. 372.
ST. MAURUS, ABBOT
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AMONG the several noblemen who placed their sons under the care of St.