Those Things Which Are Dearest to Us, and Which Are in Themselves but a Skeleton?

Those things which in this life are dearest unto us, and of most account they are in themselves but vain, putrid, contemptible. The most weighty and serious, evrightly esteemed, but has puppies biting one another, or untoward children now laughing and then crying. As for faith and modesty and justice and truth, they long since, as one of the poets hath it, have abandoned this spacious earth and retired themselves unto heaven. What else but to worship and praise the gods, and to do good unto men, to bear with them and to forbear to do them any wrong? And for all external things, belonging either to this thy wretched body or life, to