XI. APT SCHOLARS.

MOTHERS generally teach their children three sins before they be full two years old.

First, pride: Point, child, where are you fine? Where are you fine?

Secondly, lying: It was not A that cried, it was B that cried.

Thirdly, revenge: Give me a blow, and I will beat him. Give me a blow, and I will beat him.

Surely children would not be so bad, nor so soon bad, but partly for bad precedents set before them, partly for bad precepts taught unto them.

As all three lessons have taken too deep impressions in our hearts, so chiefly the last of revenge. How many blows have been given on that account within our remembrance, and yet I can make it good, that we in our age are more bound to pardon our enemies than our fathers and grandfathers in their generation.

For charity consisteth in two main parts; in donando et condonando, in giving and forgiving. Give we cannot so much as those before us, our estates being so much impaired and impoverished with taxes unknown to former ages.

Seeing, therefore, one channel of charity must be the less, the stream thereof ought to run 251broader and deeper in the other. The less we can give, the more we should forgive: but alas! this is the worst of all, that giving goeth not so much against our covetousness, but forgiving goeth more against our pride and ambition.