He has given a fine ring of bells to a church in the country; and there is much expectation that he will some time or other make a more beautiful front to the market-house, than has yet been seen in any place: for it is the generous spirit of Negotius, to do nothing in a mean way.
7. If you ask what it is that has secured Negotius from all scandalous vices, it is the same thing that has kept him from all strictness of devotion, it is his great business. He has always had too many important things in his head: his thoughts are too much employed, to suffer him to fall either into a course of rakery, or to feel the necessity of an inward, solid piety.
For this reason he hears of the pleasures of debauchery, and the pleasures of piety with the [♦]same indifferency; and has no more desire of living in the one than in the other, because neither of them consists with that turn of mind, and multiplicity of business, which are his happiness.
[♦] inserted omitted word ‘same’
*If Negotius was asked, what it is which he drives at in life? He would be as much at a loss for an answer, as if he was asked, what any other person was thinking of. For though he always seems to himself to know what he is doing, and has many things in his head, which are the motives of his actions; yet he cannot tell you of any one general end of life that he has chosen with deliberation, as being truly worthy of all his labour and pains.
He has several confused notions in his head, which have been a long time there: such as these; that it is something great to have more business than other people, to have more dealings upon his hands than a hundred of the same profession, to grow continually richer and richer, and to raise an immense fortune before he dies. The thing that seems to give Negotius the greatest life and spirit, and to be most in his thoughts, is an expectation that he shall die richer than any of his business ever did.
8. The generality of people when they think of happiness, think upon Negotius; in whose life every instance of happiness is supposed to meet, sober, prudent, rich, prosperous, generous and charitable.
Let us now look at this condition in another, but truer light.
*Let it be supposed, that this same Negotius was a painful, laborious man, very deep in variety of affairs; that he neither drank, nor debauched, but was sober and regular in his business. Let it be supposed, that he grew old in this course of trading, and that the end and design of all his labour, and care, and application to business, was only this, that he might die possessed of more than an hundred thousand pair of boots and spurs.
Let it be supposed that the sober part of the world say of him when he [♦]is dead, that he was a great and happy man, a thorough master of business, and had acquired an hundred thousand pair of boots and spurs when he died.