What with a lustful eye, a greedy tongue and a gambling hand, once they have foolishly impoverished themselves, mortgaged their wits along with their lands, and buried their ancestors’ fine possessions in their bowels, they may spend the rest of their days in prison, as they often do. They repent at leisure, and when everything is gone begin to be thrifty. But “economy comes too late at the bottom”: it is then too late to take stock. Their end is misery, sorrow, shame and discontent.

And well they deserve disgrace and discontent: “to be flogged in the amphitheatre,” as they were in ancient times by an edict of Emperor Hadrian, “squanderers of their own property,” as he calls them, prodigal fools, to be publicly shamed and hissed out of every gathering rather than pitied or relieved. The Tuscans and Boeotians brought their bankrupts into the marketplace on a bier, with an empty purse carried before them and all the boys following. There they sat all day, “with the people standing around,” exposed to disgrace and ridicule.

At Padua in Italy they have a stone called the Stone of Shame, near the Senate House, where spendthrifts and those who declare themselves unable to pay their debts sit with their backsides bare. This mark of disgrace is meant to frighten others away from such wasteful spending, or from borrowing more than they know how to repay. The civil lawyers of antiquity appointed guardians over such deranged spendthrifts, as they did over madmen, to control their expenses and prevent them from wasting their fortunes so recklessly as to ruin their families utterly.

I must not omit here those two great plagues and common obsessions of humankind, wine and women, which have made fools of countless people and robbed them of their senses. They commonly go together.

The man who indulges in wine, whom gambling ruins, Is rotten with lust—

Who has sorrow, says Solomon, Proverbs 23:39? Who has woe, but the man who loves drink? It causes torment—“racked by wine and anger”—and bitterness of mind, Sirach 31:21. Jeremiah calls it “wine of fury,” chapter 15: wine of madness, as well he may, for “it makes the sane go mad.” It makes healthy men sick and sad, and wise men mad, saying and doing they know not what.

“A terrible event happened today,” says Saint Augustine. Hear this dreadful occurrence: Cyrillus’s son, drunk today, “wickedly assaulted his pregnant mother, tried to rape his sister, almost killed his father, and mortally wounded two other sisters”; he would have raped his sister, killed his father, and so on.

His saying was true: “wine brings joy and grief.” Drink causes mirth, and drink causes sorrow; drink causes poverty and want (Proverbs 21), shame and disgrace. “Many have fallen into dishonour through drinking wine and, stripped of their honours, have wandered as fugitives,” says Augustine. Many men have shipwrecked their fortunes and wander like rogues and beggars, having turned all their property into “drinkable gold,” though they might otherwise have lived in good standing and prosperity.

For a few hours’ pleasure—for their term of merriment is short—or “voluntary madness,” as Seneca calls it, they purchase endless weariness and trouble.

That other madness centres on women. “It makes the heart turn away,” says the wise man, “and diminishes a man’s brain.” At first she is pleasant, like Dioscorides’ rhododaphne, that plant so beautiful to the eye but poisonous to taste. What follows is as bitter as wormwood in the end (Proverbs 5:4), and sharp as a two-edged sword. At 7:21: “Her house is the way to hell, and goes down to the chambers of death.”

What more sorrowful thing could be said? They are miserable in this life: mad, beasts, led like oxen to the slaughter. Worse still, whoremongers and drunkards will be judged: “they forfeit grace,” says Augustine, “lose glory, and incur eternal damnation.” They lose grace and glory,

That brief pleasure Cancels heaven’s eternal glory—

They gain hell and eternal damnation.