according to their own inclinations and to violate law, as if the oppressed were in dejection and made way for the tyrant; as if greediness on all sides had opened its jaws and swallowed all that was far and near; as if there was no trace left of contentment; as if the wicked had exalted themselves to Heaven and had made the good sink into the ground; as if nobility of mind were thrown from the loftiest pinnacle to most abysmal depths, as if turpitude were in honour and authority and as if sovereignty had been transferred from the exalted to the mean—­in fact as if the world in the fullness of its joy were crying, “I have concealed the good and brought the evil to light.”  When, however, I reflected on the world and its condition and on the fact that man, although he is the noblest and foremost of creatures in it, is still in spite of his eminent position, subject to one misery after another and that this is his notorious peculiarity so that whoever has even a tittle of reason must be convinced that a human being is unable to help himself and to exert for his salvation,—­this greatly astonished me, as further consideration told me that he is debarred from salvation only because of the small miserable enjoyments of smell, taste, sight, hearing and feeling of which he may receive a fraction or enjoy a particle but which is insignificant being so transient.  He is, however, so much taken up with it that on its account he does not trouble himself for the salvation of his soul.

Then I looked for a similitude for this behaviour of human beings and found the following: 

A certain person was fleeing from a danger into a well and suspended himself by clinging to two branches which grew on its edge, his feet striking against something which supported them.  When he looked round there were four serpents which were projecting their heads from their holes.  As he looked into the bottom of the well he noticed a dragon with its jaws open expecting him to fall his prey.  And as he turned his head up to the branches he observed at their roots a black and a white mouse which were ceaselessly gnawing at both.  While he was contemplating the situation and casting about for a means of escape he descried near him a hollow with bees that had made some honey.  This he tasted and he was so much absorbed in its deliciousness that he no more thought of the condition he was in and that he must devise some contrivance of escape.  He became oblivious of the fact that his feet rested against four serpents and that he did not know which would attack him first, forgot that the two mice were without cessation nibbling at the boughs by which he was hanging, and that as soon as they had gnawed them through he would drop into the jaws of the dragon.  And so in his heedlessness he yielded to the enjoyment of the meed till he perished.