Selected quad for the lemma: love_n

Word A	Word B	Word C	Word D	Occurrence	Frequency Band	MI	MI Band	Prominent
love_n	love_v	neighbour_n	self_n	2,652	5	9.4322	5	false

Text snippets containing the quad

ID	Title	Author	Corrected Date of Publication (TCP Date of Publication)	STC	Words	Pages
A50650	The moral history of frugality vvith its opposite vices, covetousness, niggardliness, prodigality and luxury / written by the Honourable Sir George Mackenzie ...	Mackenzie, George, Sir, 1636-1691.	1691 (1691)	Wing M179; ESTC R20197	43,307	108

Yet God seems now to permit Luxury to throw away that mony amongst the Poor which Charity cannot persuade them to give Others again recommend Luxury as that which occasions the sharpning of Wit and the beautifying of the Universe for those who have Wit study Painting Architecture Sculpture and by these the Rich adorn the World and make it a more glorious instance of his excellent Skill who first formed it and bestowed those excellent Talents on Men for improving it That same God also has made Jewels Perfumes and many other things which he must allow to be used by Luxury since Frugality knows no use for them But the great Advocate for Luxury is Self-Love that Orator which never fails to persuade And it suggests to us that the greatest of our Concerns should be for ourselves and that a reasonable Man should think all thrown away which he spends not to please himself And which he can no way do so well as by gratifying all his own Appetites and Inclinations with the full enjoyment of all they can desire the Publick Good and Charity being meer Notions invented by Philosophers and Divines to make us share with them that mony which when they have once got they laugh at us for parting with I confess that all the Arguments that plead for Avarice seem to conclude at last in favour of Luxury for to what purpose should a Man lay up mony except he use it And Nature would not allow one to toil much for it if it were not that he promised to himself to live one day softly and pleasantly on the fruits of these Labours and on the other hand Luxury never approves any Argument or Design that Avarice can bring for it is so much taken up with the present pleasure of using what it has that it will allow it self no time to foresee or toil for what it may want Many who have been very Prodigal and Luxurious have afterwards turned very Avaritious whereas they never gained one Proselyte from Avarice And I have known some who have spent a very prodigal and luxurious Youth throwing away the little they had who so soon as they grew Rich became so fond of it that they could not part with what was sufficient to supply their Necessity And when I asked them why they run from one extreme to another in spight both of Reason and Custom They answered that what formerly they had was not worth their Care and therefore they spent it in hopes thereby to gain more In which we may see a new and different view of the genius of Avarice and Luxury and the motives whence they rise As Avarice differs from Parsimony so does Prodigality from Luxury for Prodigality is a profuse spending on others but Luxury upon ones self In Prodigality a Man seems to value every Man more than himself because he prefers them defrauding himself of Necessaries to bestow upon them In Luxury a Man prefers himself to all others robbing and cheating them by all arts and devices to get thereby superfluities to feed himself and his Lusts. For which Reason and since also the Scripture speaks so much against Luxury and not against Prodigality it may seem strange why the Laws are so severe to Prodigals in interdicting and forbidding them the Administration of their own Estates without putting any restraint upon the Luxurious whereas it seems that the Prodigal is less an Enemy to the Common-Wealth than the Luxurious Seeing he is ready to prefer his fellow-Citizens to himself and generally they who get the Prodigals means have more Wit than he and can make better use of what they get from him and so should by the Laws be preferred to him But I think the reason of this is that the Law fears that after he hath dissipated his own he may fall a burden on the Society and therefore it confiders him as a generous kind of Idiot and so puts him under Tuition as it does an Idiot And thus it cares for him more than for the Luxurious and it were to be wished that by the same compassion it provided also Tutors for the Niggard who is in greater danger to be ruined by himself than the Prodigal by others To which nothing can be answered but that the Law thinks this Churl unworthy of its care and that the Common-Wealth would lose little though he should starve himself Since self-Self-Love is mans chief Counsellor it seems that Men are more naturally inclined to Luxury than Prodigality as they are inclined to love themselves better than their Neighbours But yet on a more serious Reflection it will appear that even Prodigality has Self Love to plead for it because Ambition which is a more violent Passion than Sensuality drives a Man to Prodigality as that whereby he may raise his Reputation by buying that Fame of which only he is greedy The great Arguments that weigh with me against Luxury are first That Luxury disorders confounds and is inconsistent with that just and equal Oeconomy whereby God governs the World as his own Family in which all Men are but Children or Servants for as the Avaritious hoards up for one that which should be distributed among many so in Luxury one vitious Man spends upon himself what should maintain many hundreds and he surfeits to make them starve This is not to be a Steward but Master Nor can we think that the wise and just Judge of all things will suffer in his beautiful World what the most negligent and imprudent amongst us could not suffer in his private Family The second Argument is That Nature should be Mans chief Rule in things relating to this World and Reason his great Director under God in making use of that Rule and the Eyes as it were by which we are to see how to follow it By this Nature teaches us how to proportion the means to the end and not to imploy all the Instruments whereby such an end may be procured but only such as are necessary and suitable for the procuring of it which proportion Luxury neither understands nor follows and therefore we must conclude it unnatural and unreasonable and that Frugality is the true Mathematicks of Moral Philosophy and by this we may condemn not only such as Senecio was in the Roman History who delighted to have his Cloaths and his Shooes twice as large as were fit for his Body and Feet which the Luxurious laughed at with others but even such as keep twice as great Tables build twice as great Houses pay twice as many Servants as are fit for them are as mad as he For though that disproportion be not so very perceptible as the other because the bulk of a Mans Estate is not so easily measured and known as that of his Person and because there are twice as many Fools of this kind as there are of the other So that Reason is out-voted though it cannot be answered yet the folly is the same every where and in this it is