n of their
penitence. For there was so little truth in them, that the lord
required other proofs of their sincerity beside their own word, for
they often lied with their lips and dissembled with their tongue.
But those who professed to be penitent must give some outward proof
of it. They were neither allowed to raise heaps of clay, by
circumventing their neighbors, or to keep great piles lying by them
useless; nor must they barter them for any of those idle vanities
which reduced the heaps on a sudden; for I found that among the
grand articles of future reckoning, the use they had made of the
heaps would be a principal one.

I was sorry to observe many of the fairer part of these pilgrims
spend too much of their heaps in adorning and beautifying their
tenements of clay, in painting, whitewashing, and enameling them.
All those tricks, however, did not preserve them from decay; and
when they grew old, they even looked worse for all this cost and
varnish. Some, however, acted a more sensible part, and spent no
more upon their moldering tenements than just to keep them whole and
clean, and in good repair, which is what every tenant ought to do;
and I observed, that those who were most moderate in the care of
their own tenements, were most attentive to repair and warm the
ragged tenements of others. But none did this with much zeal or
acceptance, but those who had acquired a habit of overlooking _the
things below_, and who also, by the constant use of the telescope
had got their natural weak and dim sight so strengthened, as to be
able to discern pretty distinctly the nature of the _things above_.
The habit of fixing their eyes on these glories made all the shining
trifles, which compose the mass of _things below_, at last appear in
their own diminutive littleness. For it was in this case
particularly true, that things are only big or little by comparison;
and there was no other way of making the _things below_, appear as
small as they really were, but by comparing them, by means of the
telescope, with the _things above_. But I observed that the false
judgment of the pilgrims ever kept pace with their wrong practices;
for those who kept their eyes fastened on the _things below_, were
reckoned wise in their generation, while the few who looked forward
to the future glories, were accounted by the bustlers, or heapers,
to be either fools or mad.

Most of these pilgrims went on in adorning their tenements, adding
to their he