“Whence comes such vanity in the lives of Christians who enjoy the truth of the Gospel?  With what tumults everywhere our lives are filled!  We do business, we sail the seas, we engage in wars, we make treaties and we break them, we beget children, enroll heirs, buy fields and sell, cement friendships, erect buildings and tear them down… We are exercised in various arts, sweat and become doctors of law and theology… With such cares we torture ourselves.  In this we wax old.  In this we let slip so many years and lose that precious treasure which alone is of worth.  Then we come the last  tribunal where only truth can stand.  Too late we shall perceive that all these vanities were but shadows and we have squandered our lives in the delusion of a dream.  Some one will say, ‘Shall a Christian, then, have nothing to do with all of these vanities?’  No, not that, but we shall participate only with detachment, being ready to forsake all for the sake of the one thing needful, as Paul said, ‘Having a wife as if not having,’ weeping as if not weeping, rejoicing as if not rejoicing, selling as possessing nothing, using the world as if not using for the fashion of this world passes away.  Use then the world but delight not in it.”
Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536)