Women Brought In to Guard the Money

From here many are led on over a steep precipice, by a fall that cannot be undone, to death. Not content to keep by themselves the money they either never had before or kept back through a bad beginning, they look for women to live with them, to guard what they have wrongfully piled up or kept back. And they entangle themselves in so many harmful and dangerous affairs that they are thrown down into the depths of hell. For they refuse to accept the saying of the apostle, that “having food and clothing they should be content” with what the frugality of the monastery supplied. Instead, “wishing to become rich, they fall into temptation and the snare of the devil, and into many useless and harmful desires, which drown men in ruin and destruction. For the love of money,” that is, greed, “is a root of all kinds of evil; and some, coveting it, have wandered from the faith and entangled themselves in many sorrows.” [a]