are more excellent than wisdom. Again, only the fool will deny
that friendship is to be preferred to riches, since the wisest of
men testifies this; but the chief of philosophers honours truth
before friendship, and the truthful Zorobabel prefers it to all
things. Riches, then, are less than truth. Now truth is chiefly
maintained and contained in holy books--nay, they are written
truth itself, since by books we do not now mean the materials of
which they are made. Wherefore riches are less than books,
especially as the most precious of all riches are friends, as
Boethius testifies in the second book of his Consolation; to whom
the truth of books according to Aristotle is to be preferred.
Moreover, since we know that riches first and chiefly appertain
to the support of the body only, while the virtue of books is the
perfection of reason, which is properly speaking the happiness of
man, it appears that books to the man who uses his reason are
dearer than riches. Furthermore, that by which the faith is more
easily defended, more widely spread, more clearly preached, ought
to be more desirable to the faithful. But this is the truth
written in books, which our Saviour plainly showed, when he was
about to contend stoutly against the Tempter, girding himself
with the shield of truth and indeed of written truth, declaring
"it is written" of what he was about to utter with his voice.

And, again, no one doubts that happiness is to be preferred to
riches. But happiness consists in the operation of the noblest
and diviner of the faculties that we possess--when the whole mind
is occupied in contemplating the truth of wisdom, which is the
most delectable of all our virtuous activities, as the prince of
philosophers declares in the tenth book of the Ethics, on which
account it is that philosophy is held to have wondrous pleasures