Part 2: On the Religion Incumbent on the Merchant

In that we must follow the scheme proposed in our preface, in this second book it behoves us to deal with religion and the devotions a merchant should offer up to his creator; and these observances are very important and necessary to every man, given that, as Lactantius maintains in his treatise On Religion: “Man’s greatest prize is religion alone”. In fact all the other things a man possesses he shares with the beasts: the voice with which it seems that one understands the other, laughter with which one appears to cuddle the other; they are alike in loving their wives, their children etc., (f. 42) in gathering food and storing it for the future, in knowing what is harmful to them and which are the curative plants. In these and many other things the bees seem to be sagacious: hoarding honey, they venerate their king, and arrange and sort their goods.