Advice to a Friend

Genevan pastor Simon Goulart (1543-1628) offers this advice to a friend:

1. Live with other people as if God were watching. Speak with God as if others were listening.
2. Endure with greatest patience what you are not able to change and walk with God (by whose authority all things occur) without complaining. Evil and wretched is the person who follows after the commander of Hell.
3. In times of activity as much as in periods of rest, all dimensions of life ought to be beautiful.
4. Commit your way to God. Hope in him and he will do it.

Goulart adds: “[Only] eternal things endure.”

– from Scott M. Manetsch, Calvin’s Company of Pastors: Pastoral Care and the Emerging Reformed Church, 1536-1609 (Oxford: 2013), 108.