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¹ And indeed, were my discourse not likely to grow long, and to approach the length of a history, I could have shown you countless customs upon countless others that the ancient Fathers allowed for the winning of their brothers’ souls. For they knew not to please themselves, but each to please his neighbor for his good, to build him up. But now—alas for our own dropsical swelling! — we say, And who is my neighbor? and we knock down countless people who are standing, so that we may set up our own will, which deserves not to stand at all but to be buried; and we transform and rearrange everything, so as to give substance to what has none, and shape to what is shapeless; and if we manage to blurt out some phrase, however ridiculous it may seem, we hasten to make it out to be the voice of God, worthy of the hearing of Moses, perhaps, and Aaron—for it would be too humble to say Ithamar and Eleazar, and still more humble to say the common people of Israel, and that too when they had been purified only three days before—and we do not perceive that we are behaving shamefully in two ways: both in what we say wrongly to begin with, and in what we pile on afterward in defending it.

² Blessed, indeed, is he who has not sinned in word, as someone has said; but praiseworthy too is the one who, after having sinned, discovers and recognizes the sin, and abhors it as a hideous thing—like some monster born in the night, but then seen by day and abhorred, and for that reason cast away. Shall we not imitate the humility of the Lord, who did not please himself, but us, the many, and was bound like something useless, that he might bind us to himself and to one another in the bond of peace, and who poured out his blood, that he might gather the scattered children of God into one, that there might be one flock of all the sheep, arranged under one shepherd, and might escape the carelessness of shepherding that tears them no less than wolves do—indeed, that lends the wolves themselves greater strength to tear the flock apart?