Writings

You reject, unhappy one, the advantage of heavenly discipline, and rushest into death while wishing to stray without a bridle. Luxury and the shortlived joys of the world are ruining you, whence you shall be tormented in hell for all time. They are vain joys with which you are foolishly delighted. Do not these make you to be a man dead? Cannot thirty years at length make you a wise man? Ignorant how you have first strayed, look upon ancient time, you think now to enjoy here a joyous life in the midst of wrongs.

These are the ruins of your friends, wars, or wicked frauds, thefts with bloodshed: the body is vexed with sores, and groaning and wailing is indulged; whether a slight disease invade you, or you are held down by long sickness, or you are bereaved of your children, or you mourn over a lost wife. All is a wilderness: alas, dignities are hurried down from their height by vices and poverty; doubly so, assuredly, if you languish long. And do you call it life when this life of glass is mortal?

Consider now at length that this time is of no avail, but in the future you have hope without the craft of living. Certainly the little children which have been snatched away desired to live. Moreover, the young men who have been deprived of life, perchance were preparing to grow old, and they themselves were making ready to enjoy joyful days; and yet we unwillingly lay aside all things in the world. I have delayed with a perverse mind, and I have thought that the life of this world was a true one; and I judged that death would come in like manner as you did— that when once life had departed, the soul also was dead and perished.

These things, however, are not so; but the Founder and Author of the world has certainly required the brother slain by a brother. Impious man, say, said He, where is your brother? And he denied. For the blood of your brother has cried aloud to Me to heaven. You are tormented, I see, when you thought to feel nothing; but he lives and occupies the place on the right hand. He enjoys delights which you, O wicked one, have lost; and when you have called back the world, he also has gone before, and will be immortal: for you shall wail in hell. Certainly God lives, who makes the dead to live, that He may give worthy rewards to the innocent and to the good; but to the fierce and impious, cruel hell. Commence, O you who are led away, to perceive the judgments of God.