your bones will say, Lord, who is like unto Thee?' For that great desert of God cannot be thought of as it deserves, and all human speech and understanding fails, that free mercy, without any preceding merits, should have come to you. Therefore is it called grace, because it is given gratis. What grace? to be members of Christ, sons of God, brethren of the Only-Begotten. If He be the only-begotten, whence are you brethren; but, because He was alone by nature, ye made brethren by grace? Because, then, ye have been made members of Christ, I warn you. I fear for you, not so much from Pagans, from Jews, from heretics, as from bad Catholics. Choose you, among the people of God, whom ye will follow. For if ye will follow the multitude, ye will not be among the few, who walk in the narrow way. Abstain from fornication, from rapine, from frauds, from perjuries, from things forbidden, from strifes: be drunkenness far from you; fear adultery as death;—not death which parts soul from body, but wherein the soul will for ever burn with the body." And after having, with all plainness of speech, expostulated with those, who, in those days also, veiled deadly sins under soft names, or avoided public scandal only, "May I not do in my own house what I will? I tell you, No. They who do these things go to hell, and will burn in everlasting fire;" and, having warned "against that raven-like "repetition, Cras! Cras!" procrastination of repentance, "that raven, whose voice thou imitatest, departed out of the ark, and returned not; but thou, my brother, return to the Church which that ark signified," he thus concludes, to the baptized, "But do ye hear me, ye baptized! hear me, ye who have been re-born by the Blood of Christ, I beseech you, by that Name which has been pronounced over you, by that altar to which you approached, by the Sacraments which you have received, by the future judgment of quick and dead;—I beseech you, I bind you by the name of Christ, that ye imitate not those whom you know to be such, but let His Sacraments remain in you, who would not come down from the tree, but who would rise again from the grave."
It may be said, perhaps, that some of these are speaking, in
