"Master these, exulting in the disposition of the soul,
Vanquished neither by gold nor by languishing love,
Nor are they any longer attendants to the wanton."
And at length infers:
"Those, unenslaved and unbended by servile Pleasure,
Love the immortal kingdom and freedom."
He writes expressly, in other words, "that the stop[1] to the unbridled propensity to amorousness is hunger or a halter."
And the comic poets attest, while they depreciate the teaching of Zeno the Stoic, to be to the following effect:
"For he philosophizes a vain philosophy:
He teaches to want food, and gets pupils
One loaf, and for seasoning a dried fig, and to drink water."
All these, then, are not ashamed clearly to confess the advantage which accrues from caution. And the wisdom which is true and not contrary to reason, trusting not in mere words and oracular utterances, but in invulnerable armour of defence and energetic mysteries, and devoting itself to divine commands, and exercise, and practice, receives a divine power according to its inspiration from the Word.
Already, then, the aegis of the poetic Jove is described as
"Dreadful, crowned all around by Terror,
And on it Strife and Prowess, and chilling Rout;
On it, too, the Gorgon's head, dread monster,
Terrible, dire, the sign of Ægis-bearing Jove."[2]
But to those, who are able rightly to understand salvation, I know not what will appear dearer than the gravity of the Law, and Reverence, which is its daughter. For when one is said to pitch too high, as also the Lord says, with reference to certain; so that some of those whose desires are towards Him may not sing out of pitch and tune, I do not understand it as pitching too high in reality, but only as spoken with reference to such as will not take up the divine yoke. For to those, who are unstrung and feeble, what is
