ment, amidst the same worldly fashions and customs, yet we became holy, and are now eternally happy. Could not you have done as we did? We have lived in the world, in daily intercourse with worldly people, but we shunned the vain customs and laws of the world; why have you always adored them and taken them as the guide of your actions, although the Christian law was placed before your eyes as well as before ours, and the warning of the Apostle was for your good as well as for ours: “Be not conformed to this world.”[1] We have attended to the duties of our state, and have performed them with a good intention for God’s sake, and been careful not to offend God for any man’s sake; that according to our ideas was to live in a holy, Christian, and pious manner; why could you not have done the same?
Nor his want of knowledge or reflection. Ah, what is to be done then? Shall I say: I knew no better at the time; I did not reflect on what I was doing? But that might avail a heathen, a Turk, a Jew, a wild barbarian brought up in savagery, who never heard a word of the Christian Gospel, of the commandments of God, of the holy sacraments. But you and I, O Catholic Christian, who are born and bred in the full light and with every opportunity of doing good, how could we put forward such an excuse? But what am I saying? Even many heathens, who followed the mere light of reason and lived better than many a Christian, shall testify against us.
Even heathens shall convict him in this respect. There will appear against us from amongst the Roman nobility the heathen youth Spurina, who seeing that his great beauty was an occasion of unchaste desires to many, deliberately took a knife and cut and slashed his face so that it was completely disfigured. What will you answer, asks St. Ambrose, who relates this incident: what will you answer, vain Christian who, not content with the natural comeliness given you by God, seek to increase it by all imaginable luxury in dress, and thus equipped show yourself in public? There will appear against us the heathen matron Lucretia, who not being able to defend herself from the violence of a king, took a dagger and stabbed herself to the heart, preferring death to the shame of having lost her purity. What will you answer, unchaste Christian, who allow so many liberties to be taken with you, and seek out opportunities of exposing your virginal or conjugal chastity to danger? There will appear against us the heathen philosopher Anaxagoras, with many others like him, who in order to be more at liberty to at-
- ↑ Nolite conformari huic’sæculo.—Rom. xii. 2.
