and I see that they meet together at various places, and that those to whom the image was entrusted, make small counterfeits of it, and distribute them to all, as it were, in a covering, and they with piety take them into their mouths. Then I ask: "What are they doing here?" The answer was that it sufficed not merely to behold the often-named image outwardly, but that one must also enter into its innermost, so that a man could transform himself into its beauty. For all sins, they said, must vanish before this celestial medicine. And I, relying on this message, praised within myself the Christians as blessed men, who possessed among themselves such remedies and such help against evil.
(Dissoluteness among the Christians.)
6. Meanwhile, looking at some of those who had recently—as they said—received God, gave themselves up one after the other to drunkenness, quarrelling, impurity, thieving, and robbing. But I, trusting not mine eyes, gaze yet more carefully, and I see in truest truth that they drink and vomit, quarrel and fight, rob and pillage one another both by cunning and by violence, neigh and skip from wantonness, shout and whistle, commit fornication and adultery worse than any of the others I had seen; briefly, everything they did was in contradiction to the admonitions they had received and to their own promises. Therefore was I troubled, and mournfully I said: "But
