TO A CERTAIN DISCIPLE OF HIS. I. This world passes away, and daily decreases. No one living shall remain: no living man has remained: the whole human race uses a like origin, and from a similar life falls by an equal end: from those who carry on life, uncertain death snatches it away: the mourning of death seizes all the proud and wandering: what they will not bestow for Christ, all the greedy lose at the wrong time: others gather after them: scarcely do the living themselves dare to give a little to God, they leave all to death: they keep nothing of these things. Daily the present life, which they love, decreases: the punishment which they prepare shall remain for them unfailing. While the slippery thing slips away, they try to gather it, and this which leads itself onward, they fear the less to trust.
They have loved the foul darkness more than the light (John 3:19). They scorn to imitate the Lord, the Leader of life. As though they reigned in dreams, for one hour they rejoice; but eternal torments are even now being prepared for them. The blind by no means see what remains after death for sinners, what impiety bestows upon the impious. II. It befits you, friend, to ponder all these things. Far be it from you to love the pattern of this life. For all flesh is grass (Isa. 40:6), though flaming, though flowery: and so all glory is as it were the flower of grass. When the sun is risen, the grass withers and the flower fades (James 1:11): so is all youth, when its strength shall have failed. The beauty of men, growing sluggish, falls away:
the radiance of Christ's countenance, lovely beyond all things, is more to be loved than the flower of fragile flesh. Beware, little son, of sowing kinds of things which death enters as no small destruction. Very many have suffered the burnings of punishments, unwilling for the losses of a slippery will. Drink never the cup of the most impious: from it many oftentimes, vile and merry, laugh: for whomever you see laughing emptily, know that at the last they shall weep bitterly. III. Behold, dearest one, that lust is thus like a deadly bite, in that it overcomes sweetness. Do not go on headlong through the ways of mortals: you see how shipwreck has befallen many. Go among the snares with suspended feet, through which we have found the rest of the incautious taken captive.
Lift up the eyes of your heart from earthly things: love the most loving peoples of the angels. Blessed is the family that dwells on high, where no old man groans, nor any infant wails; where no voice ceases the praises of the Lord; where none hungers, where none ever thirsts; where the heavenly people are fed with food from above; where no one dies, because no one is born; where the royal heavenly hall is fed, in which no ill-sounding voice has ever been heard; where life is to be green and true, which neither the fear of death nor of sorrow shall consume. The joyful, with death passed away, shall see the joyful King: with Him who reigns they shall reign; with Him who rejoices they shall rejoice. Then grief, then weariness, then toil shall be wiped away: then the King of kings, the pure King, shall be seen by the pure.