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MISCELLANEOUS CORRESPONDENCES
"Hence turn your looks to the abominations, not less to be deplored, of another kind of spectacle. In the theatres also you will behold what may well cause you grief and shame. It is the tragic buskin which relates in verse the crimes of ancient days. The old horrors of parricide and incest are unfolded to express the image of truth, so that as the ages pass by, any crime that was formerly committed may not be forgotten. Adultery is learnt while it is seen; and while the mischief of having public authority panders to vice, the matron, who perchance had gone to the spectacle as a modest woman, returns from it immodest..
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14 Oh, if... you could gaze into the secret places-if you could open the closed doors of sleeping chambers, and recall their dark recesses to the perception of sight,-you would behold things done by immodest persons which no chaste eye could look upon; you would see what even to see is a crime; you would see what people embruted with the madness of vice deny that they have done, and yet hasten to do,-men with frenzied lusts rushing upon men, doing things which afford no gratification even to those who do them. I am deceived if the man who is guilty of such things as these does not accuse others of them. The depraved maligns the depraved, and thinks that he himself, though conscious of the guilt, has escaped, as if consciousness were not a sufficient condemnation. The same people who are accusers in public are criminals in private, condemning themselves at the same time as they condemn the culprits; they denounce what they commit at home, willingly doing what, when they have done, they accuse, a daring which assuredly is fitly mated with vice, and an impudence quite in accordance with shameless people."-(Cyprian) A.N.C.L. vol. vii. pp. 5-8.
"Ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? Whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God."-James iv. 4.
"Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever."-John ii. 15-17.
