BOOK II. VIII. 12-19
converse, do you not know that you are nourishing God, exercising God? You are bearing God about with you, you poor wretch, and know it not! Do you suppose I am speaking of some external God, made of silver or gold? It is within yourself that you bear Him, and do not perceive that you are defiling Him with impure thoughts and filthy actions. Yet in the presence of even an image of God you would not dare to do anything of the things you are now doing. But when God Himself is present within you, seeing and hearing everything, are you not ashamed to be thinking and doing such things as these, O insensible of your own nature, and object of God's wrath!
15Again, when we send a young man forth from the school to sundry activities, why are we afraid that he will do something amiss—eat amiss, have intercourse with women amiss, be abased if dressed in rags or conceited if he has on fine clothes? This fellow does not know the God within him, this fellow does not know the companion with whom he is setting forth. Nay, can we allow him to say, "O God, would that I had Thee here"? Have you not God there, where you are? And when you have Him, do you seek for someone else? Or will He have other commands for you than these? Nay, if you were a statue of Pheidias, his Athena or his Zeus,[1] you would have remembered both yourself and your artificer, and if you had any power of perception you would have tried to do nothing unworthy of him that had fashioned you, nor of yourself, and you would have tried not to appear in an unbecoming attitude before the eyes of men; but as it is, because Zeus has made you, do you on that account not care
- ↑ Referring to the chryselephantine statues at Athens and at Olympia, upon which the fame of Pheidias principally rested. The statue of Athena held a Nike in the out-stretched right hand; cf. § 20 below.
