Complete Works of Saint Cyprian

He can no longer covet anything, no longer desire anything from the world, who is greater than the world. How stable, how unshakable is the protection, how heavenly the safeguard with eternal goods, to be loosed from the snares of an entangling world, to be purged from earthly filth into the light of eternal immortality. Let him see what insidious destruction of the hostile enemy previously raged against us. We are compelled to love more what we are going to be, while it is granted to us both to know and to condemn what we were. And for this, there is no need for money or canvassing or force, so that the sum of a man's dignity or power is produced by elaborate effort. It is both a free gift from God and it is easy. As the sun radiates of its own accord, as the day illuminates, as a fountain waters, as a shower sprinkles, so the heavenly spirit pours itself in. After the soul, looking toward heaven, has recognized its author, higher than the sun and more sublime than all this earthly power, it begins to be what it believes itself to be.

You only, whom the heavenly militia has now marked in the spiritual camps, hold fast to an uncorrupted discipline, hold fast to one that is sober with religious virtues. Let your prayer or reading be constant. Now speak with God, now let God speak with you. Let him instruct you with his precepts, let him arrange your life. He whom God has made rich, no one will make poor. No penury will be able to exist once the heavenly nourishment has saturated the breast. Now, ceilings distinguished with gold and homes covered with slabs of precious marble will seem sordid to you, when you have known that you yourself are to be cultivated more, that you are to be adorned rather, that this home is better for you which the Lord has occupied like a temple, in which the Holy Spirit has begun to dwell. Let us paint this house with the pigments of innocence, let us illuminate it with the light of justice. This will never collapse into the fall of old age, nor will it be disgraced by the pigment of a wall or by fading gold. Whatever is dyed is perishable, nor does it provide stable confidence to those who possess it, as it does not have the truth of possession.