Saint Augustine: The City of God (De Civitate Dei)

displease, and therefore they do not fall into that damnation with them which is prepared for such people after this life. Yet, because they spare their damnable sins—while fearing them in their own conduct, however light and venial—they are justly flogged with them temporally, although they are by no means punished eternally. They justly feel this life to be bitter when they are divinely afflicted with them, because they did not wish it to be bitter to those who were sinning, while they loved its sweetness.

For if anyone refrains from rebuking and correcting those who act wrongly, because he seeks a more opportune time, or fears that they might become worse from it, or fears that he might hinder others from being educated to a good and pious life, or might press and avert them from the faith: it does not seem to be an occasion of covetousness, but a counsel of charity. That which is culpable is that those who live differently and abhor the deeds of the wicked, yet spare the sins of others which they ought to disabuse or rebuke, while they avoid their offenses, lest they harm themselves in those things which the good use licitly and innocently, but more greedily than they ought, as those who are pilgrims in this world and carry the hope of a heavenly homeland before them. For not only the weaker ones, leading a married life, having children or seeking to have them, possessing homes and families (whom the Apostle addresses in the churches, teaching and warning how they ought to live—wives with husbands and husbands with wives, and children with parents and parents with children, and servants with masters and masters with servants original: Colossians 3:18), freely obtain many temporal and earthly things and lose them with difficulty, because of which they do not dare to offend men whose most contaminated and wicked life displeases them; but even those who hold a higher rank of life, nor [are held by] marital [life]...