One evening undoes the Lenten labor

The sights of this evening move me to speak, but the fruitlessness of my previous labors holds back my impulse and dulls my eagerness. A farmer, when his first seeds do not sprout, is more reluctant to cast seed into the same furrows a second time. If, after all the exhortations we never stopped offering you in the time before, and after these seven weeks of fasting when night and day we did not cease solemnly testifying to you the Gospel of God's grace, nothing has come of it—on what hopes shall I speak today? Oh, how many nights you kept vigil in vain! How many days you gathered in vain! If indeed it was in vain. For the one who has made progress in good works and then has run back to his old habits not only forfeits the reward for his labors but deserves a heavier condemnation, because he tasted the good word of God and was counted worthy of the knowledge of mysteries, yet betrayed everything, lured by a brief pleasure. The one with little is pardonable and receives mercy, but the powerful, it says, will be powerfully tested. One evening, and one assault of the enemy, dissolved and obliterated all that labor. What eagerness, then, can there be for this present word? I would have kept silent, know well, had I not feared the example of Jeremiah, who, when he did not want to speak to a disobedient people, suffered those things he himself described: that fire came into his inward parts, and he gave way on every side, and could not bear it. Wanton women, forgetting the fear of God, despising the eternal fire, on such a day—when they ought to have sat in their homes because of the remembrance of the resurrection and taken thought of that day when the heavens will be opened, and the Judge will appear to us from heaven, and there will be trumpets of God, and resurrection of the dead, and righteous judgment, and recompense to each according to his work—instead of holding these things in their thoughts, and cleansing their hearts from evil imaginations, and wiping away with tears their former sins, and preparing to meet Christ on the great day of his appearing, they shook off the yoke of Christ's service, cast the veils of modesty from their heads, despised God, despised his angels, were shameless before every male gaze, tossing their hair, trailing their tunics, and playing with their feet at the same time, with wanton eye and unrestrained laughter driven mad into dancing, calling upon themselves every lust of young men, forming choruses at the martyrs' shrines before the city, and making the holy places a workshop of their own shamelessness. They defiled the air with their songs of fornication, and defiled the earth with their unclean feet as they stamped it in their dances, surrounding themselves with a crowd of young men as their theater—truly wanton and utterly deranged, leaving no excess of madness undone. How shall I keep silent about these things? How shall I lament them as they deserve? Wine has brought this ruin upon these souls of ours—wine, the gift given by God for the comfort of weakness to the self-controlled, but now become a weapon of lust for the licentious.