The Christian as conqueror and the emptiness of worldly goods

What a beautiful sight for God when a Christian grapples with pain, when he stands arrayed against threats, punishments, and tortures, when, laughing, he drives home the din of death and the executioner's horror, when he raises his freedom against kings and rulers and yields only to God, whose he is, when he taunts the very man who pronounced sentence against him as a conqueror and victor! For he has won who has obtained what he fought for.

What soldier would not court danger more boldly under his commander's eyes? No one receives a reward before the test. And yet a commander cannot give what he does not have: he cannot prolong life, but he can honor military service.

But God's soldier is neither abandoned in pain nor ended by death. So a Christian can seem wretched, but he cannot be found wretched. You yourselves carry calamitous men to heaven: Mucius Scaevola, who, having missed the king, would have perished among the enemy, had he not lost his right hand.

And how many of our people have endured not only their right hand but their whole body being burned and cremated without any wailings, especially when they had it in their own power to be released!

Do I compare men with Mucius or with Aquilius or Regulus? Our boys and little women mock crosses and tortures, wild beasts and all the terrors of punishment, with inspired endurance of pain.

Do you not understand, you wretched people, that no one either wants to undergo punishment without reason or can endure tortures without God?

Unless perhaps you are deceived because those who do not know God overflow with riches, flourish with honors, and are strong in positions of power. Wretched people are lifted higher for this reason: so that they may fall from higher. For they are fattened like victims for punishment, crowned like sacrificial animals for the penalty. Indeed, some are raised to commands and dominions for this purpose: so that their ruined minds may freely traffic in the license of power.

For without knowledge of God, what happiness can be solid, since death exists? Like a dream, it slips away before it is grasped. Are you a king? You fear as much as you are feared, and however much you are surrounded by a large retinue, you are still alone when danger comes. Are you rich? Fortune is badly trusted, and the short journey of life is not equipped but weighed down by a large travel allowance.

Do you glory in fasces and purple? It is the empty error of a human being and the hollow cultivation of rank to gleam in purple while the mind is filthy. Are you noble by birth? Do you praise your parents? We are all born with equal lot; we are distinguished by virtue alone.

We, therefore, who are judged by our character and modesty, rightly abstain from your evil pleasures, your processions, and your spectacles. We know the origin of these things from your sacred rites, and we condemn their harmful allurements. For in chariot races, who would not shudder at the madness of the people fighting among themselves? In gladiatorial games, at the training in homicide?

In the theater there is no less frenzy and more prolonged shame. Now the mime either exposes or demonstrates adulteries; now the effeminate actor inflicts love while he feigns it. The same man disgraces your gods by dressing them in debauchery, sighs, and hatreds; the same man provokes your tears with feigned grief and empty gestures and nods. So you demand homicide in reality, and you weep over it in fiction.