Choose any good thing whatsoever, and you will find that it results from and is established through toil. Piety and holiness are good, but we cannot attain to them save through the service of God, and service calls for earnest toil as its yoke-fellow. Prudence, courage, justice, all these are noble and excellent and perfectly good, yet we cannot acquire them by self-indulgent ease. It is much indeed if by constant care and practice there arise a kindliness between us and them. Service pleasing to God and to virtue is like an intense and severe harmony, and in no soul is there an instrument capable of sustaining it, without such frequent relaxation and unstringing of the chords that it descends from the higher forms of art to the lower. Yet even these lower forms demand much toil. Consider all who practise the school-learning, the so-called preparatory culture. Consider the labourers on the soil and all who get their living by some trade or profession. Neither by day nor night do they cast their cares aside, but always and everywhere they cease not to bear affliction, as the saying goes, in hand and foot and every faculty, so that often they choose death in its stead.
On the Sacrifices of Abel and Cain 7
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