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ℹ️ The Chinese and English alongside are this site's own translation, made directly from the original text on this page (not the CUV or the WEB, which follow the Masoretic Text and a different textual tradition).
We believe that you have profited not a little from the discourse of last Sunday; inasmuch as by our preaching we were cleansing your hearts from all defilement of idols. For our hearts are cleansed when our conscience, polluted by the filth of the devil, is not held fast. But he does not have a polluted conscience who does not suffer sacrileges to be practiced in his possession. Otherwise, he who knows that sacrifice is offered to idols in his field and does not forbid it—although he himself abides far off in the city—yet the pollution will touch him nonetheless. And though it is the peasant who stands by the altars, the execrable contamination returns to the master. For he becomes a partaker of it, if not by conscience, at least by knowledge.
We believe, therefore, that we have made progress when they restrain the worship of sacrilege in your possessions; for we say that, as a Christian man—that is, a clean man—should have a clean possession. For Solomon says: 'A clean man is a precious possession.' If, then, a pure man is compared to a most precious possession, how much more is this possession of greater price, if it be sincere and pure, and grow not cheap through any contagion of the devil. But why a clean man is called a clean possession we ought to know: namely, because it is not the frailty of the body that makes him precious, but the sincerity of virtue, and because, on account of the very purity of mind, the Lord deigns to possess him, as the prophet says in the person of the saints. (In the Ambrosian codex, where this sermon is read, some folios are wanting.)