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15. When the soul then consults either for itself or for others with
a good will towards perceiving the inner and higher things, such as are
possessed in a chaste embrace, without any narrowness or envy, not
individually, but in common by all who love such things; then even if
it be deceived in anything, through ignorance of things temporal (for
its action in this case is a temporal one), and if it does not hold
fast to that mode of acting which it ought, the temptation is but one
common to man. And it is a great thing so of pass through this life,
on which we travel, as it were, like a road on our return home, that
no temptation may take us, but what is common to man. For this is a
sin, without the body, and must not be reckoned fornication, and on
that account is very easily pardoned. But when the soul does anything
in order to attain those things which are perceived through the body,
through lust of proving or of surpassing or of handling them, in order
that it may place in them its final good, then whatever it does, it
does wickedly, and commits fornication, sinning against its own body:
and while snatching from within the deceitful images of corporeal
things, and combining them by vain thought, so that nothing seems to
it to be divine, unless it be of such a kind as this; by selfish
greediness it is made fruitful in errors, and by selfish prodigality it
is emptied of strength. Yet it would not leap on at once from the
commencement to such shameless and miserable fornication, but, as it
is written, "He that contemneth small things, shall fall by little
and little."
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