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ALL, vices when overcome grow feeble, and when beaten are day by day
rendered weaker, and both in regard to place and time grow less and
subside, or at any rate, as they are unlike the opposite virtues, are more
easily shunned and avoided: but this one when it is beaten rises again
keener than ever for the struggle; and when we think that it is destroyed,
it revives again, the stronger for its death. The other kinds of vices
usually only attack those whom they have overcome in the conflict; but this
one pursues its victors only the more keenly; and the more thoroughly it
has been resisted, so much the more vigorously does it attack the man who
is elated by his victory over it. And heroin lies the crafty cunning of our
adversary, namely, in the fact that, where he cannot overcome the soldier
of Christ by the weapons of the foe, he lays him low by his own spear.
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