Page:Ante-Nicene Christian Library Vol 4.djvu/246

242 lives. "For what was made in Him was life." "Blessed is the man," says Wisdom, "who shall hear me, aud the man who shall keep my ways, watching at my doors, daily observing the posts of my entrances." "Let us not then sleep, as do others, but let us watch," says the Scripture, "and be sober. For they that sleep, sleep in the night; and they that lie drunken, are drunken in the night," that is, in the darkness of ignorance. "But let us who are of the day be sober. For ye are all children of the light, and children of the day; we are not of the night, nor of the darkness." But whoever of us is most solicitous for living the true life, and for entertaining noble sentiments, will keep awake for as long time as possible, reserving to himself only what in this respect is conducive to his own health; and that is not very usual.

But devotion to activity begets an everlasting vigil after toils. Let not food weigh us down, but lighten us; that we may be injured as little as possible by sleep, as those that swim with weights hanging to them are weighed down. But, on the other hand, let temperance raise us as from the abyss beneath to the enterprises of wakefulness. For the oppression of sleep is like death, which forces us into insensibility, cutting off the light by the closing of the eyelids. Let not us, then, who are sons of the true light, close the door against this light; but turning in on ourselves, illumining the eyes of the hidden man, and gazing on the truth itself, and receiving its streams, let us clearly and intelligibly reveal such dreams as are true.

But the hiccuping of those who are loaded with wine, and the snortings of those who are stuffed with food, and the snoring rolled in the bed-clothes, and the rumblings of pained stomachs, cover over the clear-seeing eye of the soul, by filling the mind with ten thousand phantasies. And the cause is too much food, which drags the rational part of man down to a condition of stupidity. For much sleep brings advantage neither to our bodies nor our souls; nor is it suitable at all to those processes which have truth for their object, although agreeable to nature.