Page:The Apocryphal Acts of Paul, Peter, John, Andrew and Thomas.djvu/182



68. "Thus, I think, it is with the faith which every one of us practices, and which can only be decided as having been the true one when it remained the same to the end of life. For there are many obstacles which cause unrest to human reasoning: cares, children, parents, glory, poverty, flattery, youth, beauty, boasting, thirst for riches, anger, pride, frivolity, envy, passion, carelessness, licentiousness, love, slaves, money, pretense, and all the other like obstacles which exist in life; thus for the helmsman who takes his course in a quiet journey, the adverse winds and a great tempest and a mighty wave, when the heaven is serene; for the husbandman, untimely weather and blight and creeping worms appearing from the ground; for the athletes, the "almost," and for the artists, the obstacles issuing from them.

69. "The believer must above all things consider the end and carefully examine how it will come, whether energetic and sober and without impediment, or in confusion and flattering this world and bound by passions. Thus one can only praise the beauty of the body, when it is wholly uncovered; and the great general, when one has happily finished the whole campaign, as he promised, and the excellent physician, when he has succeeded in every cure, and so also a soul as filled with faith and worthy of God if it happily accomplished that which it promised, not one which made a (good) beginning, and gradually descended into the errors of life and became weak; also not the