מי יורש קנייני אלוה כ״בWho is the Heir of Divine Things 22
א׳
1[105] For vast is the number of those who repudiate the sacred trusts and in their unmeasured greed use up what belongs to Another as though it was their own. But thou, my friend, try with all thy might, not merely to keep unharmed and unalloyed what thou hast taken, but also deem it worthy of all carefulness, that He who entrusted it to thee may find nothing to blame in thy guardianship of it.
ב׳
2[106] Now the Maker of all that lives has given into thy trust soul, speech, and sense, which the sacred scripture calls in its parable heifer, ram, and goat (Gen. 15:9). Some in their selfishness at once annex these, others store them up, to repay when the moment for repayment has come.
ג׳
3[107] Those who appropriate the trust are countless in number. For which of us does not assert that soul and sense and speech, each and all are his own possession, thinking that to perceive, to speak, to apprehend, rest with himself alone.
ד׳
4[108] But small is the number of those who guard the trust as something holy and inviolable. These have dedicated these three, soul, sense, and speech, to God, for they “took” them all for God, not for themselves; so that they naturally acknowledge that through Him come the activities of each, the reflections of the mind, the language in which speech expresses itself, the pictures presented to sense.
ה׳
5[109] Those, then, who assert their ownership of the three, receive the heritage which their miserable state deserves; a soul malevolent, a chaos of unreasoning passions, held down by a multitude of vices; sometimes mauled by greed and lust, like a strumpet in the stews, sometimes fast bound as in a prison by a multitude of ill deeds, herded with malefactors, not of human kind, but habits which an unanimous judgement has declared worthy of arrest; speech brow-beating, keen-edged against truth, working harm to its victims and shame to its employers; sense insatiable, ever imbibing the objects of sense, yet through its uncontrolled avidity incapable of reaching satisfaction, regardless of its monitors, blind, deaf and derisive to all that they preach for its benefit.
ו׳
6[110] But those who have “taken,” not for themselves but for God, have dedicated each of the three to Him, guarding them for the Owner, as in truth sanctified and holy: the thinking faculty, that it should think of nothing else but God and His excellences; speech, that with unbridled mouth it should honour the Father of all with laud and hymn and benediction, that it should concentrate all the graces of expression to be exhibited in this task only; sense, that it should report faithfully and honestly to the soul the pictures presented to it by the whole world within its ken, heaven and earth and the intermediate forms of nature, both living creatures and plants, their activities, their faculties, their conditions whether in motion or rest.
ז׳
7[111] For God has permitted the mind to comprehend of itself the world of the mind, but the visible world only through sense. Oh! if one can live with all the parts of his being to God rather than to himself, using the eye of sense to penetrate into the objects of sense and thus discover the truth, using the soul to study the higher verities of mental things and real existences, using the organ of his voice to laud both the world and its Maker, he will live a happy and blessed life.
