Exhortation to Martyrdom 10

And even if the bridegroom, being wise and free from passion, does not turn his betrothed away from every defilement for his own sake, yet for her sake, seeing her defilement and abomination, he will do everything that can heal her and turn her back, offering to a nature that has free will words that turn it from fornication. What defilement, then, could you conceive worse for a soul than to proclaim in any way another god and not to confess the one who is truly the one and only Lord? And I think that, just as “he who is joined to a prostitute is one body,” so the one who confesses someone, especially in a time of torture and of the testing of faith, is blended and united with the one confessed; but the one who denies, cut off by the denial itself as by a sword from him whom he denies, suffers division, being separated from him whom he has denied. Therefore consider whether it was not as a consequence that necessarily follows, that the one who confesses is confessed and the one who denies is denied, that it was said: “Whoever confesses in me before men, I also will confess in him before my Father in heaven.” And the very Word and the very Truth might say to the one who has confessed and to the one who has denied: “With the measure you measure it will be measured back to you.” “You, then, who measured with the measure of confession toward me and filled up the measure of confession, will receive a measure of confession from me ‘pressed down, shaken together, running over,’ which will be given ‘into your lap’; and you who measured with the measure of denial and denied me will receive, in proportion to the measure of your denial, a measure of denial from me concerning you.”