On Idolatry 12

We flatter ourselves wrongly about the necessities of making a living, if after the faith has been sealed we say, “I have nothing to live on.” Here I will now answer that abrupt proposition more fully. It is said too late. For you ought to have deliberated beforehand, after the example of that most provident builder who first reckons the cost of the work against his means, lest, having begun, he should afterwards blush at running short. But even now you have the Lord's sayings and examples, which take away every excuse from you. For what do you say? “I shall be in want.” But the Lord calls the needy blessed. “I shall have no food.” But “Do not be anxious,” he says, “about food”; and for clothing we have the lilies as an example. “I needed property.” Yet all things are to be sold and divided among the needy. “But I must provide for my children and my posterity.” “No one who puts his hand to the plough and looks back is fit for the work.” “But I was under contract.” “No one can serve two masters.” If you wish to be the Lord's disciple, you must take up your cross and follow the Lord: that is, your hardships and tortures, or at least your body, which is shaped like a cross. Parents, wives, and children will have to be left for God's sake. Do you hesitate about arts and trades and professions, even for the sake of children and parents? It was shown to us long ago that dear ones, crafts, and business are to be abandoned for the Lord's sake, when James and John, called by the Lord, left their father and their boat; when Matthew was roused from the tax booth; when even burying a father was too slow for faith. None of those whom the Lord chose said, “I have nothing to live on.” Faith does not fear hunger. It knows that hunger too is to be despised for God's sake no less than every kind of death. It has learned not to regard life; how much less food? How few have fulfilled these things! But what is hard with men is easy with God. Yet let us not so flatter ourselves on the gentleness and mercy of God as to make concessions to necessity even to the point of kinship with idolatry; but let us avoid its every breath like a plague, even from afar, not only in the things we have set out above, but in the whole range of human superstition, whether made over to their gods, or to the dead, or to kings, as belonging to the same unclean spirits: now through sacrifices and priesthoods, now through shows and the like, now through festival days.