pleasures here on earth? This first and that after! Why Should God have
bestowed on us the gifts of the flesh if not that we may use them?
Beauty and strength are not empty trifles, and none but a fool gives
noble gifts to another, only in order to throw them away."

Paulus gazed in astonishment at the youth, who up to this moment had
always unresistingly obeyed his father and him, and he shook his head as
he answered,

"So think the children of this world who stand far from the Most High.
In the image of God are we made no doubt, but what child would kiss the
image of his father, when the father offers him his own living lips?"

Paulus had meant to say 'mother' instead of 'father,' but he remembered
in time that Hermas had early lost the happiness of caressing a mother,
and he had hastily amended the phrase. He was one of those to whom it is
so painful to hurt another, that they never touch a wounded soul unless
to heal it, divining the seat of even the most hidden pain.

He was accustomed to speak but little, but now he went on eagerly:

"By so much as God is far above our miserable selves, by so much is the
contemplation of Him worthier of the Christian than that of his own
person. Oh! who is indeed so happy as to have wholly lost that self and
to be perfectly absorbed in God! But it pursues us, and when the soul
fondly thinks itself already blended in union with the Most High it cries
out 'Here am I!' and drags our nobler part down again into the dust. It
is bad enough that we must hinder the flight of the soul, and are forced
to nourish and strengthen the perishable part of our being with bread and
water and slothful sleep to the injury of the immortal part, however much