Ambrose of Milan : Let your people not desire many things, for the reason that few things are many to them. Poverty and riches are names that imply want and satiety. He is not rich who wants anything, nor poor who does not want. Let no one spurn a widow or cheat an orphan or defraud his neighbor. Woe to him who has a fortune amassed by deceit and builds in blood a city, in other words, his soul. For it is this that is built like a city. Greed does not build it but sets it on fire and burns it. Do you wish to build your city well? "Better is a little with the fear of the Lord than great treasures without fear." The riches of a person ought to work for the redemption of his soul, not to its destruction. Wealth is redemption if one uses it well; so too it is a snare if one does not know how to use it. For what is a person's money if not provision for the journey? — LETTER 15 Cyril of Alexandria : As for the inventors of impure heresies, those profaners and apostates who have opened their mouths wide against the divine glory, "those who have uttered perverted things," we could accuse them of having slipped in their madness as low as the foolish pagans. [They have slipped] perhaps even lower, for it would have been better never to have known it than to have turned away from the sacred commandment which was handed on to them. What the book of Proverbs so rightly speaks of has indeed come about: "that the dog has returned to its vomit, and no sooner has it washed than the pig returns to wallow in the slime." They have circulated among themselves blasphemous accusations against Christ and like wild, ferocious wolves ravage the flock for which Christ died. They pillage what is his very own, "bloating themselves on what is not theirs," as it is written, and "stuffing their gorge to the full." How aptly does that saying apply to them, that "they came out from us but were not part of us." — ON THE UNITY OF CHRIST