Chapter I.
What diversity there ought to be in the art of
preaching.
Differently to be admonished are these that
follow:—
Men and women.
The poor and the rich.
The joyful and the sad.
Prelates and subordinates.
Servants and masters.
The wise of this world and the dull.
The impudent and the bashful.
The forward and the fainthearted.
The impatient and the patient.
The kindly disposed and the envious.
The simple and the insincere.
The whole and the sick.
Those who fear scourges, and therefore live innocently;
and those who have grown so hard in iniquity as not to be corrected
even by scourges.
The too silent, and those who spend time in much
speaking.
The slothful and the hasty.
The meek and the passionate.
The humble and the haughty.
The obstinate and the fickle.
The gluttonous and the abstinent.
Those who mercifully give of their own, and those who
would fain seize what belongs to others.
Those who neither seize the things of others nor are
bountiful with their own; and those who both give away the things they
have, and yet cease not to seize the things of others.
Those that are at variance, and those that are at
peace.
Lovers of strifes and peacemakers.
Those that understand not aright the words of sacred
law; and those who understand them indeed aright, but speak them
without humility.
Those who, though able to preach worthily, are afraid
through excessive humility; and those whom imperfection or age debars
from preaching, and yet rashness impels to it.
Those who prosper in what they desire in temporal
matters; and those who covet indeed the things that are of the world,
and yet are wearied with the toils of adversity.
Those who are bound by wedlock, and those who are free
from the ties of wedlock.
Those who have had experience of carnal intercourse, and
those who are ignorant of it.
Those who deplore sins of deed, and those who deplore
sins of thought.
Those who bewail misdeeds, yet forsake them not; and
those who forsake them, yet bewail them not.
Those who even praise the unlawful things they do; and
those who censure what is wrong, yet avoid it not.
Those who are overcome by sudden passion, and those who
are bound in guilt of set purpose.
Those who, though
their unlawful deeds are trivial, yet do them frequently; and those who
keep themselves from small sins, but are occasionally whelmed in graver
ones.
Those who do not even begin what is good, and those who
fail entirely to complete the good begun.
Those who do evil secretly and good publicly; and those
who conceal the good they do, and yet in some things done publicly
allow evil to be thought of them.
But of what profit is it for us to run through all these
things collected together in a list, unless we also set forth, with all
possible brevity, the modes of admonition for each?
(
Admonition
1.) Differently, then, to
be admonished are men and women; because on the former heavier
injunctions, on the latter lighter are to be laid, that those may be
exercised by great things, but these winningly converted by light
ones.
(
Admonition
2.) Differently to be
admonished are young men and old; because for the most part severity of
admonition directs the former to improvement, while kind remonstrance
disposes the latter to better deeds. For it is written,
Rebuke
not an elder, but entreat him as a father
(
1 Tim. v. 1
).>