[94] Such are the feasts of those whom men call happy. And so long as they confine their unseemly doings to houses or unconsecrated places, their sin seems less to me. But when their wickedness like a rushing torrent spreads over every place and invades and violates the most sacred temples, it straightway overturns all that is venerable in them, and as a result come sacrifices unholy, offerings unmeet, vows unfulfilled, their rites and mysteries a mockery, their piety but a bastard growth, their holiness debased, their purity impure, their truth falsehood, their worship a sacrilege.
[95] Furthermore they cleanse their bodies with lustrations and purifications, but they neither wish nor practise to wash off from their souls the passions by which life is defiled. They are zealous to go to the temples white-robed, attired in spotless raiment, but with a spotted heart they pass into the inmost sanctuary and are not ashamed.
[96] And if an animal be found to be blemished or imperfect, it is driven out of the consecrated precincts and not suffered to approach the altar, though it is through no will of its own that it has any of these bodily defects. But they themselves—their souls are a mass of wounds from the hideous maladies with which the irresistible power of vice has smitten them, or rather they are mutilated, docked of their noblest parts, prudence, courage to endure, justice, piety and all the other virtues of which human nature is capable. And though it is with free deliberate judgement that they have imbibed the mischief, yet they dare to handle the holy thing, and think that the eye of God sees nothing but the outer world through the co-operation of the sun. They do not know that He surveys the unseen even before the seen, for He Himself is His own light.
[97] For the eye of the Absolutely Existent needs no other light to effect perception, but He Himself is the archetypal essence of which myriads of rays are the effluence, none visible to sense, all to the mind. And therefore they are the instruments of that same God alone, who is apprehended by mind, not of any who have part and lot in the world of creation. For the created is approached by sense, which can never grasp the nature which is apprehended by mind.