ABSTRACT
AN extremely seductive, yet altogether baneful, permissiveness deceives many people in this unhappy age, so that they conform with the times and are more remiss in their conduct. They do not live as ascetically or keep up standards as it was once laid down by our fathers that they should.‘ The world is more subtle,’ they say, ‘and harsher trials are presented to frail man.’ So from arguments like these schools of serpents are set up in paradise, as though they would be safer in all desired prosperity than in that testing and castigation of the just in which virtue is made perfect; or as if they might attain to a greater measure of peace in the state, when they perform their humble devotions in church with greater laxity.
