Leaving Lighter Vices Alone to Remove Graver Ones

When the sickness of two vices attacks a man, one may press on him lightly and the other perhaps more heavily. It is surely right to hurry to the help of the one through which he is tending more quickly toward death. And if the one cannot be kept from causing the death that threatens unless the other, its opposite, increases, the preacher must be content, by skillful management in his exhortation, to let the one increase, so that he may keep the other from causing the death that threatens. When he does this, he does not make the disease worse; he preserves the life of the sufferer to whom he gives the medicine, so that he may find a fitting time to look for the means of recovery. For there is often someone who puts no restraint on his gluttony in food and is soon pressed hard by the stings of lust, which is on the point of overcoming him. When, terrified by the fear of this struggle, he tries to restrain himself through abstinence, he is harassed by the temptation of empty glory. In such a case, certainly, one vice is in no way put out unless the other is fed. Which plague, then, should be attacked more ardently, if not the one that presses on the man more dangerously? For it is to be tolerated that, through the virtue of abstinence, arrogance should grow for a while in one who is still alive, rather than that lust, through gluttony, should cut him off from life entirely. [a]

That is why Paul, when he considered that his weak hearer would either go on doing evil or rejoice in the reward of human praise for doing good, said, “Do you want to be free from fear of the power? Do what is good, and you will have praise from it.” For good things are not to be done so that no human power may be feared, or so that the glory of passing praise may be won by them. But since the excellent preacher saw that the weak soul could not rise to such strength as to shun both wickedness and praise at the same time, in his admonition he offered something and took something away. For by allowing milder ailments he drew off sharper ones; so that, since the mind could not rise all at once to letting go of all its vices, it might, while still left on familiar terms with one of them, be drawn away without difficulty from another.