Discourses: Book 2 8 : 2

Again, when we send a young man forth from the school to sundry activities, why are we afraid that he will do something amiss—eat amiss, have intercourse with women amiss, be abased if dressed in rags or conceited if he has on fine clothes? This fellow does not know the God within him, this fellow does not know the companion with whom he is setting forth. Nay, can we allow him to say, "O God, would that I had Thee here"? Have you not God there, where you are? And when you have Him, do you seek for someone else? Or will He have other commands for you than these? Nay, if you were a statue of Pheidias, his Athena or his Zeus, you would have remembered both yourself and your artificer, and if you had any power of perception you would have tried to do nothing unworthy of him that had fashioned you, nor of yourself, and you would have tried not to appear in an unbecoming attitude before the eyes of men; but as it is, because Zeus has made you, do you on that account not care what manner of person you show yourself to be? And yet what comparison is there between the one artificer and the other, or between the one work of art and the other? And what work of an artificer has forthwith within itself the faculties which its workmanship discloses? Is it not mere stone, or bronze, or gold, or ivory? And the Athena of Pheidias, when once it had stretched out its hand and received the Nike upon it, stands in this attitude for all time to come; but the works of God are capable of movement, have the breath of life, can make use of external impressions, and pass judgement upon them. Do you dishonour the workmanship of this Craftsman, when you are yourself that workmanship? Nay more, do you go so far as to forget, not only that He fashioned you, but also that He entrusted and committed you to yourself alone, and moreover, by forgetting, do you dishonour your trust? Yet if God had committed some orphan to your care, would you so neglect Him? He has delivered your own self into your keeping, saying, "I had no one more faithful than you; keep this man for me unchanged from the character with which nature endowed him—reverent, faithful, high-minded, undismayed, unimpassioned, unperturbed." After that do you fail so to keep him?