Teaching Christianity
iniquity, you that sleep on beds of ivory, you that sport wantonly on your quilts, you that eat lamb from the flock, you that eat veal from the midst of the herd." If it were said like that, it would indeed be very fine, with all six clauses flowing along from the one pronominal phrase repeated each time, and each indicated by the reciter's inflection. But it has turned out much finer, with their being connected to the same pronoun in pairs, and so unfolding themselves in three sentences; one concerned with foretelling the captivity: You that have been set apart for the evil day, and are drawing near to the throne of iniquity; the next with lechery: Who sleep on beds of ivory, and sport wantonly on your quilts; while the third is concerned with gluttony: Who eat, he says, lamb from the flock, and veal from the midst of the herd. Thus it remains the reciter's choice whether to make six clauses by closing each one, or whether to raise his voice slightly at the first and third and fifth, and by threading the second onto the first, the fourth onto the third and the sixth onto the fifth, to make three of the neatest two-clause periods —one pointing to the imminent catastrophe, the next to the unchaste bed, the third to the wastefully lavish table.
19. Next he savages the self-indulgent pleasure of the ears.[23] Now music can be wisely engaged in by the wise; so after saying, Who sing to the voice of the psaltery, with a marvelous, beautiful finesse he eased off the violence of his invective, and went on now to speak not to them but about them, as a reminder to us to distinguish between a wise man's music and that of a self-indulgent man. So he did not say, "who sing to the voice of the psaltery, and imagine you have instruments of song like David"; but first he told them what the self-indulgent needed to hear: Who sing to the voice of the psaltery; and then, to point out somehow to others their ignorant vulgarity, he added, They imagined they had instruments of song like David, drinking wine in goblets, and smearing themselves with the finest ointments. These three