Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
By this one governing precept the whole discipline of patience is cinched tight, since it is not even permitted to do evil by way of just deserts. Now, as we run through the causes of impatience one by one, the rest of the precepts will fall into line, each in its place. If the mind is stirred up by loss of household property, scripture warns us in almost every passage to hold the world in contempt, and no exhortation to despise money lies more ready to hand than this: that the Lord himself is found among no riches at all. He always vindicates the poor, and condemns the rich in advance. Thus he trained impatience over losses to disdain wealth beforehand, showing by his own rejection of riches that their loss too need not be counted a wound. What we have no business coveting in the first place — since the Lord did not covet it — we ought not to take hard when it is docked or even stripped from us entirely. The spirit of the Lord pronounced through the apostle that covetousness is the root of all evils: let us not construe that as meaning only the coveting of what belongs to another. For even what seems to be ours is another's — nothing is truly ours, seeing that everything belongs to God, and we ourselves belong to him too. So if, when hit by loss, we feel it with impatience, we shall be caught as kin to covetousness even while grieving over what was never truly our own: it is another's property we are chasing after, when we take hard the loss of another's property. Whoever is provoked to impatience by loss, ranking earthly things above heavenly, sins against God at close quarters: he shakes loose the very spirit he received from the Lord, for the sake of a worldly thing. Let us therefore willingly let earthly things go, and hold fast to heavenly ones; let the whole world perish, so long as I turn a profit in patience! And a man who has determined he cannot steadily bear the loss of some small thing, whether to theft, or force, or even his own carelessness — I doubt whether he could easily, or from the heart, lay his own hand to his own property in the matter of almsgiving. For who, unable to bear being cut by another at all, drives the knife into his own flesh himself? Patience in the face of loss is training in generosity and in sharing: the man who does not fear losing is not loath to give. Otherwise, how will the man with two tunics give one to the naked, unless he is the very man who can offer his cloak too to the one who steals his tunic? How shall we make friends for ourselves out of worldly wealth, if we love it so much that we cannot bear to lose it? We shall perish along with what is lost. What do we find here, where all we have is something to lose? It is the way of the pagans to meet every loss with impatience — pagans, who perhaps rank money above the soul itself. And indeed they show it, when for love of gain they run the risky, profit-hungry ventures of trade upon the sea, when for money's sake they do not hesitate to undertake in the courts things that carry the risk of condemnation, when finally they hire themselves out to the arena and the barracks, when along the roads, forgetting they are men, they turn robbers worse than beasts. But we, in keeping with the difference that sets us apart from them, ought to lay down money for the soul's sake, not the soul for money's sake — whether willingly, in giving, or patiently, in losing!