No doubt God showed how to boil wool in the juices of herbs and the slime of shellfish! It had slipped his mind, when He commanded all things to be born, to order purple and scarlet sheep! God devised the workshops of those very garments which, light and thin, are heavy only in price; God produced such great works of gold for clasping and setting little stones; God inflicted painstaking wounds on the ears, and thought so much of tormenting His own work and the torture of innocent infancy, then first feeling pain, that from those scars of a body born for the steel certain grains should hang, which the Parthians, indeed, set even in their boots in place of studs! And yet even gold itself, whose glory possesses you, serves one nation for chains, as the gentiles' writings report. So they are good not in truth but in rarity; and the labor brought in by the arts through the sinful angels, who also disclosed the materials themselves, joined to rarity, has excited costliness, and from it the lust of women to possess costliness. But if the same angels who disclosed both such materials and their allurements, I mean of gold and brilliant stones, and handed on the work on them, and taught among other things even eye-paint and the dyeing of fleeces, were condemned by God, as Enoch relates, how shall we please God rejoicing in the things of those who for this reason provoked God's anger and punishment?⁠a Now, granting that God foresaw these things, that God permitted them, that Isaiah finds fault with no purple garment, crushes no cluster-shaped ornament, rejects no little crescents, still we must not, like the gentiles, flatter ourselves, thinking God only the establisher of things and not also the one who looks down on how they are used. For how much more usefully and cautiously we shall act if we presume that all things were indeed provided by God and placed in the world then, so that there might now be things in which the discipline of His servants is tested, so that through the license to use them trials of continence might go forward. Do not wise heads of households deliberately offer and permit certain things to their slaves, to test whether and how they use what is permitted, whether honestly, whether moderately? And how much more praiseworthy is the one who abstains entirely, who fears even his master's indulgence! So, then, the apostle too says: “All things are lawful, but not all things are expedient.” How much more easily will one fear unlawful things who stands in awe of lawful ones?