30 Do not follow your base desires, but restrain your appetites. 31 If you allow your soul to take pleasure in base desire, it will make you the laughingstock of your enemies. 32 Do not revel in great luxury, or you may become impoverished by its expense. 33 Do not become a beggar by feasting with borrowed money, when you have nothing in your purse.

For those that are absorbed in pots, and exquisitely prepared niceties of condiments, are they not plainly abject, earth-born, leading an ephemeral kind of life, as if they were not to live [hereafter]? Those the Holy Spirit, by Isaiah, denounces as wretched, depriving them tacitly of the name of love (agape), since their feasting was not in accordance with the word. But they made mirth, killing calves, and sacrificing sheep, saying, Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die. And that He reckons such luxury to be sin, is shown by what He adds, And your sin shall not be forgiven you till you die — not conveying the idea that death, which deprives of sensation, is the forgiveness of sin, but meaning that death of salvation which is the recompense of sin. Take no pleasure in abominable delicacies, says Wisdom. At this point, too, we have to advert to what are called things sacrificed to idols, in order to show how we are enjoined to abstain from them. Polluted and abominable those things seem to me, to the blood of which, fly Souls from Erebus of inanimate corpses.