Dead Souls

Vides fratrem indigna patientera, nihil commouetur animus, modo tua res sit incolumis. Cur nihil hic sentit anima? Nempe quia mortua. Quare mortua? Quia non adest illius uita, deus. Siquidem ubi deus, ibi caritas. Deus enim caritas est. Alioqui si uiuam es membrum, cur ulla pars corporis dolet te non modo non dolente uerum ne sentiente quidem? Accipe signum non paulo etiam certius: Defraudasti amicum, commisisti adulterium, capitale uulnus accepit anima, et tamen adeo tibi non dolet, ut etiam quasi de lucro gaudeas iactesque, quod turpiter admisisti. Certum habe mortuam iacere animam. Non uiuit corpus, si punctionem aciculae non sentiat, et uiuet anima, quae tanti uulneris sensu uacat? Audis quempiam sermones impios, tumidos, maledicos, impudicos, obscoenos proferentem, uerbis rabiosis in proximum debacchantem, caue putes isti homini uiuam esse animam. lacet in sepulcro pectoris putre cadauer, unde eiusmodi foetores exhalantur et proximum quemque inficiunt. Christus Pharisaeos sepulcra dealbata uocat. Quid ita? Nempe quia mortuam animam secum circumferebant. Et regius ille propheta: Sepulcrum, inquit, patens guttur eorum, linguis suis dolose agebant. Piorum corpora templa sunt spiritus sancti, impiorum sepulcra cadauerum, ut potissimum in eos quadret illa grammaticorum etymologia: soma quasi sèma. Sepulcrum pectus, guttur et os hiatus sepulcri. Neque ullum corpus tam mortuam est destitutum anima, quam mortua est anima relicta a deo. Enchiridion Militis Christiani, Desiderius Erasmus

You see your brother suffering disgrace, your soul is not troubled, you are uninjured. Why does the soul feel nothing here? Certainly because it is dead. Why dead? Because its life is not present, that is, God.  Where God is, there is love. God is love. If you were a living member, how could any part of your body ache and you not sense the pain? Take a more certain sign. You deceived a friend, you committed adultery, your soul has received a fatal wound, and yet you feel no pain; indeed you are happy as if you have made a profit, and you boast of what you have shamefully done. For certain your soul lies dead. A body is not alive if it does not feel the pricking of a pin, and is a soul alive which has no feeling of such a wound? You hear evil speech, malevolent, perverted, filthy, words raging wildly against a neighbour: think not the soul of that man to be alive. There lies a corpse in the sepulchre from whence such stench rises that it infects any man who comes near. Christ called the Pharisees whitened sepulchres. Why so? Because they carry dead souls about with them. And that prophetic king said, Their throat is an open sepulchre, since they spoke deceitfully with their tongues. The bodies of the good are temples of the Holy Ghost; the bodies of the wicked are the tombs of corpses, that it might be as the etymology of the grammarians say, σῶμα quasi σῆμα. The breast is the sepulchre, the throat is the gaping of the sepulchre. And yet that body deprived of the soul is not so dead as is the soul forsaken by God. Handbook of the Christian Soldier, Desiderius Erasmus