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Translated by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson.
Clement of Alexandria in Print
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This Part: 134 Pages
Page 73
And though maintaining parrots and curlews, they do not receive the orphan child; [1623] but they expose children that are born at home, and take up the young of birds, and prefer irrational to rational creatures; although they ought to undertake the maintenance of old people with a character for sobriety, who are fairer in my mind than apes, and capable of uttering something better than nightingales; and to set before them that saying, "He that pitieth the poor lendeth to the Lord;" [1624] and this, "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these My brethren, ye have done it to Me." [1625] But these, on the other hand, prefer ignorance to wisdom, turning their wealth into stone, that is, into pearls and Indian emeralds. And they squander and throw away their wealth on fading dyes, and bought slaves; like crammed fowls scraping the dung of life. "Poverty," it is said, "humbles a man." [1626] By poverty is meant that niggardliness by which the rich are poor, having nothing to give away.
[1623] [The wasting on pet dogs, pups, and other animals, expense and pains which might help an orphan child, is a sin not yet uprooted. Here Clement's plea for widows, orphans, and aged men, prepares the way for Christian institutions in behalf of these classes. The same arguments should prevail with Christians in America.] [Elpenor's note: God did not make animals in order for us to ignore them. It is not our care for animals that makes us ignore an orphan, on the contrary! The less we care for orphans, the less we care for any living creature and all nature. The problem is our will to money and power, not our caring for pets. The fact that there exist some exceptions to this rule, people who indeed are more devoted to a pet than to a neighboor or an orphan, should not make us blind to the rule, that the more we become sensitive and faithful, the more we care for all.]
[1624] Prov. xix. 17.
[1625] Matt. xxv. 40.
[1626] Prov. x. 4.
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