Worthy Eucharist; smash high places; do not copy nations’ rites

I think, is what wise Paul also said, that ‘The one eating and drinking the body and blood of Christ unworthily eats and drinks judgment to himself, not discerning the Lord’s body. Yet let a human test himself,’ he says, ‘and then eat from the bread, and drink from the cup;’ The partaking of the holy mysteries will therefore be unto blessing, he says, for those at least who are truly most God-loving. And they will be freed from softening—that is, from being ready to be sick with what is by nature unjust, and carrying off unto unmanliness; yet neither will there be barren among them, he says, nor sterile. For every God-loving and holy soul is most fertile, and leafy with holy fruits—I mean again the boasts from virtue.

Palladius: So it is.

Cyril: And not allowing to have the heart easy to shake, he skillfully turns us toward needing to choose what stands firm unto faith, and securely unto piety; for sometimes educating by fitting reasonings unto the better, he commands to be eager away from—or rather to turn away altogether, as procurer of ruin—the sacrificing to idols or worshiping, showing such a sickness full of the last slander, or rather of the highest impiety; and sometimes also setting fear—I mean that of being punished—as it were some pedagogue and noble guard for us, he turns us from every side unto what pleases him. And indeed in Deuteronomy blessed Moses says: ‘And these are the ordinances and the judgments which you will keep to do upon the land which the Lord the God of your fathers gives you in a lot all the days which you live upon the earth. With destruction you will destroy all the places in which the nations served their gods there, whom you inherit, upon the high mountains, and upon the dunes, and under a leafy tree. And you will dig down their altars, and smash their steles, and cut out their groves, and the carved things of their gods you will burn with fire, and you will destroy their name from that place.’ The wise and select of Greeks, and poets especially, name some mountain-nymphs and tree-nymphs, or demons. And there are those who having chosen to honor the gods beside themselves with the heights according to place, setting altars on mountains, were eager to sacrifice oxen, and having settled around the more well-grown of the trees groves and images of demons, were using sheep-slaughters. Yet it was necessary that those come to be under God who is according to truth and by nature, dreading nothing, shake down the playthings of the wanderers, and go as far as possible from the customs beside those ones. Therefore he says again: ‘And if the Lord your God should wipe out the nations unto whom you go there to inherit their land, from your face, and you should inherit them, and settle in their land, take heed to yourself, lest you seek to follow along with them after they have been wiped out from your face; you will not seek their gods, saying, How do these nations do to their