Clement of Alexandria · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Embracing, then, all the more this good obedience, let us give ourselves over to the Lord, having made fast to the surest cable of his faith, grasping that excellence in a man and excellence in a woman come to one and the same thing. For if God is one for both, one too is the tutor of both. One church, one temperance, one modesty; their nourishment is common, marriage is a yoking-together; breathing, seeing, hearing, knowing, hoping, obeying, loving — every one of these shared alike. And for those whose life is common, whose grace is common, whose salvation too is common, common also is their virtue and their training. "In the present age," he states, "people take husbands and take wives" — since only in the present age is the female set apart from the male — "but no longer once that age arrives," where the rewards belonging to this shared and consecrated way of living born of marriage are stored up not on account of being male or being female, but for the human being, once freed from the craving that splits him in two. Common, then, is the very name for men and women: human being. It is for this reason, I think, that the Attic writers called "paidarion" (child) in common use not the male only but the female as well, if the comic poet Menander is to be trusted by anyone here, speaking somewhat thus in the Rhapizomene: "my little daughter . . . for the child is by nature altogether humane." So too "lambs" is a name applied in common, out of plainness, to both the male and the female of that creature. And the Lord himself "shepherds us" unto the ages, amen. "Without a shepherd neither sheep nor anything else at all can yet be lived, nor indeed children without their tutor, nor servants without their master."
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