Against Celsus 3.51

But if those men are not blameworthy for doing this, let us see whether Christians do not summon the multitudes to nobility of character even more, and better, than they. For the philosophers who converse in public do not sort their hearers; whoever wishes stands and listens. But Christians, as far as they can, first test the souls of those who want to hear them and first instruct them privately; and when the hearers, before entering the community, seem to have made sufficient progress in the will to live well, then they bring them in, forming one order apart of those just beginning and being introduced who have not yet received the sign of having been purified, and another of those who, as far as they can, have shown that their purpose is to want nothing other than what Christians approve. Among them some are appointed to inquire into the lives and conduct of those who come, so as to prevent those who do disreputable things from coming to their common assembly, but to welcome with all their soul those who are not such and make them better day by day. And such is their discipline toward sinners, and especially the licentious, whom they drive out of the community, these people whom Celsus likens to those who put on the most disreputable shows in the marketplaces! The revered school of the Pythagoreans used to build cenotaphs for those who had abandoned their philosophy, reckoning them to have become dead; but these mourn as dead those overcome by licentiousness or some other outrage, as lost and dead to God. And if they show a notable change, they receive them again later, as risen from the dead, after a longer time than those who are first being introduced; but they do not enroll in any office or leadership of what is called the church of God those who, after coming to the word, have fallen.