God has such great concern, such great love, such great desire that we be put to death in the body but quickened in the spirit, that he has commanded [us] to preach the Gospel, the word of faith, to those also who are implicated in greater crimes and justifiably must be accounted among the dead, namely, because of their self-indulgence, desires, insobriety, gluttony, drunkenness and unlawful worship of idols, since even they, when they have passed judgment on, that is, rejected and put aside, their bodily desires, may be alive spiritually and may look for eternal life together with those whom the grace of the Gospel finds living innocently.
[Bede the Venerable, Commentary on the Seven Catholic Epistles, Hurst, tr. Cistercian Publications (Kalamzoo, MI: 1985) p. 109.]
