He knew well how to hold his listeners by the versatility of his spirit and his ability to handle words. His language comprises, now weighty sentences, now popular and taking comparisons. He speaks, when he is so inclined, in the popular and forcible style he employs at a later date; he borrows from the lips of the populace sayings of unexampled coarseness with which he spices his harangues, more especially with a view to emphasising his attitude to his opponents. We may be permitted to quote one such passage in which he is speaking against those who hold themselves to be pure: “I look on them as the biggest fools, who want to forget how deeply they stick in the mire.... Did you never ... in your mother’s lap, and was not the smell evil? Is your perfume always so sweet? Is there nothing about your whole person which has an unpleasant odour? If you are so clean, I am surprised that the apothecaries have not long ago got hold of you to use you in making their balsams, for surely you must reek of balm. Yet had your mother left you as you are and were, you would have perished in your own filth.”[641] Immediately after this he proceeds with a more pleasing thought: “Truly to please oneself, one must be utterly displeased with self. No one can please himself and others at the same time.” He is fond of startling antitheses and frequently loses himself in paradoxes. “God has concealed righteousness under sin, goodness under severity, mercy under anger.”[642] “He who does not think he is righteous, is for that very reason righteous before God.” “To be sinners does not harm us, if we only strive earnestly for justification.”[643] It may serve to give a better idea of the exegetical value of the whole work, and thereby increase our knowledge of its author, if we consider some of the other peculiarities which permeate it.