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| The Power of This Twofold Patience, the Spiritual and the Bodily. Exemplified in the Saints of Old.
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Chapter XIV.—The Power of This Twofold Patience, the
Spiritual and the Bodily. Exemplified in the Saints of Old.
With this strength of patience, Esaias is cut
asunder, and ceases not to speak concerning the Lord; Stephen is
stoned, and prays for pardon to his foes.9169
Oh, happy also he who met all the violence of the devil by the exertion
of every species of patience!9170
| 9170 Job. See Job i. and
ii. | —whom neither
the driving away of his cattle nor those riches of his in sheep, nor
the sweeping away of his children in one swoop of ruin, nor, finally,
the agony of his own body in (one universal) wound, estranged from the
patience and the faith which he had plighted to the Lord; whom the
devil smote with all his might in vain. For by all his pains he was not
drawn away from his reverence for God; but he has been set up as an
example and testimony to us, for the thorough accomplishment of
patience as well in spirit as in flesh, as well in mind as in body; in
order that we succumb neither to damages of our worldly goods, nor to
losses of those who are dearest, nor even to bodily afflictions.
What a bier9171
| 9171
“Feretrum”—for carrying trophies in a triumph, the
bodies of the dead, and their effigies, etc. | for the devil did
God erect in the person of that hero! What a banner did He rear over
the enemy of His glory, when, at every bitter message, that man uttered
nothing out of his mouth but thanks to God, while he denounced his
wife, now quite wearied with ills, and urging him to resort to crooked
remedies! How did God smile,9172
how was the evil
one cut asunder,9173
| 9173 i.e. with rage and
disappointment. | while Job with
mighty equanimity kept scraping off9174
the unclean
overflow of his own ulcer, while he sportively replaced the vermin that
brake out thence, in the same caves and feeding-places of his pitted
flesh! And so, when all the darts of temptations had blunted themselves
against the corslet and shield of his patience, that
instrument9175
of God’s
victory not only presently recovered from God the soundness of his
body, but possessed in redoubled measure what he had lost. And if he
had wished to have his children also restored, he might again have been
called father; but he preferred to have them restored him “in
that day.”9176
| 9176 See 2 Tim. iv. 8. There is no authority for this
statement of Tertullian’s in Scripture. [It is his inference
rather.] | Such joy as
that—secure so entirely concerning the Lord—he
deferred; meantime he endured a voluntary bereavement, that he might
not live without some (exercise of) patience.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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