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| The Principle of the Reckoning.
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8.
The Principle of the Reckoning.
But you will here inquire whether all men can be called
servants of the king, or some are servants whom he foreknew and
fore-ordained, while there are others who transact business with the
servants, and are called bankers.6088
And in
like manner you will inquire if there are those outside the number of
the slaves from whom the householder declares that he will exact his
own with usury, not only men alien from piety, but also some of the
believers. Now the servants alone are the stewards of the Word,
but the king, making a reckoning with the servants, demands from those
who have borrowed from the servants, whether a hundred measures of
wheat or a hundred measures of oil,6089
or whatever in
point of fact those who are outside of the household of the king have
received; for he who owed the hundred measures of wheat or the hundred
measures of oil is not found to be, according to the parable, a
fellow-servant of the unjust steward, as is evident from the
question—how much owest thou to my lord?6090
But mark with me that each deed which
is good or seemly is like a gain and an increment, but a wicked deed is
like a loss; and as there is a certain gain when the money is greater
and another when it is less, and as there are differences of more or
less, so according to the good deeds, there is as it were a valuing of
gains more or less. To reckon what work is a great gain, and what
a less gain, and what a least, is the prerogative of him who alone
knows to investigate such things, looking at them in the light of the
disposition, and the word, and the deed, and from consideration of the
things which are not in our power cooperating with those that are; and
so also in the case of things opposite, it is his to say what sin, when
a reckoning is made with the servants, is found to be a great loss, and
what is less, and what, if we may so call it, is the loss of the very
last mite,6091
or the last
farthing.6092
The account,
therefore, of the entire and whole life is exacted by that which is
called the kingdom of heaven which is likened to a king, when “we
must all stand before the judgment-sent of Christ that each one may
receive the things done in the body according to what he hath done,
whether good or bad;”6093
and then when the
reckoning is being made, shall there be brought into the reckoning that
is made also every idle word that men shall speak,6094
and any cup of cold water only which one has
given to drink in the name of a disciple.6095
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