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| Our Love of the Righteous is Kindled from Love Itself of the Unchangeable Form of Righteousness.
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Chapter 9.—Our Love of the Righteous is Kindled from
Love Itself of the Unchangeable Form of Righteousness.
13. For why is it, pray, that we
burn when we hear and read, “Behold, now is the accepted time;
behold, now is the day of salvation: giving no offense in anything,
that the ministry be not blamed: but in all things approving
ourselves as the ministers of God, in much patience, in
afflictions, in necessities, in distresses, in stripes, in
imprisonments, in tumults, in labors, in watchings, in fastings; by
pureness, by knowledge, by long-suffering, by kindness, by the Holy
Ghost, by love unfeigned, by the word of truth, by the power of
God, by the armor of righteousness on the right hand and on the
left, by honor and dishonor, by evil report and good report: as
deceivers, and yet true; as unknown, and yet well known; as dying,
and, behold, we live; as chastened, and not killed; as sorrowful,
yet alway rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having
nothing, and yet possessing all things?”695
Why is it that we are inflamed with
love of the Apostle Paul, when we read these things, unless that we
believe him so to have lived? But we do not believe that the
ministers of God ought so to live because we have heard it from any
one, but because we behold it inwardly within ourselves, or rather
above ourselves, in the truth itself. Him, therefore, whom we
believe to have so lived, we love for that which we see. And except
we loved above all else that form which we discern as always
steadfast and unchangeable, we should not for that reason love him,
because we hold fast in our belief that his life, when he was
living in the flesh, was adapted to, and in harmony with, this
form. But somehow we are stirred up the more to the love of this
form itself, through the belief by which we believe some one to
have so lived; and to the hope by which we no more at all despair,
that we, too, are able so to live; we who are men, from this fact
itself, that some men have so lived, so that we both desire this
more ardently, and pray for it more confidently. So both the love
of that form, according to which they are believed to have lived,
makes the life of these men themselves to be loved by us; and their
life thus believed stirs up a more burning love towards that same
form; so that the more ardently we love God, the more certainly and
the more calmly do we see Him, because we behold in God the
unchangeable form of righteousness, according to which we judge
that man ought to live. Therefore faith avails to the knowledge and
to the love of God, not as though of one altogether unknown, or
altogether not loved; but so that thereby He may be known more
clearly, and loved more steadfastly.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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