3. Nor do they attend to this,
that if another should say, that the Lord indeed, speaking in
parables and in similitudes concerning spiritual food and clothing,
did warn that not on these accounts should His servants be
solicitous; (as He saith, “When they shall drag you to
judgment-seats, take no thought what ye shall speak. For it will be
given you in that hour what ye shall speak: but it is not ye that
speak, but the Spirit of your Father that speaketh in you.”2479
For the
discourse of
spiritual wisdom is that for which He would not that
they should take thought, promising that it should be given unto
them, nothing solicitous thereof;) but the
Apostle now, in manner
Apostolical, more openly discoursing and more properly, than
figuratively speaking, as is the case with much, indeed well-nigh
all, in his Apostolic
Epistles, said it properly of corporal
work
and
food, “If any will not
work, neither let him eat:” by those
would their sentence be rendered doubtful, unless, considering the
other words of the
Lord, they should find somewhat whereby they
might
prove it to have been of not caring for corporal
food and
raiment that He spoke when He said, “Be not solicitous what ye
shall eat, or what ye shall drink, or wherewithal ye shall be
clothed.” As, if they should observe what He saith, “For all
these things do the Gentiles
seek;” for there He shows that it
was of very corporal and temporal things that He spake. So then,
were this the only thing that the
Apostle has said on this subject,
“If any will not
work, neither let him eat;” these words might
be drawn over to another meaning: but since in many other
places of his
Epistles, what is his
mind on this point, he most
openly
teaches, they superfluously essay to raise a mist before
themselves and others, that what that charity adviseth they may not
only refuse to do, but even to understand it themselves, or let it
be understood by others; not fearing that which is written, “He
would not understand that he might do good.”
2480
| 2480 Ps. xxxvi. 3, (35,
4.) “noluit intelligere ut bene
ageret.” |
E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
