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| To Those Who Had Invited Him, and Not Come to Receive Him.
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Oration III.
To Those Who Had Invited Him, and Not
Come to Receive Him.
(About Easter a.d. 362.)
I. How slow you
are, my friends and brethren, to come to listen to my words, though you
were so swift in tyrannizing over me, and tearing me from my Citadel
Solitude, which I had embraced in preference to everything
else, and as coadjutress and
mother of the divine ascent, and as deifying man,2920
I had especially admired, and had set before
me as the guide of my whole life.2921
| 2921 The passage might also
be rendered “had preferred to every other kind of
life.” | How is
it that, now you have got it, you thus despise what you so greatly
desired to obtain, and seem to be better able to desire the absent than
to enjoy the present; as though you preferred to possess my
teaching rather than to profit by it? Yes, I may even say
this to you: “I became a surfeit unto you before you tasted
of me, or gave me a trial”2922
—which is
most strange.
II. And neither did you entertain me as a guest,
nor, if I may make a remark of a more compassionate kind, did you allow
yourselves to be entertained by me, reverencing this command if nothing
else; nor did you take me by the hand, as beginning a new task; nor
encourage me in my timidity, nor console me for the violence I had
suffered; but—I shrink from saying it, though say it I
must—you made my festival no festival, and received me with no
happy introduction; and you mingled the solemn festival with sorrow,
because it lacked that which most of all would have contributed to its
happiness, the presence of you my conquerors, for it would not be true
to call you people who love me. So easily is anything despised
which is easily conquered, and the proud receives attention, while he
who is humble before God is slighted.
III. What will ye? Shall I be judged by you,
or shall I be your judge? Shall I pass a verdict, or receive one,
for I hope to be acquitted if I be judged, and if I give sentence, to
give it against you justly? The charge against you is that you do
not answer my love with equal measure, nor do you repay my obedience
with honour, nor do you pledge the future to me by your present
alacrity—though even if you had, I could hardly have believed
it. But each of you has something which he prefers to both the
old and the new Pastor, neither reverencing the grey hairs of the one,
nor calling out the youthful spirit of the other.
IV. There is a Banquet in the
Gospels,2923
and a hospitable
Host and friends; and the Banquet is most pleasant, for it is the
marriage of His Son. He calleth them, but they come not: He
is angry, and—I pass over the interval for fear of bad
omen—but, to speak gently, He filleth the Banquet with
others. God forbid that this should be your case; but yet you
have treated me (how shall I put it gently?) with as much haughtiness
or boldness as they who after being called to a feast rise up against
it, and insult their host; for you, though you are not of the number of
those who are without, or are invited to the marriage, but are
yourselves those who invited me, and bound me to the Holy Table, and
shewed me the glory of the Bridal Chamber, then deserted me (this is
the most splendid thing about you)—one to his field, another to
his newly bought yoke of oxen, another to his just-married wife,
another to some other trifling matter; you were all scattered and
dispersed, caring little for the Bridechamber and the
Bridegroom.2924
V. On this account I was filled with despondency
and perplexity—for I will not keep silence about what I have
suffered—and I was very near withholding the discourse which I
was minded to bestow as a Marriage-gift, the most beautiful and
precious of all I had; and I very nearly let it loose upon you, whom,
now that the violence had once been done to me, I greatly longed
for: for I thought I could get from this a splendid theme, and
because my love sharpened my tongue—love which is very hot and
ready for accusation when it is stirred to jealousy by grief which it
conceives from some unexpected neglect. If any of you has been
pierced with love’s sting, and has felt himself neglected, he
knows the feeling, and will pardon one who so suffers, because he
himself has been near the same frenzy.
VI. But it is not permitted to me at the
present time to say to you anything upbraiding; and God forbid I ever
should. And even now perhaps I have reproached you more than in
due measure, the Sacred Flock, the praise-worthy nurselings of Christ,
the Divine inheritance; by which, O God, Thou art rich, even wert Thou
poor in all other respects. To Thee, I think, are fitting those
words, “The lot is fallen unto Thee in a fair ground: yea
Thou hast the goodliest heritage.”2925
Nor will I allow that the most
populous cities or the broadest flocks have any advantage over us, the
little ones of the smallest of all the tribes of Israel, of the least
of the thousands of Judah,2926
of the little
Bethlehem among cities,2927
where Christ was
born and is from the beginning well-known and worshipped; amongst those whom the Father is
exalted, and the Son is held to be equal to Him, and the Holy Ghost is
glorified with Them: we who are of one soul, who mind the same
thing, who in nothing injure the Trinity, neither by preferring One
Person above another, nor by cutting off any: as those bad
umpires and measurers of the Godhead do, who by magnifying One Person
more than is fit, diminish and insult the whole.
VII. But do ye also, if you bear me any good
will—ye who are my husbandry, my vineyard, my own bowels, or
rather His Who is our common Father, for in Christ he hath begotten you
through the Gospels2928
—shew to us
also some respect. It is only fair, since we have honoured you
above all else: ye are my witnesses, ye, and they who have placed
in our hands this—shall I say Authority, or
Service? And if to him that loveth most is due, how shall
I measure the love, for which I have made you my debtors by my own
love? Rather, shew respect for yourselves, and the Image
committed to your care,2929
and Him Who
committed it, and the Sufferings of Christ, and your hopes therefrom,
holding fast the faith which ye have received, and in which ye were
brought up, by which also ye are being saved, and trust to save others
(for not many, be well assured, can boast of what you can), and
reckoning piety to consist, not in often speaking about God, but in
silence for the most part, for the tongue is a dangerous thing to men,
if it be not governed by reason. Believe that listening is always
less dangerous than talking, just as learning about God is more
pleasant than teaching. Leave the more accurate search into these
questions to those who are the Stewards of the Word; and for
yourselves, worship a little in words, but more by your actions, and
rather by keeping the Law than by admiring the Lawgiver; shew your love
for Him by fleeing from wickedness, pursuing after virtue, living in
the Spirit, walking in the Spirit, drawing your knowledge from Him,
building upon the foundation of the faith, not wood or hay or
stubble,2930
weak materials and
easily spent when the fire shall try our works or destroy them; but
gold, silver, precious stones, which remain and stand.
VIII. So may ye act, and so may ye honour
us, whether present or absent, whether taking your part in our sermons,
or preferring to do something else: and may ye be the children of
God, pure and unblamable, in the midst of a crooked and perverse
generation:2931
and may ye
never be entangled in the snares of the wicked that go round about, or
bound with the chain of your sins. May the Word in you never be
smothered with cares of this life and so ye become unfruitful:
but may ye walk in the King’s Highway, turning aside neither to
the right hand nor to the left,2932
but led by the
Spirit through the strait gate. Then all our affairs shall
prosper, both now and at the inquest There, in Christ Jesus our Lord,
to Whom be the glory for ever. Amen.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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