On Patience

To us the authority for practising patience is delegated not by human affectation formed in the stupor of a canine equanimity, but by the divine disposition of a living and heavenly discipline, showing God himself as the example of patience. First of all, he who scatters the dew of this light equally upon the just and the unjust, who suffers the duties of the seasons, the services of the elements, the tributes of the whole creation to come to the worthy and the unworthy alike, enduring most ungrateful nations who worship the mockeries of arts and the works of his own hands, who persecute his name together with his family, luxury, avarice, iniquity, malice growing insolent daily, so that his own patience works against him: for more people do not believe in the Lord for this reason, because they do not know him to have been angry with the world for so long.

And this aspect of divine patience is, as it were, estimated from afar, as from on high. But what of that which was in some manner openly laid hold of by hand among men on earth? God suffers himself to be born in the womb of a mother, and awaits the time; born, he endures to grow up; and grown up, he is not eager to be acknowledged, but is moreover contemptuous of himself, and is baptized by his servant, and repels the assaults of the tempter with words alone; when he becomes a teacher from the Lord, teaching man to attain salvation, instructed, that is, in the forgiveness of offence through patience, he contends not, he cries not out, nor did anyone hear his voice in the streets; a bruised reed he did not break, smoking flax he did not quench. For the prophet had not lied, nay it was the very attestation of God himself, placing his Spirit in the Son with all patience.

No one wishing to cleave to him did he refuse to receive; no one's table or roof did he despise: he himself supplied water for washing the feet of his disciples. He spurned neither sinners nor publicans. He was not even angry with that city which had refused to receive him, though even the disciples had wished that heavenly fires be brought down upon so contemptuous a town. He healed the ungrateful, he yielded to those who laid snares for him. This were little, if he had not also kept his own betrayer with him, nor persistently denounced him. But when he is betrayed, when he is led as a beast to the slaughter—for thus he opens not his mouth any more than a lamb under the power of the shearer—he, for whom legions of angels would have been present from heaven at a single word, had he willed it, did not approve even the avenging sword of a single disciple. The patience of the Lord was wounded in Malchus.

And so he also cursed the work of the sword thenceforth, and gave satisfaction by the restoration of health to him whom he himself had not harmed, through patience, the mother of mercy. I say nothing of his being crucified, for to this end he had come. Yet was it necessary that even insults should attend the death he was to undergo? But he wished to depart satiated with the pleasure of patience. He is spat upon, scourged, mocked, clothed with foulness, crowned with fouler things. Wondrous proof of equanimity. He who had purposed to lie hidden in the form of man imitated nothing of man's impatience. Hence, O Pharisees, you ought above all to have recognised the Lord: no man could have perpetrated such patience as this.

Such and so great proofs, whose greatness is indeed among the nations a rejection of faith, but among us the ground and structure of it, prove clearly enough, not only by words in commanding, but also by enduring the sufferings of the Lord, to those to whom it is given to believe, that patience is the nature of God, the effect and excellence of a certain innate property.

If therefore we see that all good servants and those of right mind conduct themselves according to their master's character (since indeed the art of deserving favour is obedience, and the discipline of obedience is compliant submission), how much more ought we to be found conformed to the Lord! Servants, that is, of the living God, whose judgment upon his own turns not on fetters or the cap of freedom, but on eternity, either of punishment or of salvation. To avoid which severity, or to be invited by which generosity, so great a diligence of obedience is needed, as great as are the things which severity threatens or generosity promises. And yet we exact obedience not only from men who are bound by servitude, or by any other right as debtors of obedience, but even from cattle, even from beasts, understanding that they have been provided and delivered to our uses by the Lord. Shall those things then be better than we in the discipline of obedience, which God subjects to us?

Those which obey us at least recognise us. Do we hesitate to hearken to him alone to whom we are subject, namely the Lord? But how unjust it is, how ungrateful even, that what you obtain from others through another's indulgence, you do not render back to him through whom you obtain it, in respect of yourself! Nor need I say more about the rendering of obedience owed by us to the Lord God. For the acknowledgment of God sufficiently understands what is incumbent upon it. Yet lest we seem to have introduced obedience as something foreign to the subject, obedience itself also is drawn from patience. The impatient man never obeys, nor does the patient man fail to take delight in it. What then shall anyone broadly dispute against the good of him whom the Lord God, the demonstrator and acceptor of all good things, carried about in himself?

And who likewise can doubt that every good thing, because it pertains to God, is to be pursued with the whole mind by those who pertain to God? Through these considerations, in a ready and as it were compendious prescription, both the commendation and the exhortation concerning patience are established.

Nevertheless it is not idle to carry the discussion forward concerning the necessities of faith, since it is not without fruit. No loquacity in edification is base, if ever it is base. And so if there is discourse about some good thing, the matter requires that we also review the contrary of the good. For you will illuminate more clearly what is to be pursued, if you have likewise set forth what is to be avoided. Let us therefore consider impatience: whether, as patience is native and found in God, so its adversary is native and found in our adversary; so that from this it may appear how principally it is opposed to faith. For that which has been conceived by the rival of God is assuredly not friendly to the things of God. The discord of things is the same as that of their authors.

Moreover, since God is supremely good and the devil on the contrary supremely evil, by their very diversity they testify that neither does anything for the other, so that nothing good can seem to us to be said by evil, any more than anything evil by good. I find therefore the birth of impatience in the devil himself, even then when he impatiently bore that the Lord God had subjected all the works which he had made to his own image, that is, to man. For he would not have grieved had he endured; nor would he have envied man, had he not grieved. So he deceived him, because he envied; and he envied because he had grieved. He had grieved because he had assuredly not borne it with patience. I disdain to inquire what that angel of perdition was first, evil or impatient, since it is plain that impatience was inaugurated together with malice, or malice from impatience, and that thereafter they conspired together and grew up inseparable in the bosom of one father.

But the same impatience which he had first felt, through which he had entered into sin, armed by his own experience with what would help toward sinning, he brought to bear upon man by thrusting it into his crime: the woman, once approached, I would not rashly say was breathed upon through that very conversation of his by a spirit infected with impatience, to such a degree that she would never have sinned at all, had she preserved patience in the divine prohibition. What of the fact that she who was approached alone did not endure to keep silence; but being impatient even of silence, she makes Adam, not yet her husband, not yet one who owed her his ears, the heir of that which she had drawn from evil? Thus the other human being also perishes, through the impatience of another; and he himself soon perishes through his own impatience committed on both sides: not enduring to keep the warning of God, and to refuse the deception of the devil, the one to observe, the other to reject.

Hence the first judgment, whence the origin of the offence: hence God began to be angry, whence man was led to offend. Thence the first patience in God, whence the first indignation. He who then, content with a curse alone, restrained himself from a burst of punishment upon the devil. Or what crime committed before this one of impatience is charged against man? He was innocent, and a close friend of God, and a dweller in Paradise. But once he fell through impatience, he ceased to be wise toward God, ceased to be able to endure heavenly things. Thenceforth man, given over to the earth and cast out from the eyes of God, began easily to be seized upon by impatience for everything that would offend God. For straightway that impatience, conceived from the seed of the devil, by the fruitfulness of malice, brought forth anger as its offspring, and reared it up, trained in its own arts. For what had itself plunged both Adam and Eve into death, it taught the son also to begin with homicide.

I would have ascribed this in vain to impatience, if that Cain, the first murderer and first fratricide, bore with equanimity and without impatience the refusal of his offerings by the Lord, if he was not angry with his brother, if he killed no one at all. Since therefore he could not have killed unless angry, nor have been angry unless impatient, he demonstrates that what he did through anger is to be referred to that from which anger was suggested. And these were in some manner the cradle of impatience then in its infancy. But how great its growth thereafter is no wonder. For if it sinned first, it follows that, because it was first, it is therefore also the sole matrix of every sin, pouring from its own source the various streams of crimes. Of homicide indeed it has been spoken. But anger, brought forth from the beginning, also finds for itself whatever causes it may afterwards discover, and refers them to impatience as to its own origin.

For whether anyone commits that crime out of enmity or for the sake of plunder, it is first necessary that he become impatient either of hatred or of greed. Whatever compels, cannot be accomplished without impatience of itself. Who has committed adultery without impatience of lust? And even if in women that sale of chastity is compelled by payment, it is assuredly ordered by impatience of despising gain. These are, as it were, the chief offences before the Lord. For to speak briefly, every sin is to be ascribed to impatience. Impatience is the evil of good. No unchaste person is not impatient of chastity, no dishonest person of honesty, no impious person of piety, no restless person of rest. That each one may become evil, he will not be able to persevere in being good. Such therefore is this serpent of sins, why should it not offend the Lord, who disapproves of evils?

Is it not manifest that Israel itself also always sinned against God through impatience, from the time when, forgetful of the heavenly arm by which it had been drawn out of Egyptian afflictions, it demands gods as leaders from Aaron, when it pours out collections of its gold for an idol? For it had impatiently endured the delays of Moses, who was meeting with the Lord, so necessary as those delays were. After the food-giving rain of manna, after the water-giving stream from the rock, they despair of the Lord, not enduring a thirst of three days. For this too is reproached to them by the Lord as impatience. And lest we wander through each instance, they perished by sinning through impatience at every turn. But how did they lay hands on the prophets, except through impatience of hearing? And on the Lord himself, through impatience of seeing. But if they had embraced patience, they would have been set free.

It is patience itself that both follows faith and precedes it. In short, Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness by Him: but patience proved his faith, when he was commanded to sacrifice his son—I would say not for a testing of his faith, but for a typological attestation of it. For the rest, God, whom he had reckoned as righteousness, knew. So grave a commandment, which the Lord himself did not wish to be carried through to completion, he both heard patiently and would have fulfilled if God had willed it. Rightly therefore blessed, because also faithful; rightly faithful, because also patient. Thus faith, illuminated by patience, when it was to be sown among the nations through the seed of Abraham, which is Christ, and was to bring grace over the law, appointed its helper patience to the task of enlarging and fulfilling the law, because patience alone had been lacking heretofore for the teaching of righteousness.

For of old they demanded an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, and lent evil at interest for evil: for patience was not yet on earth, because neither was faith: and so in the meantime impatience was making use of the occasions afforded by the law. It was easy, while the lord and master of patience was absent. After he came, and composed the grace of faith with patience, now it is not even lawful to provoke with a word, nor even to say "Fool," without the peril of judgment. Anger is forbidden, the spirit is restrained, the insolence of the hand is curbed, the poison is taken from the tongue; the law finds more than it lost, Christ saying: Love your enemies, and bless those who curse you, and pray for your persecutors, that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. You see what father patience wins for us. By this chief precept the whole discipline of patience is girded, since it is not even permitted to do evil deservedly.

Now indeed, as we run through the causes of impatience, the other precepts too will answer in their proper places. If the spirit is stirred up by loss of worldly goods, it is admonished by the dominical Scriptures in almost every place concerning the contemning of the world: nor is there any greater exhortation to contempt of money than that the Lord himself is found to have had no riches. He always justifies the poor, he condemns the rich beforehand. Thus loss, as the disdain of patience toward wealth, has served as a preparation, showing through the casting away of riches that their injuries too are not to be reckoned. What therefore we have no need at all to seek after, because the Lord also did not seek it, we ought to bear without distress when it is diminished or even taken away. The Spirit of the Lord declared through the Apostle that covetousness is the root of all evils.

Let us not interpret it as consisting only in the desire of another's goods; for even what seems to be ours is another's: for nothing is ours, since all things belong to God, of whom we ourselves also are. Therefore if, having been afflicted with loss, we feel it impatiently, grieving over what was lost as though it were our own, we shall be found to be akin to covetousness. We seek what is another's when we bear impatiently the loss of what is another's. He who is stirred up by impatience at loss, by setting earthly things before heavenly, sins against God from close at hand. For he shakes the Spirit which he received from the Lord on account of a worldly thing. Let us therefore willingly lose earthly things, and guard heavenly ones. Let the whole world perish, so long as I gain patience.

Now whoever resolves not to bear steadfastly some small thing taken from him by theft, or by force, or even by negligence, I do not know whether he could easily, or from the heart, himself lay hand upon his own property for the cause of almsgiving. For who, being utterly unable to endure being cut by another, himself draws the knife across his own body? Patience in losses is a training in giving and sharing. He does not grudge to give who does not fear to lose. Otherwise, how shall one who has two tunics give one of them to the naked, unless he be the same man who can offer his cloak also to one who takes his tunic? How shall we make friends for ourselves out of mammon, if we have loved it so much that we cannot bear to lose it? We shall perish with what is lost. What do we find here, where we have to lose?

It is the way of the Gentiles to apply impatience to every loss, who perhaps set money above the soul. For so they do, when out of greed for gain they engage in the profitable perils of merchandise at sea; when for the sake of money they do not hesitate to undertake in the forum even what is not to be feared for condemnation; when finally they hire themselves out to the games and the camps, when on the road they rob after the manner of beasts. But we, according to the difference by which we stand apart from them, ought not to lay down the soul for money, but money for the soul, whether willingly in giving, or patiently in losing.

We carry our very soul and our very body exposed in this world to every injury, and we undergo patience of that injury; are we wounded by the deliberation of lesser matters? Far be such a defilement from a servant of Christ, that patience, prepared for greater temptations, should fail in trifles. If someone attempts to provoke with the hand, the Lord's coin is at hand: To the one who strikes you, he says, on the face, turn also the other cheek. Let your patience wear out his wickedness. As for him whose blow that is, constrained by pain and shame, he is more severely beaten by the Lord. You beat that wicked man more by enduring his blows; for he will be beaten by him for whose sake you endure. If the bitterness of the tongue breaks out in cursing or abuse, look to the saying: When they curse you, rejoice. The Lord himself was cursed in the law, and yet he alone is blessed.

Therefore let us servants follow the Lord, and be cursed patiently, that we may be able to be blessed. If I hear too impatiently some insolent or wicked word spoken against me, I must either return the bitterness in kind, or I shall be tormented by silent impatience. When therefore I strike back, being cursed, how shall I be found to have followed the teaching of the Lord, by which it is handed down, that a man is defiled not by the uncleanness of vessels, but by those things which proceed from the mouth? Likewise: that we incur the guilt of every vain and superfluous word? It follows therefore that what the Lord keeps us from, the same he admonishes us to bear equanimously from another. There now concerning the pleasure of patience. For every injury, whether inflicted by tongue or by hand, when it has encountered patience, will be settled with the same outcome as some weapon hurled against a rock of most steadfast hardness, and blunted.

For it will fall there, its work vain and fruitless, and sometimes, rebounding upon him who launched it, will rage against him with a returning force. Surely someone injures you for this reason, that you may suffer pain: because the fruit of the one who injures lies in the pain of the one injured. Therefore when you have overturned his fruit by not feeling pain, he himself must needs feel pain at the loss of his fruit: then you depart not only unharmed—which alone would suffice for you—but moreover delighted by your adversary's frustration and defended by his pain. This is the usefulness and pleasure of patience.

Not even that form of impatience is excused in the loss of those dear to us, where some affection of grief pleads as advocate. For the regard of the Apostle's warning must be set before us, who says: Be not saddened at the falling asleep of any, as the nations who have no hope. And rightly. For believing the resurrection of Christ, we believe it also for ourselves, for whose sake he both died and rose again. Therefore since the resurrection of the dead is established, grief at death is empty, and impatience of grief is empty too. Why then do you grieve, if you do not believe that he has perished? Why do you bear impatiently the withdrawal for a time of one whom you believe will return? It is a departure, what you take to be death. He who goes before is not to be mourned, but plainly to be longed for. Even that longing is to be tempered by patience. For why should you bear immoderately the going away of one whom you will shortly follow?

Moreover, impatience in such matters both ill-omens our hope and transgresses faith. And we injure Christ when we do not receive with equanimity those whom he has called away from us, as though they were to be pitied. I desire, says the Apostle, to depart now and to be with the Lord. How much better does he show the desire of Christians? Therefore if we grieve impatiently that others have attained that desire, we ourselves do not wish to attain it.

There is also another supreme spur of impatience, the lust for revenge, which attends to the business either of glory or of malice. But glory is assuredly vain, and malice is never not odious to the Lord, especially in this case, when malice, provoked by another's malice, sets itself above the other in executing revenge, and by repaying evil doubles what was done once. Revenge seems to the erring mind a consolation of pain; but in truth it is certainly convicted of malice. For what difference is there between the provoker and the provoked, except that the one is caught in the wrongdoing first, and the other second? Yet both are guilty before the Lord of the injured man, who forbids and condemns all wickedness. There is no reckoning of order in wrongdoing; nor does place separate what likeness joins. It is therefore absolutely commanded that evil not be repaid for evil. An equal deed has an equal desert. How shall we observe this if, having been disdained, we shall not first be in disdain of revenge?

And what honor shall we offer to the Lord God if we arrogate to ourselves the right of self-defense? We are wineskins, vessels of clay; we are gravely offended by our little servants when they take revenge upon their fellow-servants for themselves; and those who have offered us their patience, as mindful of humility, of servitude, loving the right of their master's honor, we not only approve, but render them a satisfaction greater than they would have presumed for themselves. Does this waver in our estimation of the Lord, so just to judge, so powerful to accomplish? What then do we believe that judge to be, if not also an avenger? He promises this to us, saying: Vengeance is mine, and I will avenge; that is, Patience is mine, and I will reward patience. For when he says: Judge not, that you be not judged, does he not demand patience? For who will not judge another except he who is patient in not defending himself? Who judges in order to forgive?

And if he forgives, he has nonetheless avoided the impatience of the one who judges, and has taken away the honor of the sole judge, that is, of God. How many mishaps does impatience of this kind customarily run into! How often has one repented of self-defense! How often has its persistence made its own causes worse! Because nothing undertaken in impatience knows how to be carried through without violence; nothing done in violence either does not give offense, or does not collapse, or does not rush headlong. Now if you defend yourself too lightly, you will rage; if too abundantly, you will be burdened. What have I to do with revenge, whose measure I cannot govern through the impatience of pain? But if I shall apply myself to patience, I shall not feel pain: if I shall not feel pain, I shall not desire to take revenge.

After these chief materials of impatience have been reviewed as best we could, why should we wander through the rest? Those at home, those abroad? The working of evil is broad and widespread: the incitements of the spirit that hurls them are manifold, now small, now very great. But small ones you may despise on account of their slightness; to the greatest you may yield on account of their exceeding greatness. Where the injury is lesser, there is no necessity for impatience. But where the injury is greater, there the remedy of injury, patience, is the more necessary. Let us therefore strive to endure what is inflicted by the evil one, so that the zeal of our enemy may be baffled by the emulation of our equanimity. But if we ourselves bring upon us certain things, either through imprudence or even willingly, let us likewise patiently undergo what we impute to ourselves. But if we believe that certain things are sent upon us by the Lord, to whom more fittingly shall we show patience than to the Lord?

Nay, he teaches us moreover to rejoice and be glad, in the dignity of divine chastisement. I, he says, chasten those whom I love. O blessed is that servant, upon whose correction the master is intent! To whom he deigns to be angry, whom he does not deceive by the pretense of not admonishing! We are therefore bound on every side to the duty of administering patience. From every direction, whether by our own errors or by the assaults of the evil one, ambushes, or when the use of the Lord's admonitions intervenes, the reward of that duty is great, namely blessedness. For whom did the Lord call blessed, if not the patient, saying: Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven? Surely no one is poor in spirit unless he is humble; and who is humble, if not patient? For no one can subject himself without the prior patience of subjection itself. Blessed, he says, are those who weep and mourn. Who endures such things without patience?

And so to such persons both advocacy and laughter are promised. Blessed are the meek. By this word, certainly, the impatient may not at all be reckoned. Likewise, when he marks the peacemakers with the same title of blessedness and calls them sons of God, are the impatient in any way akin to peace? Only a fool would think so. But when he says, rejoice and exult, as often as they shall revile you and persecute you, for your reward is great in heaven; this assuredly does not promise the exultation of impatience, because no one has exulted in adversities unless he first despised them; and no one will despise them unless he has exercised patience.

As regards the discipline of peace, most pleasing to God, who that is born of impatience will ever forgive his brother even once (I say not seven times, but even seventy times seven)? Who, directing his case against his adversary, will settle the matter by agreement, unless he has first cut away the grief of mind, the hardness, the bitterness—the poisons, that is, of impatience? How will you forgive, and be forgiven, if you have been tenacious of injury through the absence of patience? No one shaken in spirit against his brother will complete his offering at the altar, unless he has first returned to patience by being reconciled to his brother. If the sun sets upon our anger, we are in peril. We are not permitted to remain a single day without patience.

Moreover, since it governs every form of saving discipline, what wonder that it also ministers to repentance, which is wont to succour the fallen; when, upon the dissolution of a marriage, yet for that cause which permits either husband or wife to persevere in widowhood, patience awaits, desires, and entreats salvation for those who shall at some time enter upon repentance. How great a good it confers upon both! It keeps the one from being an adulterer, and it reforms the other. So also in those examples of the Lord's parables patience is present with the saints. The erring sheep the patience of the shepherd seeks and finds. For impatience would easily have despised the one. But patience undertakes the labour of the search, and moreover the patient bearer carries upon his shoulders the sinful one that had been left behind. That prodigal son also the patience of his father both receives, and clothes, and feeds, and excuses before the impatience of his angry brother. He is saved therefore who had perished, because he entered upon repentance.

Repentance does not perish, because it has found patience. For love, the highest sacrament of faith, the treasure of the Christian name, which the Apostle commends with all the powers of the Holy Spirit—by what other than the disciplines of patience is it trained? Love, he says, is long-suffering. Thus it takes on patience. It is kind; evil patience does not commit. It envies not; that indeed is the property of patience. It savours nothing forward; it has drawn modesty from patience. It is not puffed up, it does not go beyond bounds; for that does not belong to patience. Nor does it seek its own, if it offers its own, so long as it profits another: nor is it provoked; otherwise what would it have left to impatience? Therefore, he says, love endures all things, bears all things, assuredly because it is patient. Rightly therefore shall it never fail; for the rest shall be made void, shall be brought to completion.

Tongues are exhausted, knowledge, prophecies; faith, hope, love remain: faith, which the patience of Christ introduced; hope, which the patience of man awaits; love, which, with God as teacher, patience accompanies.

Thus far concerning patience in its simple and uniform form, and constituted only in the mind; while the same patience also labours manifoldly in the body for the deserving of the Lord, inasmuch as it was displayed by the Lord himself also in the virtue of the body, since the ruling mind readily communicates what the spirit has brought in to its dwelling-place. What then is the work of patience in the body? First, the affliction of the flesh, a sacrifice pleasing to the Lord through the offering of humiliation, when it pours out to the Lord squalor and straitness of sustenance, content with simple food and pure water to drink, when it joins fasts thereto, when it cleaves to ashes and sackcloth. This patience of the body commends prayers, confirms supplications; this opens the ears of Christ God, disperses severity, draws forth clemency.

Thus that king of Babylon, having offended the Lord, when he had been banished from human form for seven years in filth and squalor, by the sacrifice of his body's patience both recovered his kingdom and, what is more desirable to a man, made satisfaction to God. Now, if we set forth the higher and more blessed degrees of bodily patience, the same also procures continence of the flesh for holiness. This both keeps the widow, and consecrates the virgin, and raises the voluntary eunuch to the kingdoms of heaven. What comes from the virtue of the mind is accomplished in the flesh; the patience of the flesh fights in persecutions at last. If flight press upon us, the flesh soldiers against the hardships of flight. If prison also weigh upon us, the flesh is in chains, the flesh is on the rack, the flesh is on the ground, and in that poverty of light, and in that want of the world.

But when it is brought forth to the proof of blessedness, to the occasion of the second baptism, to the very ascent of the divine throne, nothing is needed there more than the patience of the body: if the spirit is willing, but the flesh without patience is weak, where is the salvation of the spirit and of the flesh itself? But when the Lord says this of the flesh, pronouncing it weak, he shows what is needed to strengthen it, namely patience against every preparation for subverting or punishing faith, so that it may most steadfastly endure stripes, fire, the cross, beasts, the sword—things which the Prophets, which the Apostles overcame by enduring.

By these powers of patience Isaiah is sawn asunder, and does not keep silence concerning the Lord. Stephen is stoned, and asks pardon for his enemies. O most blessed also was that man who discharged every form of patience against every force of the devil, when neither the driven-off flocks, nor those riches in cattle, nor the sons taken away in one rush of ruin, nor finally the torment of his own body in its ulcer drove him away from the patience and faith owed to the Lord—whom the devil beat with all his strength in vain! For he was not drawn away from regard for God by so many pains; but he stands as an example and testimony to us of patience to be maintained both in spirit and in flesh, both in mind and in body; so that we should not give way either under worldly losses, or the taking away of those most dear, or even the conflicts of the body. What a bier God built up for the devil in that man!

What a standard he raised over the enemy of his glory, when that man, at every heap of messengers, brought forth nothing from his mouth but thanks to God; when he execrated his wife, already worn out by misfortunes and urging evil remedies. What then? God laughed. What then? The evil one was cut to pieces: when Job stripped away with great equanimity the foul overflow of his ulcer; when he playfully called back the little creatures bursting forth from it to the same cavities and pastures of his disfigured flesh. And so that workman of God's victory, with all the darts of temptations beaten back by the breastplate and shield of patience, both soon recovered the wholeness of his body from God, and possessed doubled what he had lost. And had he wished his sons also to be restored, he would again be called father. But he preferred that they should be given back to him on that day.

So great a joy, thus secure in the Lord, he deferred; he endured so voluntary a bereavement, lest he should live without some exercise of patience.

So fully sufficient a trustee of patience is God. If you have deposited an injury with him, he is the avenger; if a loss, he is the restorer; if pain, he is the physician; if death, he is the one who raises again. How much patience is permitted, that it may have God as its debtor! And not undeservedly. For it guards all things pleasing to him: it intervenes in all his commandments. It fortifies faith, governs peace, aids love, instructs humility, awaits repentance, assigns confession, rules the flesh, preserves the spirit, bridles the tongue, restrains the hand, treads down temptations, drives away scandals, brings martyrdoms to completion, consoles the poor, tempers the rich, does not stretch out the weak, does not consume the strong, delights the faithful, invites the gentile, commends the servant to the master, the master to God, adorns the woman, approves the man; it is loved in the child, praised in the youth, looked up to in the old man; in every sex, in every age it is beautiful.

Come now, let us also comprehend its image and appearance. Its countenance is calm and peaceful, its brow pure, contracted by no wrinkle of grief or anger; its brows equally relaxed in a cheerful manner, its eyes cast down in humility, not in unhappiness. Its mouth marked with the honour of silence. Its colour such as belongs to those who are secure and harmless. Its head moves frequently toward the devil, and its laughter is threatening. For the rest, its garment is white about the breast and pressed close to the body, as one that is neither puffed up nor defiled. For it sits upon the throne of that most gentle and meek spirit, which is not gathered up in a whirlwind, nor darkened with cloud, but is open and simple with tender serenity, which Elijah saw the third time. For where God is, there also is his nursling, namely patience: when therefore the Spirit of God descends, inseparable patience accompanies him. If we have not admitted patience together with the Spirit, will it dwell in us always?

Nay, I know not whether it will persevere any longer. Without its companion and minister, it must needs be distressed in every place and at every time. Whatever its enemy shall have inflicted, it will not be able to endure alone, lacking the instrument of endurance.

This is the reason of patience, this its discipline, this its work—heavenly and true, namely Christian; not like that patience of the gentiles of the earth, false and shameful. For as the devil, in this matter also, emulated the Lord, as if plainly on equal terms—except that the very difference of evil and good is equally matched in greatness—he also taught his own a patience of their own kind: that patience, I mean, which subjects husbands purchasable by a dowry, or trafficking in the prostitution of their wives, to the power of those wives; which, in the pursuit of inheritances from the childless, endures all the labour of forced compliance with feigned affections; which devotes the servants of the belly to the subjection of their freedom to gluttony under insulting patronages. Such are the studies of patience that the nations know; and they occupy the name of so great a good with foul practices: patient toward rivals and the wealthy and those who invite them, they live impatient of God alone.

But let that patience of theirs and of their presiding lord look to itself, which fire awaits below. For the rest, let us love the patience of God, the patience of Christ: let us repay to him what he himself paid out for us. Let us offer the patience of the spirit, the patience of the flesh, we who believe in the resurrection of the flesh and the spirit.