So let us call out to him what we have just been singing: Have mercy on me, God, have mercy on me because in you my soul has put its trust. Have mercy on me, God, he says. Why? Because in you my soul has put its trust. This, he says, is the sacrifice I offer you, so that you may hear me: because in you my soul has put its trust. Whoever hoped in the Lord and was left in the lurch?^[1] Even great saints are subject to temptation, and however much progress we make in God, we live in need of pardon. Was it little lambs and not the rams of the flock that the Lord Jesus taught how to pray? It was his disciples, our apostles, the very leaders of the flock, whose children we are, of whom it is said, Bring to the Lord the children of rams;^[2] yes, it was these rams he was teaching to pray, when he told them to say, Forgive us our debts.^[3] If this is a daily prayer, then we live in need of pardon. All our sins were forgiven us in baptism, and we live in need of pardon. We make progress if our hope is nourished in God and strengthened by his aid to enable us to put a brake on all covetousness. Let us keep on fighting; our struggles are known to him, and he knows how to be both a spectator and a helper.

You will not be able to move to the good place from the bad place unless you do good in the bad place. What sort of place is that other? One where nobody goes hungry. So if you want to live in the good place where nobody goes hungry, in this world share your food with the hungry.^[1] Because in that blessed place nobody is a foreigner, and all are living in their own native land; so if you wish to be in the good place, whenever in this bad place you find a foreigner who has nowhere to go, welcome him into your home. Show hospitality in the bad place, in order to get to the place where you cannot be a guest worker. In the good place nobody is in need of clothes; there is no cold weather there, nor hot weather. What need of shelter, what need of clothing? There will be no shelters there, but there will be protection; so in fact even there we find shelter: under the shadow of your wings will I hope. So in this bad place provide shelter for the person who has none, so that you may find yourself in the good place, where you can enjoy such shelter that you need never want to patch your thatched roof. After all, there are no showers of rain there but instead a perennial fountain of truth. But the shower from this [fountain] makes you glad, not wet; this shower is the fountain of life itself. What is the meaning of Lord, with you is the fountain of life?^[2] It means, And the Word was with God.^[3]

One thing you can count on: Corruption does not save those who get into it. On the contrary, it sets itself up against them, tears them down and brings about their doom. Woe to those people against whom this prophecy is written! For the evil they pursue is sharper than a two-edged sword, and it will first slay those who lay hold of it. Even their own tongue, as the psalmist points out, is a sharp sword, and their teeth are spears and arrows.

Casting away therefore all anxiety and superfluous care, let us return to ourselves; and let us adorn the body and the soul with the ornament of virtue; converting our bodily members into instruments of righteousness and not instruments of sin.

And first of all, let us discipline our tongue to be the minister of the grace of the Spirit, expelling from the mouth all bitterness and malice and the practice of using disgraceful words. For it is in our power to make each one of our members an instrument of wickedness or of righteousness. Hear then how people make the tongue an instrument, some of sin, others of righteousness! Their tongue is a sharp sword. But another speaks thus of his own tongue: My tongue is the pen of a ready writer.^[1] The former worked destruction; the latter wrote the divine law. So one was a sword, the other a pen, not according to its own nature but according to the choice of those who employed it. For the nature of this tongue and of that was the same, but the operation was not the same.

I have read the document^[1] sent from the East by our friend and good brother to a distinguished member of the Senate, Pammachius, which you have copied and forwarded to me. It brought to my mind the words of the prophet: The sons of men whose teeth are spears and arrows and their tongue a sharp sword. But for these wounds that people inflict on one another with the tongue we can hardly find a physician; so I have turned to Jesus, the heavenly physician, and he has brought out for me from the medicine chest of the gospel an antidote of sovereign power; he has assuaged the violence of my grief with the assurance of the righteous judgment that I shall have at his hands. The potion that our Lord dispensed to me was nothing else than these words: Blessed are you when people persecute you and say all manner of evil against you falsely. Rejoice and leap for joy, for great is your reward in heaven, for so persecuted they the prophets who were before you.^[2] With this medicine I was content, and, as far as the matter concerned me, I had determined for the future to keep silence; for I said to myself, If they have called the master of the house Beelzebub, how much more them of his household? (that is, you and me, unworthy though we are). And, if it was said of him, He is a deceiver, he deceives the people, I must not be indignant if I hear that I am called a heretic and that the name of mole is applied to me because of the slowness of my mind or indeed my blindness. Christ who is my Lord, yes, and who is God over all, was called a gluttonous man and a drunkard, a friend of publicans and sinners. How can I, then, be angry when I am called a carnal man who lives in luxury?

But if, after all these preceding actions of yours,^[1] you also shouted, Crucify, crucify, hear what the prophet also shouts against you, The sons of men, their teeth are weapons and arrows, their tongue a sharpened sword. See with what weapons, with what arrows, with what sword you have put to death a just man when you said that it was not lawful for you to put anyone to death. So it is that, although the chief priests had not come themselves but had sent others to arrest Jesus, the Evangelist Luke in the same place in his narrative said, But Jesus said to those who had come to him, namely, the chief priests and the magistrates of the temple and the elders, ‘Have you come out, as it were, against a thief?’ and so on. Since, therefore, the chief priests [came] not themselves but in those whom they have sent for arresting Jesus, what else does it mean than that they themselves came in their power of giving the order? So all who shouted with ungodly voices for him to be crucified, they themselves killed him, not indeed by themselves but yet by him who was driven to this sacrilegious crime by their shouting.

See the kind of murder, brothers.^[1] The devil is called a murderer, not armed with a sword, not girded with a weapon; he came to humankind, he planted an evil word, and he killed him. Do not, then, think that you are not a murderer when you persuade your brother to do evils; if you persuade your brother to do evils, you kill him. And, that you may know that you kill him, hear the psalm: The sons of men, their teeth are weapons and arrows, their tongue a sharp sword.

In the same way I too was having the truth about the catholic church, as it is spread throughout the whole world, dinned into me from every side by the words of the divine Scriptures; and the false accusations about the betrayers leveled against it by my relatives made me deaf.^[1] I am not comparing myself with Paul’s merits but with his sins. Even if I have not been found worthy to be as good as he was, still, before receiving the remedy of correction, I was not as bad. He failed to recognize the bridegroom in the books he read, and I failed to recognize the bride. The one who revealed to him what is written about Christ’s glorification, Be exalted over the heavens, God, also revealed to me what follows about the spread of the church: over the whole earth your glory.^[2] The evidence of both texts is plain to those who can see but hidden from the blind. It was the baptism of Christ that opened his eyes, the peace of Christ that opened mine. He was made new by the washing of the holy water; whereas it was charity that covered the multitude of my sins.

Call to mind the psalm.^[1] To whom was it said, Be exalted above the heavens, O God?^[2] Who was being spoken to? It would not be said to God the Father, would it, be exalted, seeing that he has never been brought low? No, you are exalted, you who were enclosed in your mother’s womb; you who were made in her whom you had made; you who lay in the manger; you, suckled at the breast as a baby, according to the very nature of flesh; you, holding up the world and being held by your mother; you, the baby acknowledged by Simeon the old man and praised as great; you, seen by the widow Anna being suckled and acknowledged as almighty; you, who were hungry for our sakes, thirsty for our sakes, tired along the road for our sakes—did you ever hear of bread being hungry, a fountain being thirsty, a road being tired?—you who endured all these things on our account; you who went to sleep, and yet you slumber not, watching over Israel;^[3] you, finally, whom Judas sold, whom the Jews bought and did not gain possession of; you, arrested, bound, scourged, crowned with thorns, hung on the tree, pierced with the lance, you dead, you buried: be exalted above the heavens, O God.

Amos too speaks of the glory of the humanity [Christ] had assumed: He who builds a means of ascent in heaven and founds his promise on earth.^[1] He built a means of ascent in heaven when he created for himself a human body and soul in which he would be able to mount up to heaven. He founded his promise on earth when by sending the Spirit from above he filled all the ends of the earth with the gift of his faith, as he had promised. The psalmist, foreseeing in his spirit that the gift of this promise would come and desiring that it come quickly, said, Be exalted, O God, above the heavens, and let your glory be over all the earth! Here he clearly means that before our Redeemer assumed a mortal body and demolished the kingdom of death, God was known only in Judah, and in Israel was his name great.^[2] But when the God-man arose from the dead and penetrated the heights of heaven, then the glory of his name was proclaimed and believed throughout the whole wide world.

We heard the apostle telling us, We are ambassadors for Christ, exhorting you to be reconciled with God.^[1] He would not be exhorting us to be reconciled unless we had been enemies. So the whole world was the Savior’s enemy, the captor’s friend; that is, God’s enemy, the devil’s friend. And the whole human race, like this woman,^[2] was bent over and bowed down to the ground. There is someone who already understands these enemies, and he cries out against them and says to God, They have bowed my soul down. The devil and his angels have bowed the souls of men and women down to the ground; that is, have bent them forward to be intent on temporal and earthly things and stop them from seeking the things that are above.^[3]

Our Lord Jesus Christ gave great assurance to his witnesses, that is, to the martyrs who, on account of their human weakness, were worried that perhaps they would perish after death if they died while confessing him. He did this by telling them, Not a hair of your head will be harmed.^[1] Are you, whose hair will not be harmed, afraid of perishing? If inconsequential things in your life are protected in this way, under how much protection is your soul? A hair, which you do not feel when it is cut, does not perish; does the soul, through which you feel, perish? To be sure, he foretold that they were going to suffer many difficult circumstances, in order that by his prediction he might make them stronger. They said, then, to him, My heart is steadfast. What does this mean, My heart is steadfast, except that my will is strong? In their martyrdom the martyrs had their will steadfast, but their will was made steadfast by the Lord.^[2] As they thought about the future harsh and difficult evils, he added, By patient endurance you will save your lives.^[3] By patient endurance, he said, for patient endurance would not be there if your will were not in it. In patient endurance, but where does ours come from? Both what we possess and what is given to us are ours, for if it were not ours, it would not be given to us. How do you give something to another, unless it comes to belong to the one to whom you are giving it? That confession is revealed: Will not my soul be subject to God? For from him comes my patience.^[4] He himself tells us, In patient endurance. Let us also say to him, From him comes my hope. He made it yours by giving it to you; do not be ungrateful by attributing it to yourself.