Sermons on Selected Lessons of the New Testament

¹⁵ I render unspeakable thanks to our Lord God, that He has vouchsafed, at your prayers, to deliver my infirmity from this most perplexed and difficult place. Yet above all things remember this, that the Creator transcends indescribably whatever we could gather from the creature, whether by the bodily senses, or the thought of the mind. But would you with the mind reach Him? Purify your mind, purify your heart. Make clean the eye whereby That, whatever It be, may be reached.

For “blessed are the clean in heart, for they shall see God.” But while the heart was not cleansed, what could be provided and granted more mercifully by Him, than that That Word of whom we have spoken so great and so many things, and yet have spoken nothing worthy of Him; that That Word, “by whom all things were made,” should become that which we are, that we might be able to attain to That which we are not? For we are not God; but with the mind or the interior eye of the heart we can see God.

Our eyes dulled by sins, blinded, enfeebled by infirmity, desire to see; but we are in hope, not yet in possession. We are the children of God. This says John, who says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God;” he who lay on the Lord's Breast, who drew in these secrets from the Bosom of His Heart; he says, “Dearly beloved, we are the children of God, and it does not yet appear what we shall be; we know that, when He shall appear, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.” This is promised us.