Sermons on Selected Lessons of the New Testament

^2. Christ Humbled is the Way; Christ the Truth and the Life, Christ Highly Exalted and God. If you walk in the Humbled, you shall attain to the Exalted. If infirm as you are, you despise not the Humbled, you shall abide exceeding strong in the Exalted. For what cause was there of Christ's Humiliation, save your infirmity? For solely and irremediably did your infirmity press you in, and this circumstance it was that made so great a Physician come to you. For if your sickness had been even such, that you could have gone to the Physician, this infirmity might have seemed endurable. But because you could not go to Him, He came to you. He came teaching humility, whereby we might return; for that pride allowed us not to return to life; yea had even made us depart from life. For the heart of man being lifted up against God, and neglecting in its sound state His saving precepts, the soul fell away into infirmity; let her in her infirmity learn to hear Him whom in her strength she despised. Let her hear Him that she may rise, whom she despised, that she might fall. Let her at length, taught by experience, give ear to what she had no mind, when taught by precept, to obtain. For her misery has taught her, how evil a thing it is to go a whoring from the Lord. For to fall away from that Simple and Singular Good, into this multitude of pleasures, into the love of the world, and earthly corruption, is to go a whoring from the Lord. And He has addressed her as in a sense a harlot, to warn her to return: very often by the Prophets does He reproach her as a harlot, but yet not despaired of, for that He who reproaches the harlot has in His Hands the cleansing of the harlot too.