Treatise on the Love of God

But, finally, when we are afraid of offending God not to avoid the pains of hell or the loss of heaven, but only because God being our good Father we owe him honour, respect, obedience, then our fear is filial, because a good child does not obey his father on account of the power he has to punish his disobedience, or because he might disinherit him, but purely because he is his father; in such sort that though his father might be old, powerless, and poor, he would not serve him with less diligence, but rather, like the bird of filial piety, would assist him with the more care and affection. So Joseph seeing that good man Jacob his father, old, in want, and brought under his son's government, ceased not to honour, serve and reverence him with a tenderness more than filial, and which was so great that his brothers having observed it, considered that it would even operate after the father's death, and therefore worked on it to obtain pardon from him, saying: Your father commanded us before he died, that we should say thus much to thee from him: I beseech thee to forget the wickedness of thy brethren, and the sin and malice they practised against thee: we also pray thee, to forgive the servants of the God of thy father this wickedness. And when Joseph heard this, he wept,⁵⁷⁰ so readily did his filial heart melt when his deceased father's wishes and will were represented to him. Those, therefore, fear God with a filial affection who fear to displease him purely and simply because he is their most sweet, most benign and most amiable Father.

At the same time, when it happens that this filial fear is joined, mingled and tempered with the servile fear of eternal damnation, or with the mercenary fear of losing heaven, it ceases not to be agreeable to God, and is called a beginning fear, that is a fear of such as are beginners and learners in the exercises of divine love. For as young boys when they first begin to ride, feeling their horse curvet a little, not only cleave close to him with their knees, but also catch hard hold of the saddle with their hands, but after they have had a little more practice simply press their saddles close;—even so, novices and apprentices in God's service, finding themselves in desperate straits amid the assaults which the enemy delivers at the beginning, not only make use of filial but also of mercenary and servile fear, and hold themselves on as they can, that they may not fall from their design.

570. Gen. l. 17.