Letters

^40. Love finds nothing hard; no task is difficult to the eager. Think of all that Jacob bore for Rachel, the wife who had been promised to him. “Jacob,” the Scripture says, “served seven years for Rachel. And they seemed unto him but a few days for the love he had to her.” Afterwards he himself tells us what he had to undergo. “In the day the drought consumed me and the frost by night.” So we must love Christ and always seek His embraces. Then everything difficult will seem easy; all things long we shall account short; and smitten with His arrows, we shall say every moment: “Woe is me that I have prolonged my pilgrimage.” For “the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.” For “tribulation works patience, and patience experience, and experience hope; and hope makes not ashamed.” When your lot seems hard to bear read Paul's second epistle to the Corinthians: “In labors more abundant; in stripes above measure; in prisons more frequent; in deaths oft. Of the Jews five times received I forty stripes save one; thrice was I beaten with rods; once was I stoned; thrice I suffered shipwreck; a night and a day I have been in the deep; in journeyings often, in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils by my own countrymen, in perils by the heathen, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren, in weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness.” Which of us can claim the veriest fraction of the virtues here enumerated? Yet it was these which afterwards made him bold to say: “I have finished my course, I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness which the Lord, the righteous Judge, shall give me at that day.”

But we, if our food is less appetizing than usual, get sullen, and fancy that we do God a favor by drinking watered wine. And if the water brought to us is a trifle too warm, we break the cup and overturn the table and scourge the servant in fault until blood comes. “The kingdom of heaven suffers violence and the violent take it by force.” Still, unless you use force you will never seize the kingdom of heaven. Unless you knock importunately you will never receive the sacramental bread. Is it not truly violence, think you, when the flesh desires to be as God and ascends to the place whence angels have fallen to judge angels?