After the precepts of the law, spread abroad in volumes and heaped up in books, did not suffice to commend to us the divine love, God's affection is inserted and insinuated into the hard hearts of men by comparisons and examples. 'Which of you,' He says, 'if his father ask bread, will give him a stone? Or a fish, will he for a fish give him a serpent? Or if he ask an egg, will he reach out to him a scorpion? If you, then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more shall your heavenly Father give the good Spirit to them that ask Him?' (Luke 11). 'Which of you, if his father ask bread, will give him a stone?' Charity has no guile;
piety knows no deceit, affection admits no falsehood. If he is a father, he cannot but love; if he loves, he knows to give nothing but what is good. He denies that he is a father who is held suspect of a father's bounty; he is ignorant that he is a son whom a father's gifts make anxious. He excludes the whole of piety who does not believe that whatever the father has given is salutary; or how could a father give his children evils for goods, who is always ready to bear evils for his children, who for his children does not flee from death, does not turn aside from perils?
and therefore God made you a father, therefore He willed that man be begotten by you—He who assuredly, since He had made you from the earth, could have made very many; but He acted thus, that by begetting you might know how great is the affection of the one who begets, and might prove in yourself how great is the love of your Author toward you, even as much as the Author Himself strives to expend upon your pledge for the sake of your pledge. Assuredly, not only in yourself did God will you to feel what the affection of the one begetting might be, but in wild beasts, and in cattle, and in birds, this too God willed you to see:
which, though He brought them forth from the earth by His command alone, He afterward compelled to feel the labor of begetting—to change their haunts, to seek out places fit for their lairs, to fortify their young against the difficulties of the places, to bring them forth with groans, to nurture them with the greatest labors, and not to refuse themselves to death if they saw their offspring taken. Wherefore, if not by comparison with man, then by comparison with wild beasts, by the likeness of cattle, by the examples of birds, learn how great is the sincerity in a father's charity. If, then, you believe in God and have confessed Him as Father, whatever He has commanded, whatever He has chosen for you, believe that it is amply salutary for you, believe that it is amply life-giving. It is not permitted to sift a mother's gifts, it is not fitting to call in question a father's counsels;
thus, though the appearance of a father's command be rather sad, the thing itself is nevertheless salutary and life-giving. Thus Abraham, when he believed God to be his Father, did not attend to the harsh and bitter forms of the commands; he receives the modest circumcision (Gen. 17); and the things which the heavenly Father bids, he does not sift, but judges them glorious: he considers the slaying of his son most wicked; but because God commands, he commits the whole to piety. Hence Isaac, when he saw his father's sword over him, though he could have shuddered and grieved that he himself was to be the victim, rejoiced (Gen. 22). Hence the daughter of Jephthah discharged her father's gift, her father's vows, by her own death with all rejoicing (Judg. 11).
Why, then, does one who now knows God dispute about a father's gifts, when even a little and innocent child, seeking from his father, does not receive things good and profitable for himself? But let us inquire why the Lord made these comparisons. 'Which of you,' He says, 'if his father ask bread, will give him a stone?' He could have said: will he give tares, will he give darnel, which by its nearness and likeness feigns bread, but breeds distress? But Christ had come to sons, that is, to the Jews, whom He complained with such an outcry to have begotten: 'Sons have I begotten and raised up; but they have spurned Me' (Isa. 1); He had come, then, to sons, He had come as bread from heaven, He who said: 'I am the bread that came down from heaven' (John 6).
But for the Jews He was turned into a stone of stumbling (Rom. 9) and a rock of scandal (Isa. 8), the Lord saying: 'Behold, I lay in Sion a stone of stumbling and a rock of scandal' (Isa. 28). Why a rock? Because they yearned to bite the rock, not to seek bread from the Father. 'Many dogs have surrounded me,' he says (Ps. 21). And so, after they were proved to have been turned from men into dogs, the heavenly bread was turned for them into a rock—not by the fault of the Giver, but by the wickedness of the receiver—which would not refresh them, but destroy them; nor, though laid in the foundation, had it advanced them to the summit, but would give and roll those who tended toward the death of their own Father into a deep ruin. He added another comparison:
Will he then give him a serpent instead of a fish? Christ too was a fish, drawn up from the depths of the Jordan, who, laid upon the coals of his Passion, after his resurrection gave to his own, that is, to his disciples, a life-giving food; but for the Jews this fish is turned into a serpent, as the Lord says: 'As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up' (John 3). The Jews saw Christ in the serpent, because the impious eye cannot see God, cannot see mercy. And he spoke a third likeness: 'Or if he asks for an egg, will he hand him a scorpion?' It is customary and ever the accepted thing that little ones ask for an egg, and that parents do not deny the egg to their little ones when they ask;
but because Christ had come to gather his chicks together as a hen (Matthew 23), he brought forth the egg of the Word, by which the holy seedlings of the Church might be nourished. But because the Jew, out of envy, wished rather to pour out that egg than to receive it, he found there a scorpion, so that, according to the Apostle, 'the commandment which was unto life became to them unto death' (Romans 7). To commend his mercy the Lord brought forward three things and displayed examples, that by three testimonies, as by three witnesses, he might both stir the devout to faith in his love, and refute the impious, who received not the grace of charity by no fault of the Father, but by their own.
The sudden and confused storm of a bitter birth, and the untimeliness of the seedlings, would trouble me, and the sproutings would throw me into disorder, did not those about to be born, through frequent breakings of the delays of the seasons, and by rude plundering, and by the burst barriers of the womb, seek and seize sudden gains of living. Hence it is that a man often, despising the term of the tenth month, in the seventh month casts off and forsakes the narrow and cramped dwellings of the womb, his first home, so that, like a new warrior, he may rejoice to have conquered before his time, rather than himself pay out to the seasons his own term of service. And if this is permitted to human nature, what will be able to resist a nature heavenly and divine? Or what cannot the Holy Spirit do, if the flesh can do this?
Or how does heavenly grace not accomplish what human frailty obtains and fulfils? Did not Paul thus, with bitter pain, vex the way of our birth, and the inward parts of his mother, so that, as by a heavenly whirlwind and with the whole tempest of the Church, he anticipated the times of her who was giving birth, so that suddenly he was born even on the road (Acts 9), he who was to offer to the nations the way unto faith? Rightly does he call himself one born out of due time (1 Corinthians 15), and marvels that he was born, he who knew that he had endured no seasons of being conceived. For while that enemy himself was still striking from without the womb of the holy mother, and in her very birth-pangs was crushing her venerable offspring, suddenly he was changed into a holy sprout, he who had been the most savage persecutor of that very sprout. A eunuch too is begotten on the road (Acts 8).
So that him whom human infirmity had gelded unto the service of a man, and whom an unwilling chastity had placed within the court of a king, a chastity now voluntary and vowed might advance and transfer to the glory of the heavenly court, unto the service of the eternal King. Blessed is he to whom it was granted that he should not lose the insignia of the palace, but exchange them.
This is what reason declares, my little children, that you whom we have received in sorrow into a mother's womb we may lead forth in utmost joy at one and the same moment. Hear the faith, learn the prayer. But because, time forbidding, neither can we unfold to you the mystery, nor can you solemnly render back to us the things handed down, act so that even now you may learn the words of the Creed in their simplicity, and at the Easter season, when these things are more fully delivered, you may be able to recognize the inner things of this sacrament. Take what you will, invade what you desire, for the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force (Matthew 11). Take what you will;
and what force can take away, let grace bestow. The entrance of life, the gate of salvation, the doorway of faith, a singular, innocent, and pure confession is thoroughly taught, as the Prophet says: 'Enter his gates with confession' (Psalm 99). Whence the same prophet, thus admonished, asks of himself an entrance for the God who speaks within him, saying: 'Open to me the gates of justice, and having entered into them I will confess to the Lord' (Psalm 117). You see that he cannot confess who has not entered this house of salvation and faith, into which, just as confession admits, so denial undoubtedly excludes from it. But let us hear how we must confess. 'With the heart,' says the Apostle, 'one believes unto justice, but with the mouth confession is made unto salvation' (Romans 10).
And he shows what is to be believed. 'If you believe,' he says, 'the Lord Jesus in your heart, and confess with your mouth, you shall be saved.' With the heart one believes unto justice, with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. Great, my little children, do we see through this to be the summary of our faith, when between the heart and the tongue the whole sacrament of human salvation is turned and carried on. You have, O man, whereby you ought to believe: with the heart one believes unto justice; you have whereby you ought to confess: with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. And what shall I say? The man has all things in himself who has himself; but he has himself who has God; and he truly has God who believes and confesses him to be his Author. Sign yourselves. The faith which is grasped by hearing, is believed with the heart, is uttered with the mouth unto salvation, is to be lodged in the secret place of the mind;
and it is to be committed to the very vital organs of our breast, and not to be inscribed rashly upon paper and with ink, lest it be not kept for the faithful unto life, but betrayed to the faithless unto ruin. In yourself, O man, you must guard what, placed outside you, will be able to perish.