約伯倫理 第 1109 章

Verse 8. — 'Your impiety will harm a man who is like you, and your justice will help the son of man' (Job xxxv, 8). Man can harm or benefit man, but not the angels. Human impiety harms him whom it defiles by perverting; and again our justice helps him whom it changes from depraved deeds. For those things can neither be harmed nor helped which cannot be either corrupted from good or altered from evil. The supernal powers, therefore, can neither be injured nor aided in that being which they have already received as unchangeable. But those who are entangled in earthly desires cannot consider these things.

For when minds are scattered abroad it is difficult for them to return to themselves, because crooked ways hold those they have once captured with the more delight, the more that in them everything that pleases is permitted. For no wall of discipline stands in the way to restrain, no punishment of retribution is foreseen to terrify; but with the eyes of the heart closed, the soul is cast down into the lowest depths by the same measure in which it is darkened from the heights; and it perpetrates temporal evils the more securely, the more harshly it despairs of eternal goods. But this wickedness of the reprobate, after the manner of threshing, separating the life of the elect as grain from chaff, presses it in order to purge it. For the wicked more greatly free the good from the desires of this world while they afflict them;

for while they violently heap many things upon them here, they compel them to hasten toward the things above. This was well signified concerning the people of Israel when Moses called and King Pharaoh raged (cf. Exodus iii, 7). For then Moses was sent to call them, when Pharaoh had already been stirred to oppress with hard tasks, so that the minds of the Israelites, clinging shamefully to Egypt, might be moved—the one, in calling, as it were drawing them; the other, in raging, as it were driving them; and the people, disgracefully fixed in servitude, might be set in motion, whether summoned by good things or driven by evil ones.

This is done daily, while, the heavenly rewards being preached, the reprobate are permitted to rage against the elect, so that if, called to the land of promise, we neglect to go forth, we may at least be driven by raging afflictions; and this Egypt, namely the present life, which oppressed us by flattering, may aid us by pressing; and that which while it cherished us wore us down with the yoke of servitude, may, while it torments us, show the way of liberty. This assuredly is the reason why the just are allowed to be afflicted by the unjust: namely, that while they hear of future good things which they may desire, they may also suffer present evils which they may dread, and that, while love allures toward an easier departure, torment may drive them on. Whence Elihu, treating of these same labors of the elect under the oppressions of the reprobate, says: