約伯倫理 第 1141 章

Verse 21. — 'Take heed lest you turn aside to iniquity; for this you have begun to follow after your misery.' 85. Then impatience is to be guarded against, which is undeservedly charged upon Job. — He follows iniquity after misery who, after the evils which he endures for correction, inflames himself with the torches of impatience with a fervent heart. Which Elihu believed blessed Job to have perpetrated, since he heard him, set amid scourges, uttering with free voices; not knowing, forsooth, that everything he said, he brought forth not from the iniquity of impatience, but from the virtue of truth; who did not err from the sentence of the interior Judge even while he justified himself. But it is greatly to be considered how, when he said, 'Do not turn aside to iniquity,' he immediately subjoined concerning the same iniquity:

'For this you have begun to follow after your misery.' 86. The proud know not how to keep measure in accusing. — What is this, that while he forbids one to turn aside to it, he immediately condemns him as though for one to which he had already turned aside, unless because arrogant men wish to seem judges rather than consolers? Whence also sometimes they strike with strict sentences those things which they suspect to have arisen in the heart; and before the fault of offenders is certain, the strict invective of words is brought forth; and one is struck by a sentence before that comes forth which is to be struck. 87. The discretion of the saints in correcting. — Although just men too very often meet by argument depraved and hardened thoughts;

yet when some preceding works make manifest those same thoughts, they very often, by the hand of correction, eradicate from the hearts of their hearers those vices which have not yet been brought forth, but which they behold to be about to follow from other things which precede. For just as bodily physicians find certain sicknesses already to have come, but heal others before they come, so holy teachers sometimes restore to health the wounds they have found, but sometimes act within minds lest they be wounded. In which it is to be carefully observed, that just as they very often reprove certain things with asperity, so uncertain vices they contradict even with tranquility; striking, they rebuke things certain; forearming against, they turn aside things uncertain.

Because arrogant men know not this rule of discretion, with the javelins of their sentences they pierce things unknown as if known, things uncertain as if certain. Whence now it is said by Elihu: 'Take heed lest you turn aside to iniquity; for this you have begun to follow after your misery.' But because the things that are subjoined are drawn out with a longer allegation, we bind up this little book with this ending, lest it be extended more immoderately.