約伯倫理 第 373 章

Verse 18. — 'Thou visitest him at the dawn, and suddenly thou provest him.' 48. Those whom God has enriched with gifts, He proves with temptations, that they may learn what they are from God, what from themselves. Therefore they are then troubled with slippery thoughts. Who of us knows not that it is called dawn when the times of night are now changed into the brightness of light? We therefore are pressed by the darkness of night when we are darkened by the perpetration of iniquity. But night is turned into light when the obscurity of our error is irradiated by the knowledge of the truth. Night is turned into light when the splendour of righteousness illuminates our hearts, which the blindness of guilt had depressed. This dawn Paul had beheld to rise in the minds of the disciples when he said: 'The night is past, and the day is at hand' (Rom.

xiii, 12). At the dawn therefore the Lord visits us, because He illumines the darkness of our error with the light of His knowledge, uplifts us with the gift of contemplation, exalts us into the citadel of virtue. But it must be noted that God, after He visits at the dawn, suddenly proves the man, because both by approaching He advances our hearts to virtues, and by receding He permits us to be shaken by temptation. For if after the gifts of virtues one is shaken by no temptation, the mind glories to have these of itself. That therefore it may both have the gifts of firmness and humbly acknowledge its own infirmity, by the access of grace it is raised aloft, and by the recess it is proved what it is of itself. Which is well intimated to us from the history of the sacred lesson (3 Kings

iii, 16), in which Solomon is recorded both to have received wisdom divinely, and yet, after receiving that same wisdom, to have been at once assailed by the question of the harlots. For as soon as he received the grace of so great a revelation, he endured the contest of vile women, because assuredly often when the regard of the inmost bounty illumines our mind with granted virtues, slippery thoughts straightway also trouble it, so that she who exults uplifted by the immense gift may, being also assailed by temptation, find what she is. So Elijah, both visited at the dawn, opened the heavens by a word; and yet, being suddenly proved, fleeing weak through the deserts, dreaded one woman (3 Kings xix, 3).

So Paul is led up to the third heaven, penetrating he considers the secrets of paradise (2 Cor. xii, 2); and yet, returning to himself, he labours against the war of the flesh, sustains another law in his members, by whose rebellion within himself the spirit grieves that it is wearied by the law (Rom. vii, 21). At the dawn therefore God visits, but suddenly after the visitation He proves, because both by conferred gift He uplifts, and by withdrawing it for a little, He shows man to himself. Which without doubt we suffer even to the end that, the stain of sin being utterly wiped away, we may be reformed to the substance of the promised incorruption. Whence it is still aptly subjoined: