約伯倫理 第 532 章

Verse 23. — 'How many are my iniquities and sins? Show me my crimes and offences.' 57. God calls us when he chooses us by loving. We answer him by obeying. What difference there is between sin, and crimes and offences. Although 'to call' and 'to answer' can also be understood otherwise. For to call is God's part: to regard us by loving and choosing. But to answer is ours: to obey his love by good works. Where fittingly is added: 'Or else I will speak, and do thou answer me.' For we speak when we seek his face through desire. And God answers those who speak when he appears to us who love him.

But because whoever pants with desire for eternity, reproaching himself subtly, examines his own deeds, and seeks lest there be anything in him whereby he might offend the face of his Author, rightly he subjoins: 'How many are my iniquities and sins? Show me my crimes and offences.' This is the labour of the righteous in this life: that they may find themselves out, and, finding, may by weeping and correcting lead themselves on to better things. And although John the apostle holds that there is no difference between iniquity and sin, when he says, 'Iniquity is sin' (1 John 3:4), yet by very usage of speech 'iniquity' sounds more than 'sin,' and every man freely confesses himself a sinner, but sometimes blushes to call himself iniquitous.

Between crimes and offences this difference exists, that a crime exceeds even the weight of sin, but an offence does not exceed the weight of sin; for when sacrifice is bidden to be offered through the Law, it is enjoined, without doubt, just as for sin, so also for offence. And a crime is never except in deed, but an offence is often in thought alone. Hence also it is said through the Psalmist: 'Who understands his offences?' (Ps. 18:13). Because, clearly, sins of deed are known the more quickly, the more they are seen outwardly; but sins of thought are the harder to understand, the more invisibly they are perpetrated.

Whoever therefore, anxious with desire for eternity, longs to appear clean before the Judge who is to come, examines himself now the more subtly, the more he considers this: that he may then stand free of that terror, and entreats that it be shown him wherein he displeases, that he may punish this in himself through penance, and, judging himself here, may become unjudgeable. 58. Through sin we come into such blindness that we are ignorant of our very selves. — But amid these things it is necessary to observe how great a penalty of our pilgrimage has struck us, who have come into such blindness that we are ignorant of our very selves. We commit evils, and yet do not more quickly detect them, or even, once committed.

For the mind, shut out from the light of truth, finds nothing in itself but darkness, and often stretches its foot into the pit of sin, and knows it not. This, without doubt, it suffers solely from the blindness of its own exile, because, thrust back from the illumination of the Lord, it has lost the power even to see itself — it which did not love the face of its Author. Hence it is subjoined: