Top Business Site Offers Excellent Networking Avenues!
efp90uzd
Imagine having the ability to connect with thousands of like - minded
business people!
Expose Your Business to Over 100,000 Entrepreneurs!
Join Free!
efp90uzd
of our inability to reach the good by our own efforts. But example teaches
us little. No resemblance is ever so perfect that there is not some slight
difference; and hence we expect that our hope will not be deceived on this
occasion as before. And thus, while the present never satisfies us,
experience dupes us and, from misfortune to misfortune, leads us to death,
their eternal crown.
What is it, then, that this desire and this inability proclaim to us, but
that there was once in man a true happiness of which there now remain to him
only the mark and empty trace, which he in vain tries to fill from all his
surroundings, seeking from things absent the help he does not obtain in
things present? But these are all inadequate, because the infinite abyss can
only be filled by an infinite and immutable object, that is to say, only by
God Himself. He only is our true good, and since we have forsaken him, it is
a strange thing that there is nothing in nature which has not been
serviceable in taking His place; the stars, the heavens, earth, the
elements, plants, cabbages, leeks, animals, insects, calves,
efp90uzd
unworthy of them and having, nevertheless, desired to foretell them, in
order that they might be believed, foretold the time clearly, and expressed
the things sometimes clearly, but very often in figures, in order that those
who loved symbols might consider them and those who loved what was
symbolised might see it therein.
All that tends not to charity is figurative.
The sole aim of the Scripture is charity.
All which tends not to the sole end is the type of it. For since there is
only one end, all which does not lead to it in express terms is figurative.
God thus varies that sole precept of charity to satisfy our curiosity which
seeks for variety, by that variety which still leads us to the one thing
needful. For one thing alone is needful, and we love variety; and God
satisfies both by these varieties, which lead to the one thing needful.
The Jews have so much loved the shadows and have so strictly expected them
that they have misunderstood the reality, when it came in the time and
manner foretold.
The Rabbis take the breasts of the Spouse for types, and all that does not
express the only end they have, namely, temporal good.
And Christians take even the Eucharist as a type of the glory at which they
aim.
671. The Jews, who have been called to subdue nations and kings, have been
the slaves of sin; and the Christians, whose calling has been to be servants
and subjects, are free children.
672. A formal point.--When Saint Peter and the Apostles deliberated about
abolishing circumcision, where it was a question of acting against the law
of God, they did not heed the prophets, but simply the reception of the Holy
Spirit in the persons uncircumcised.
They thought it more certain that God approved of those whom He filled with
His Spirit than it was that the law must be obeyed. They knew th