On Patience 12

As for the discipline of peace, most pleasing to God: who that is born for impatience will ever forgive his brother even once, not to say seven times, or seventy times seven? Who, taking his case to the judge with his adversary, will settle it by agreement, unless he has first done away with anger, harshness, bitterness, the veins, that is, of impatience? How will you forgive and be forgiven if, for lack of patience, you hold on to an injury? No one whose mind is torn against his brother will complete his offering at the altar unless he has first returned to patience by reconciling himself to his brother. If the sun sets on our anger, we are in danger; we are not allowed to remain one day without patience. But since patience governs every form of saving discipline, what wonder that it also ministers to repentance? Accustomed to help the fallen, it waits for, longs for, and prays for repentance for those who will at some time enter upon salvation. How much good it confers on both when a marriage has been dissolved (for that cause, however, for which it is lawful for either husband or wife to be kept persevering in widowhood): it does not make the one an adulterer, and it amends the other. So too it is present in those examples of the Lord's parables about repentance, to save: the shepherd's patience seeks and finds the straying sheep (for impatience would easily despise one, but patience undertakes the labor of the search), and moreover carries back on its shoulders, a patient bearer, the sinful one who had been abandoned. That prodigal son, too, the father's patience receives, clothes, and feeds, and excuses before the impatience of the angry brother. He is saved, then, who had perished, because he entered upon repentance; repentance did not perish, because it found patience. Now love, the highest sacrament of faith, the treasure of the Christian name, which the apostle commends with all the strength of the Holy Spirit, by whose disciplines is it taught if not by patience's? “Love,” he says, “is magnanimous”: this it takes from patience. “It is kind”: patience does no evil. “It is not envious”: that indeed is proper to patience. “Nor does it savor of insolence”: it has drawn its modesty from patience. “It is not puffed up, it is not insolent”: for this does not belong to patience. “Nor does it seek its own”: it gives up its own, provided it may benefit another. “Nor is it provoked”: otherwise, what would it have left to impatience? Therefore, he says, “love endures all things, bears all things,” certainly because it is patient. Rightly, then, “it will never fail.” For the rest will be made void, completed, exhausted: tongues, knowledge, prophecies; “but faith, hope, love remain”: faith, which the patience of Christ brought in; hope, which the patience of man awaits; love, which patience accompanies, with God as teacher.