These and the like are the much-coveted treasures of the peace which men admire and praise so loudly—treasures enshrined in the mind of every fool with wonder and veneration. But to every wise man they are, as they should be, a source of pain, and often will he say to his mother and nurse, wisdom, “O mother, how great didst thou bear me!” Great, not in power of body, but in strength to hate evil, a man of displeasure and combat, by nature a man of peace, but for this very cause also a man of war against those who dishonour the much-prized loveliness of peace. “I did not owe nor did they owe to me,” for neither did they use the good I had to give, nor I their evil, but, as Moses wrote, “I received from none of them what they desired” (Num. 16:15). For all that comes under the head of their desire they kept as treasure to themselves, believing that to be the greatest blessing which was the supreme mischief. “Nor did my strength fail from the curses which they laid upon me,” but with all my might and main I clung to the divine truths; I did not bend under their ill-treatment, but used my strength to reproach those who refused to effect their own purification. For “God has set us up for a contradiction to our neighbours,” as is said in a verse of the Psalms (Ps. 79 7); us, that is all who desire right judgement. Yes, surely they are by nature men of contradiction, all who have ever been zealous for knowledge and virtue, who contend jealously with the “neighbours” of the soul; who test the pleasures which share our home, the desires which live at our side, our fears and faintings of heart, and put to shame the tribe of passions and vices. Further, they test also every sense, the eyes on what they see, the ears on what they hear, the sense of smell on its perfumes, the taste on its flavours, the touch on the characteristics which mark the qualities of substances as they come in contact with it. And lastly they test the utterance on the statements which it has been led to make. For what our senses perceive, or our speech expresses, or our emotion causes us to feel, and how or why each result is attained, are matters which we should scrutinize carefully and expose every error that we find. He who contradicts none of these, but assents to all as they come before him, is unconsciously deceiving himself and raising up a stronghold of dangerous neighbours to menace the soul, neighbours who should be dealt with as subjects, not as rulers. For if they have the mastery, since folly is their king, the mischief they work will be great and manifold; but as subjects they will render due service and obey the rein, and chafe no more against the yoke. And, when these have thus learnt the lesson of obedience, and those have assumed the command which not only knowledge but power has given them, all the thoughts that attend and guard the soul will be one in purpose and approaching Him that ranks highest among them will speak thus: “Thy servants have taken the sum of the men of war who were with us, and there is no discordant voice” (Num. 31:49). “We,” they will continue, “like instruments of music where all the notes are in perfect tune, echo with our voices all the lessons we have received. We speak no word and do no deed that is harsh or grating, and thus we have made a laughing-stock of all that other dead and voiceless choir, the choir of those who know not the muse, the choir which hymns Midian, the nurse of things bodily, and her offspring, the heavy leathern weight whose name is Baal-Peor. For we are the ‘race of the Chosen ones of that Israel’ who sees God, ‘and there is none amongst us of discordant voice’ ” (Ex. 24:11), that so the whole world, which is the instrument of the All, may be filled with the sweet melody of its undiscording harmonies. And therefore too Moses tells us how peace was assigned as the prize of that most warlike reason, called Phinehas (Num. 25:12), because, inspired with zeal for virtue and waging war against vice, he ripped open all created being; how in their turn that prize is given to those who, after diligent and careful scrutiny, following the more certain testimony of sight, rather than hearing, have the will to accept the faith that mortality is full of unfaith and clings only to the seeming. Wonderful then indeed is the symphony of voices here described, but most wonderful of all, exceeding every harmony, is that united universal symphony in which we find the whole people declaring with one heart, “All that God hath said we will do and hear” (Ex. 19:8). Here the precentor whom they follow is no longer the Word, but God the Sovereign of all, for whose sake they become quicker to meet the call to action than the call of words. For other men act after they have heard, but these under the divine inspiration say—strange inversion—that they will act first and hear afterwards, that so they may be seen to go forward to deeds of excellence, not led by teaching or instruction, but through the self-acting, self-dictated instinct of their own hearts. And when they have done , then, as they say, they will hear , that so they may judge their actions, whether they chime with the divine words and the sacred admonitions.
On the Confusion of Tongues 13
Tap any verse to see what it echoes — and start a chain or echo from it.