De Consideratione

6. How is it then with you? Are you not yet awake, and on your guard against those who have surrounded you with the snares of death? Pray bear with me yet a little while. Nay, rather, pardon me when I say these things with less temerity than timidity. I am jealous over you with a godly jealousy, and I would it were as profitable as it is strong. I know where you dwell; unbelievers and subverters are with you. They are wolves, not sheep; but you are the shepherd of these as well as of the rest. The consideration will be profitable if it leads you to the discovery of some means of converting them lest they subvert you. They were sheep and turned into wolves; why despair of their turning back again into sheep? Here, here, I do not spare you, so that God may spare you. At least either deny that you are shepherd over this people, or show that you are. You will not deny it, lest he, whose chair you fill, deny that you are his heir. I mean, of course, Peter, who never, so far as can be ascertained, paraded himself decked with gems, or robed in silks; he was not covered with gold, he did not ride on a white steed, he was not surrounded by soldiers, nor fenced off from his flock by noisy attendants. He thought that without all this he could amply fulfil the salutary command, ‘If you love me, feed my sheep.’¹ In all this painted pomp you are not Peter’s successor, but Constantine’s. What I insist on is that while you may tolerate such pomp and glory to suit the time, you must not claim it as a debt due to you. I rather urge you to consider those things which are a debt due from you. If on state occasions you are robed in purple and decked with gold, I am sure this does not mean that you, the shepherd's heir, shrink from the shepherd's toil, or the shepherd's care; it does not imply that you are ashamed of the Gospel. Albeit, if you willingly preach the Gospel, you, too, have a glorious place among the apostles. To preach the Gospel is to feed the sheep. Do the work of an evangelist, and you have done the work of a shepherd.

7. 'You are advising me', you say, 'to feed dragons and scorpions, not sheep.' For that very reason, I reply, set about them; but with the word, not with the sword. Why should you again try to use the sword, which you were once for all bidden to put into its sheath? Yet if any one should deny that you have the sword, he does not seem to me to have paid sufficient attention to his Lord's words, 'Put back thy sword into the sheath.'² To you, then, the sword belongs, and it should be unsheathed, it may be with your consent, though not by your hand. Otherwise, if it no way belonged to you, when the apostles said, 'Lo, here are two swords,'³ the Lord would not have replied, 'It is enough'; He would have said, 'They are too many.' Both swords belong to the Church, the spiritual and the material; the one is to be used to defend the Church, but the other must even be banished from the Church; the one is wielded by the priest, the other by the soldier, but of course with your consent, and at the command of the Emperor. More of this elsewhere. Now, however, seize the sword which was entrusted to you that you might strike; wound, for the saving of their souls, if not all, if not many even, at all events as many as you can.

8. You say, 'I am not better than my fathers.' I will not ask to which of your fathers this exasperating house ever hearkened, which of them it did not mock. Therefore do you the more firmly take your stand if haply they may hear, and be still; insist even when they resist. When I speak thus, I shall, perhaps, be said to use extravagant language. Was it I who said, 'Be instant in season, out of season'?⁴ Call the apostle 'extravagant' if you dare. The prophet is commanded to 'cry aloud and cease not'.⁵ To whom was he to cry unless it was to the wicked and to sinners? 'Declare unto my people their wickedness, and to the house of Jacob their sins.'⁶ Carefully observe that the same people are called 'wicked', and 'the people of the Lord'. Take the same view of those with whom you have to do. Although they are wicked, although they are unrighteous, see that you are not told, 'Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of my brethren, ye did it not to me.'⁷ I admit that this people has ever been of a hard forehead and of a wild heart; but I fail to see how you can know that their heart cannot be tamed. What has never been may yet be. You may despair, but with God no word shall be impossible.⁸ If they are of a hard forehead, do you also harden yours. Nothing is so hard that it does not yield to that which is harder. The Lord said to the prophet, 'I have made thy forehead harder than their foreheads.'⁹ If you have so dealt with that people that you can say, 'My people, what ought I to have done for thee that I have not done,' this is your only sound defence. If you have thus done, and yet have done no good, there is still something that you can do, something that you can say. Go forth from Ur of the Chaldees,¹⁰ and say, ‘I must preach the Gospel also to other cities.’¹¹ I think you will not regret your exile if you exchange Rome for the world.