2 Corinthians

"I will dwell in them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people," if we conduct ourselves according to the commandments, whether each of us severally or the whole Church together.

of a particular man, as, for example, of Paul, that he alone was caught up to the third heaven and heard unspeakable words that are not lawful for a man to utter;

For in truth they suspect that the Apostle Paul, in the second to the Corinthians, gave pardon to that same fornicator whom in the first he had pronounced should be handed over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh — the impious heir of his father's marriage-bed — as though he had even afterward turned his pen, writing:

And the word of Būlus, “We know that so long as we remain in this body we are far from our Lord, and likewise we long to part from it that we may draw near to Him, the Exalted” (5).

for in this we groan, longing to be clothed upon with our dwelling that is from heaven, if indeed, being clothed, we shall not be found naked;

After these things, or before these, when you have said that he too has his own creation and his own world and his own heaven — concerning that third heaven indeed we shall see, if we come also to the examination of your apostle — meanwhile, whatever substance it is, it ought certainly to have appeared together with its own god.

"For we know," he says, "that even if the earthly house of this our tabernacle be dissolved, we have a house not made with hands, eternal, in the heavens" — that is, through this, that our flesh shall be dissolved through sufferings, we are to attain a dwelling in the heavens.

or, for the cause of restraint, as the Apostle relates that there was given him "a stake, an angel of Satan, to buffet him"—and not even this kind is permitted to the devil against the saints to humble them through the vexation of the flesh, except at the same time that the virtue of endurance too may be perfected in infirmity.

But Paul the apostle, of a persecutor — who first shed the blood of the Church — afterwards changing the sword for the pen and turning the falchion into a ploughshare, "a ravening wolf of Benjamin," thereafter himself bringing food, according to Jacob — how does he commend martyrdoms as now even to be desired by himself!