Psalms

"Goodness and discipline and knowledge teach me"—exalting the leading faculty of perfection by a gradual ascent.

"The stone," it says, "which the builders reprobated, the same is made into the head of the corner.

342. displaying the beastliness and crookedness of your mind, and the venomous and harmful character of your purpose. Why, then, do you attempt the impossible, wretch? For since I knew that these contrivances and terrors are of your wickedness, I have no more care at all for you. The Lord is my helper, and I shall look upon my enemies; and upon the asp and the basilisk, which you make yourself lik …

and of nature in the universal sense, as when David says, "Man, his days are as grass.

And Dāwūd said:

Gird, says David, your sword upon your thigh.

"Lay hold of instruction, lest at any time the Lord be angry, and you perish from the righteous way, when his wrath is quickly kindled.

"By his Word the heavens were established, and by his Spirit all their powers.

"The kings of the earth stood up" — Herod — "and the rulers were gathered together into one" — Annas and Caiaphas — "against the Lord and against His Christ.

The law of Moses too, for the sanction of capital punishments, gives reasons which operate no less with other nations, than with the Jewish people.

Likewise, if evil indeed is unborn, but the Word of God is born — For my heart, it says, has uttered forth a good word — I do not know whether evil can be drawn from good, the mightier from the weak, as the unborn from the born.

if David too says, ‘Create in me a clean heart, O God,’ and Paul says that one believes with the heart unto righteousness, and John says that each one is reproved by his own heart;

But since it has been declared of the Son himself, "Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels," how will he be seen to have put on an angel, being thus lessened below the angels in becoming man — in respect of which he is flesh and soul and Son of man?

So far is this true, that Isaiah, since he says, "With drums and psalteries and pipes they drink wine," would have said also, "With crowns," if ever this usage had been in the things of God.

" You have at once in the Psalms, "Blessed is the man who has not gone away in the counsel of the impious, nor stood in the way of sinners, and has not sat in the seat of pestilence.

You shall not go after strange gods, and the gods of the nations which are round about you, because the Lord thy God is also a jealous God in the midst of thee, lest, being angered, he be indignant and exterminate thee from the face of the earth.

But we must pursue the other kind, the better, the one that leads to the better—the very kind that David, the poet of the sacred songs, used, when, as they say, he restored the king from his madness.

"The everlasting gates were lifted up, that the King of glory might enter, the Lord of hosts"—who purchased man from the earth, nay, from the lower regions, into the heavens.

"Such become they," he says, "who make these things.