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24. If the sentence is one of command, either forbidding a crime or
vice, or enjoining an act of prudence or benevolence, it is not
figurative. If, however, it seems to enjoin a crime or vice, or to
forbid an act of prudence or benevolence, it is figurative. "Except
ye eat the flesh of the Son of man," says Christ, "and drink His
blood, ye have no life in you." This seems to enjoin a crime or a
vice; it is therefore a figure, enjoining that we should have a share
in the sufferings of our Lord, and that we should retain a sweet and
profitable memory of the fact that His flesh was wounded and crucified
for us. Scripture says: "If thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he
thirst, give him drink;" and this is beyond doubt a command to do a
kindness. But in what follows, "for in so doing thou shall heap
coals of fire on his head," one would think a deed of malevolence was
enjoined. Do not doubt, then, that the expression is figurative;
and, while it is possible to interpret it in two ways, one pointing to
the doing of an injury, the other to a display of superiority, let
charity on the contrary call you back to benevolence, and interpret the
coals of fire as the burning groans of penitence by which a man's pride
is cured who bewails that he has been the enemy of one who came to his
assistance in distress. In the same way, when our Lord says, "He
who loveth his life shall lose it," we are not to think that He
forbids the prudence with which it is a man's duty to care for his
life, but that He says in a figurative sense, "Let him lose his
life" that is, let him destroy and lose that perverted and unnatural
use which he now makes of his life, and through which his desires are
fixed on temporal things so that he gives no heed to eternal. It is
written: "Give to the godly man, and help not a sinner." The
latter clause of this sentence seems to forbid benevolence; for it
says, "help not a sinner." Understand, therefore, that "sinner"
is put figuratively for sin, so that it is his sin you are not to
help.
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