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FOR Elisha, himself one of them, teaches that the same men used to
carry a staff; as he says to Gehazi, his servant, when sending him to raise
the woman's son to life: "Take my staff and run and go and place it on the
lad's face that he may live." And the prophet would certainly not have
given it to him to take unless he had been in the habit of constantly
carrying it about in his hand. And the carrying of the staff spiritually
teaches that they ought never to walk unarmed among so many barking dogs of
faults and invisible beasts of spiritual wickedness (from which the blessed
David, in his longing to be free, says: "Deliver not, O Lord, to the beasts
the soul that trusteth in Thee"), but when they attack them they ought
to beat them off with the sign of the cross and drive them far away; and
when they rage furiously against them they should annihilate them by the
constant recollection of the Lord's passion and by following the example of
His mortified life.
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