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BY those instances then which we have brought forward from the gospel
records we can very clearly perceive that God brings salvation to mankind
in diverse and innumerable methods and inscrutable ways, and that He stirs
up the course of some, who are already wanting it, and thirsting for it, to
greater zeal, while He forces some even against their will, and resisting.
And that at one time He gives his assistance for the fulfilment of those
things which he sees that we desire for our good, while at another time He
puts into us the very beginnings of holy desire, and grants both the
commencement of a good work and perseverance in it. Hence it comes that in
our prayers we proclaim God as not only our Protector and Saviour, but
actually as our Helper and Sponsor. For whereas He first calls us to Him,
and while we are still ignorant and unwilling, draws us towards salvation,
He is our Protector and Saviour, but whereas when we are already striving,
He is wont to bring us help, and to receive and defend those who fly to Him
for refuge, He is termed our Sponsor and Refuge. Finally the blessed
Apostle when revolving in his mind this manifold bounty of God's
providence, as he sees that he has fallen into some vast and boundless
ocean of God's goodness, exclaims: "O the depth of the riches of the wisdom
and knowledge of God! How inscrutable are the judgments of God and His ways
past finding out! For who hath known the mind of the Lord?" Whoever then
imagines that he can by human reason fathom the depths of that
inconceivable abyss, will be trying to explain away the astonishment at
that knowledge, at which that great and mighty teacher of the gentiles was
awed. For if a man thinks that he can either conceive in his mind or
discuss exhaustively the dispensation of God whereby He works salvation in
men, he certainly impugns the truth of the Apostle's words and asserts with
profane audacity that His judgments can be scrutinized, and His ways
searched out. This providence and love of God therefore, which the Lord in
His unwearied goodness vouchsafes to show us, He compares to the tenderest
heart of a kind mother, as He wishes to express it by a figure of human
affection, and finds in His creatures no such feeling of love, to which he
could better compare it. And He uses this example, because nothing dearer
can be found in human nature, saying: "Can a mother forget her child, that
she should not have compassion on the son of her womb?" But not content
with this comparison He at once goes beyond it, and subjoins these words:
"And though she may forget, yet will not I forget thee."
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