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"What things soever were written, were written for our instruction, that through patience and the consolation of the Scriptures, we might have hope unto life everlasting." Patience and consolation; patience and consolation — patience in bearing with others, and the consolation of having others bear patiently with us, so that reading the Scriptures with faith, we learn mutual charity and so hope unto life everlasting. But, " patience and consolation " have here a still deeper meaning. They give us the double secret of Christian resignation taught in the Bible from Genesis to the Apocalypse and embodied first in St. Paul's words: " All that wish to live piously in Christ must suffer persecution," and secondly in the words of the Psalmist: "I am with him in tribulation, I will deliver him and I will glorify him." No cross, no crown; through a gloomy Good Friday must we go to a glorious Easter Day, for every true disciple must take up his cross and follow the Master. Nay, the more holy one is, the more tribulation he experiences, for Christ says: " The branch that bears fruit I will prune, that it may bear fruit the more." Through many tribulations men enter into the kingdom of heaven. And why? First, because man wills it, and secondly, because God ordains it. The good and the bad in this world are like fire and water. You plunge a live coal into water — the temperature of the water is raised and the coal is extinguished. So, too, the brighter virtue shines in this world, the hotter grows the angry persecution of the wicked to dim its lustre. No where, not even in the little band