ing and misery do me since I expect such a great and glorious happiness? What injury have I to fear from any accident or misfortune since in the next life I shall possess all goods in abundance? TV hat can death with all the illnesses that may precede it take away from me, since I have the certain hope that this very body of mine, although it must decay in the earth for a time, shall rise again complete and live forever in a glorious eternity?
This thought consoled holy Job in his great affliction. Go again in thought, my dear brethren, to holy Job, who, although he lived long before the time of Our Lord, was not only infallibly certain in his faith, as we have heard already, but was also filled with consolation by his hope. What made him so patient and undaunted under his many sufferings and calamities, the least of which could have vanquished the greatest hero and thrown him into despair? What else but the hope of his future resurrection placed him on a throne as it were like an exultant champion triumphing over all his miseries? Come here, all ye men of the world! Consider for a moment that wonderful man who was renowned in the whole East: “This man was great among all the people of the East,”[1] whom the world for a long time beheld in the enjoyment of all its goods and riches, its honors and comforts, surrounded by an illustrious and numerous family, waited on by a crowd of servants, honored by strangers as well as friends, in a word, fenced in, as Satan reproached him with in the presence of God, by temporal prosperity and happiness: see how in a moment he is reduced to beggary, all his cattle driven off by the enemy, his property destroyed by fire, his servants gone from him to find other masters, his houses thrown to the ground by the wind, his children crushed to death, he himself abandoned to all the rage and wantonness of the devil, and stricken in his body with such a grievous sore that he looked like a monster of deformity and a mass of corruption. In this extreme necessity, abandoned by his friends, mocked and cursed by his own wife, he was forced by the intolerable smell of his sores to go forth from the house and sit on the dung-hill and scrape off with a potsherd the mutter that flowed from his suffering body. Even the very stones might have pitied his miserable state! And yet in the midst of all these calamities, the bare mention of which makes us shudder, he sat there consoled and contented, blessing and praising God! Go some one, with his wife and jeering friends, and reproach him with his vain hope on
- ↑ Eratque vir ille magnus inter omnes Orientales.—Job i. 3.
