Saint Augustine (354-430)

On Patience

Translated by H. Browne

Chapter 15

For, as the Divine utterances testify, “God is love, and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God dwelleth in him.” Whoso therefore contends that love of God may be had without aid of God, what else does he contend, but that God may be had without God? Now what Christian would say this, which no madman would venture to say? Therefore in the Apostle, true, pious, faithful patience, saith exultingly, and by the mouth of the Saints; “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written, For Thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter. Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him that loved us”: not through ourselves, but, “through Him that loved us.” And then he goes on and adds; “For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” This is that “love of God” which “is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit which is given unto us.” But the concupiscence of the bad, by reason of which there is in them a false patience, “is not of the Father,” as saith the Apostle John, but is of the world.

Chapter 14

Chapter 16