Chapter 16
24. If the sentence is one of command, either forbidding a crime or vice, or
enjoining an act of prudence or benevolence, it is not figurative. If,
however, it seems to enjoin a crime or vice, or to forbid an act of prudence
or benevolence, it is figurative. "Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man,"
says Christ, "and drink His blood, ye have no life in you." This seems to
enjoin a crime or a vice; it is therefore a figure, enjoining that we should
have a share in the sufferings of our Lord, and that we should retain a sweet
and profitable memory of the fact that His flesh was wounded and crucified for
us. Scripture says: "If thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him
drink;" and this is beyond doubt a command to do a kindness. But in what
follows, "for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head," one
would think a deed of malevolence was enjoined. Do not doubt, then, that the
expression is figurative; and, while it is possible to interpret it in two
ways, one pointing to the doing of an injury, the other to a display of
superiority, let charity on the contrary call you back to benevolence, and
interpret the coals of fire as the burning groans of penitence by which a
man's pride is cured who bewails that he has been the enemy of one who came to
his assistance in distress. In the same way, when our Lord says, "He who
loveth his life shall lose it," we are not to think that He forbids the
prudence with which it is a man's duty to care for his life, but that He says
in a figurative sense, "Let him lose his life"—that is, let him destroy and
lose that perverted and unnatural use which he now makes of his life, and
through which his desires are fixed on temporal things so that he gives no
heed to eternal. It is written: "Give to the godly man, and help not a
sinner." The latter clause of this sentence seems to forbid benevolence; for
it says, "help not a sinner." Understand, therefore, that "sinner" is put
figuratively for sin, so that it is his sin you are not to help.
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