III. To Burgundus and his Wife Richera, on Burgundius' departure as a Pilgrim to Jerusalem.
St. Anselm The Devotions of Saint Anselm Archbishop of Canterbury forbid!—it lose and go backward. For in the practice of virtue, as it is harder to attain something new by effort than to lose something old by sloth, so it is more difficult to recover what is lost by negligence than to acquire what one has not yet been observed to possess. Therefore, my beloved friends, always count what is past as nothing, yet without being ashamed to hold that fast to which you have once attained; and though from infirmity you fail to add anything new thereto, yet always strive to do so, without giving in. For that among many called few only are chosen,234 we are assured by the word of the Truth Himself; but we are all ignorant how few are chosen, for concerning this that same Truth was silent. And so whoever does not yet live as those few live who are chosen, must either amend his life, so as to set himself among the few; or else have a sure and certain fear of reprobation: but if a man think he is already one of the few, he ought not straightway to be confident that he is chosen. For since none of us knows how few the elect may be, no man can know that he is already one of the few elect, although he be already like the few among the many called. And so no one should look behind him, and think how many are not so far advanced as he in the way to the heavenly country; but one should look steadily forward and anxiously ask himself, whether he is walking as well as those of whose election no one doubts. See then, my dearest friends, that nothing cool the fear of God which you have conceived; but grow more and more fervent from day to day, as though the fire in you was fanned by your unwearying zeal, until it be changed for you into the steadfast light of eternal security.
Farewell, my most loving friends; and I beg you, by the brotherly love you owe me, pray with special earnestness that 1, who exhort you to improvement, may not myself finish that miserable course of failure which I began long since, and now have almost done.235
III236 To Burgundus and his Wife Richera,237 on Burgundius' departure as a Pilgrim to Jerusalem.
Matt. xx. 16.
Anselm cannot have been more than forty-five at this time, but his health was probably already injured by his austerities.
He lived however to be seventy-six.
This is Letter LXVI. of Book III. in Gerberon's edition.
Richera was St Anselm's only sister, and Burgundius was her husband. Their only son was a younger Anselm, at this time a professed monk and in attendance upon his uncle, now Archbishop of Canterbury and, as appears from a letter written soon after this to his sister, in the midst of his dispute with Henry I. about the homage claimed from him by the king.