the enmities will come, and will grow until they come to mortal hatred, to kill
CHAPTER 4: The Pure in Heart Peacemakers and the PersecuteD
the enmities will come, and will grow until they come to mortal hatred, to kill and wound, and to spare nothing. This is how impatience is the cause that men cannot be peaceful together, but are agitated by troubles in their own right, so much so that each one is like a devil to his neighbor. Let us therefore learn to be patient, and not be so devoted to our own advantage or our honor that we cannot easily forgive the wrongs that will be done to us. This, I say, is how peaceful we will be.
And moreover, it is not enough, although we do not give occasion to anyone to molest and annoy us: but we must pursue peace as long as we have it: and even if we have to bear some damage, and we have to give up part of our right, if we nevertheless have to pass. For peace must be so precious to us, as God recommends it to us, that everything else is nothing to us. Now when a man does not cause any trouble, when he does not annoy anyone, when he also gives no one cause for complaint, and for him not to be assailed, or even if he is, he will gently bear many harms, rather than making great pursuits: after all this, we must still practice the doctrine that Jesus teaches here, which is that we try to make peace in everything. It is not enough therefore for everyone to abstain from all excess, evildoing, or harm: but when we see someone having a bad cause, we must oppose it: when we see some innocent poor person afflicted, we must maintain him as much as we can: and try to provide for him and relieve him. When we see two men pitted against each other, let us have pity to see two souls in the process of perdition, who have been redeemed by the blood of our Lord Jesus Christ: let it look bad on us because the devil dominates, who is the prince of all contention, and let God be rejected, who is the author of peace: and then we try to appease all quarrels. And this is also why God curses on the contrary those who sow discord and enmity between men, who are like firebrands, and who by their relations make former friends hate one another: or if when there is something opening that one suspects of the other, we comes along to inflame their suspicions. Because it is as if there were a wound, and instead of there put some good ointment to cure it, someone poured poison into it or venom, to enpoison and set fire to it. So let's learn here that we are as if banished from the school of our Lord Jesus Christ and his church, when we cause quarrels and enmity between people: and on the contrary, that to be his disciples not only must each of us be peaceable in its place: but that we try, enas long as we have, to break all enmities, and cut them down, to dampen the fire when it is lit, and also to obviate all quarrels: when we seelet's hope that a few