stance that our hearer docs not apprehend what we mean, so
288 ON CATECHISING. [CHAP. X.
feelings, we undertake uilh no sense of pleasure what they desire ; and then, certainly, the discourse will be languid and unenjoyable which is transmitted through the agitated and fuming cliannel of a heart in that condition. Consequently, seeing there are so many causes serving to cloud the calm serenity of our minds, in accordance with God's will we must seek remedies for them, such as may bring us relief from these feelings of heaviness, and help us to rejoice in fervour of spirit, and to be jocund in the tranquillity of a good work. " Por God loveth a cheerful giver."
15. Now if the cause of our sadness lies in the circumstance that our hearer docs not apprehend what we mean, so that we have to come down in a certain fashion from the elevation of our own conceptions, and are under the necessity of dwelling long in the tedious processes of syllables which come far beneath the standard of our ideas, and have anxiously to consider how that which we ourselves take in with a most rapid draught of mental apprehension is to be given forth by the mouth of flesh in the long and perplexed intricacies of its method of enunciation ; and if the gi'eat dissimilarity thus felt
(between our utterance and our thought) makes it distasteful to us to speak, and a pleasure to us to keep silence, then let us ponder what has been set before us by Him who has
" show^ed us an example that we should follow His steps."
For however much our articulate speech may differ from the vivacity of our intelligence, much greater is the difference of the flesh of mortality from the equality of God. And, neverless, " although He was in the same form. He emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant,"—and so on down to the words " the death of the cross." ' AVhat is the explanation of this but that He made Himself " weak to the weak, in order that He might gain the weak " ? * Listen to His follower
> 2 Cor. ix. 7. M Tet. ii. 2.
Pliil. ii. 17. The form in wliicli tlie <inotation is given above, with tlie omission of the intermediate clauses, is due probably to the copyist, and not to
Augustine liimself. Tlie words loft out arc given thus in the Senn. XLVii. on
Kzekitd xx-xiv. : "Being made in the likeness of men, and being found in the fashion of a man : He humbkd Himself, being made obedient unto death, even the death of the cross."
* Cf. 1 Cor. ix. 22.