6. Ps. cxUii. 11-15.
POLITICAL WRITINGS 267
My joy is the greater because I discern the yearning of your mind, with its love for eternal life and truth and charity itself, directed toward that divine and heavenly country whose king is Christ, and in which alone we find eternal happiness if we hve uprightly and devoutly in this world, and also because I see you drawmg near to that life and I embrace you in your ardent desire to attain it. This is the source from which true friendship flows, not to be valued by temporal advantages, but to be drunk in through freely given love. No one can be a true friend of man unless he is first a friend of Truth; if friendship does not come into being spontaneously, it cannot exist at all.
Since we know that you are devoted to the public welfare, you must see how plainly the sacred writings show that the happiness of the state has no other source than the happiness of man. One of the sacred writers, filled with the Holy Spirit, speaks thus as he prays: *Rescue me out of the hand of strange children, whose mouth hath spoken vanity: and their right hand is the right hand of iniquity; whose sons are as new plants in their youth: their daughters decked out, adorned round about after the similitude of a temple: their storehouse full, flowing out of this into that, their sheep fruitful in young, abounding in their goings forth: their oxen fat. There is no breach of wall nor passage, nor crying out in their streets. They have called the people happy that hath these things, but happy is the people whose God is the Lord.' ^
You see that a people is not called happy because of an accumulation of earthly good fortune, except by the strange children, that is, by those who do not belong to the regeneration by which we
6. Ps. cxUii. 11-15.