Teaching Christianity
ewes coming up from the washing, which all give birth to twins, and there is not one among them that is barren (Sg 4:2)? Are you learning anything different than when you hear this in plain words, without the help of this comparison? And yet I don't know how it is, but I find it more delightful to contemplate the saints when I see them as the Church's teeth that cut people off from their errors, and after softening up their hardness by biting them off and chewing them transfer them into its body. I also get enormous pleasure from recognizing who the shorn ewes are, the burdens of the world laid aside like their fleeces, as they come up from the wash, that is from baptism, and all give birth to twins, that is to the two commandments of love, and from seeing that none of them is barren and lacking this holy fertility.
8. But why I should see this with greater pleasure than if no such comparison were forthcoming from the divine books, it is hard to say, since the subject is the same, and the knowledge is the same; in any case, that is another question. What is not in dispute, all the same, is both that one gets to know things more enjoyably through such comparisons, and also that discovering things is much more gratifying if there has been some difficulty in the search for them. Those, after all, who never discover what they are looking for suffer from starvation, while those who do not have to look, because everything is ready to hand, often start wilting out of sheer boredom; in either case a malady to be avoided.
Magnificent and salutary, therefore, is the way the Holy Spirit has so adjusted the holy scriptures, that they ward off starvation with the clearer passages, while driving away boredom with the obscurer ones. There is almost nothing, in fact, that can be extracted from their obscurities, which cannot be found very plainly said somewhere else.
7, 9. What is needed above all else, therefore, is to be converted by the fear of God[6] to wishing to know his will, what he bids us seek and shun. Now this fear of necessity