giving more attentive thought to your souls, and chastising your bodies. These,
SERMON 209
ON THE BEGINNING OF LENT
Date: uncertain1
Let charity be exercised by your living good lives
1. The solemn season has come round when I must remind your graces about giving more attentive thought to your souls, and chastising your bodies. These, you see, are the forty days held so sacred in all countries of the earth, that the whole world, which God reconciles to himself in Christ,2 celebrates them to¬ gether with remarkable devotion as Easter approaches. If there are any animosi¬ ties which should never have been bom, or should promptly have died, and yet have been able to persist between brothers or sisters up to this very moment, whether out of heedlessness or stubbornness, or a proud and certainly not modest kind of shame, then let them now at least be terminated, such as the sun ought not to have been allowed to set on,3 at least after so many sunrises and sunsets let them at last be extinguished by their own setting below the horizon, never further to be renewed by any rising.
The heedless person forgets to put an end to a quarrel; the stubborn one is loath to grant pardon when asked; the person who is proudly ashamed disdains to beg pardon. Animosities live on in these three vices; but they kill the soul in which they don't die. Let a spirit of recollection keep watch against heedless¬ ness, of compassion against vindictive stubbornness, of gentle good sense against proud shame. If you recall that you have neglected to make it up with someone, then wake up and shake off your torpor. If you are so keen to exact payment from your debtor, just think for a moment that you are God's debtor. If you are ashamed to ask your brother or sister to forgive you, overcome this bad sort of shame with a good sort of fear, so that with destructive animosities terminated, with them finally dead, you yourselves may live.
All this is the work of charity, which does not act crookedly (1 Cor 13:4). So let charity, my brothers and sisters, insofar as it is present among you, be exercised by your living good lives; while insofar as there is little of it there, let it be obtained by your praying for it.