of the Most High,35 who blesses his children within you, and sets as your
172 SAINT A UGUSTINE - SERMONS at his pleasure. In this you will be the more abundantly and richly and plentifully endowed, the more pleasing you are to the one from whom you have received all this. Solicit the favor of the one who knows who are his; and he will not disdain to know you among those who are his, if naming the name of the Lord, you withdraw from injustice (2 Tm 2:19).
You have, or had, parents of your flesh in the world, who bore you to toil and pain and death. But each one of you, more happily bereaved, can say about them My father and my mother have forsaken me (Ps 27:10);32 therefore, Chris¬ tian, acknowledge that Father who, when they forsook you, took you up from your mother's womb, the Father to whom a faithful man trustingly says, From my mother's womb you are my protector (Ps 22:10). God is Father, the Church mother. You will be bom of these parents very, very differently from the way you were bom of those. The birth of offspring here will not be accompanied by labor, by woe, by weeping, by death; but by easiness, by happiness, by joy, and by life. Being bom of those is something to be mourned, being bom of these is something to be desired. Those parents, in giving us birth, bear us to eternal death, because of the ancient fault; these in giving us new birth, cause both fault and punishment to disappear. This is the rebirth of those who seek him, seek the face of the God of Jacob (Ps 24:6). Be lowly in your search, because when you fmd what you seek, you will come to the security of the heights.
There your infancy will be innocence, your childhood reverence, your ado¬ lescence patience, your youth virtue, your middle age merit, your old age nothing less than the white hairs of wisdom and understanding. These are not stages of life through which you will be successively developed, but ages in which you will be permanently renewed. For it will not be the case that as the first falls away the second succeeds it, nor that the rising of the third means the setting of the second, nor that the fourth is bom so that the third may die; the fifth will not grudge the fourth remaining, nor will the sixth give the fifth its funeral.33 While these ages may not come simultaneously, still in the devoted and justified soul they persist together and in harmony. They will carry you through to the seventh age of perennial quiet and peace. When you have been delivered six times from the stem necessities of death-dealing age, as we read, now in the seventh evils will not touch you (Jb 5:19). They won't take you on, because they won't be there, nor will they prevail, because they won't dare.34 There immortality is serene, there serenity is immortal.
Growing together and growing apart
9. And where does all this come from, but from the change of the right hand of the Most High,35 who blesses his children within you, and sets as your boundaries peace (Ps 147:13-14)? So bestir yourselves and set your hearts on these good things, by growing together and growing apart; growing together with the good, growing apart from the bad; chosen, beloved, foreknown, called, to be justified, to be glorified.36 Grow, become young people, get old in faith and the maturity of your powers, not in the break-up of your bodies, in a fruitful