Sermons on the Song of Songs

OF THE SUPREME AND INFINITE SPIRIT, WHO IS GOD; AND OF THE SENSE IN WHICH MERCY AND JUDGMENT ARE CALLED THE FEET OF GOD.

IN order that this sermon may be continuous with that which went before it, let me remind you of what was last said, that the Supreme and Infinite Spirit, and He alone, has no need of the help of any body or of the agency of any bodily organ to do whatever He wills to do. We have, then, no difficulty in saying that as God alone is truly immortal, so He alone is truly incorporeal, because He alone, of all spirits, is so raised above the entire nature of a body, and transcends it to such a degree, that He has no need of its ministry in any of His works, but when it so pleases Him, acts by the sole Fiat of His Will, and thus performs whatever is His good pleasure. It is that Divine Majesty alone, therefore, which has no need of any bodily organization, neither on its own account nor for the sake of others, because to Its omnipotent bidding obedience is swiftly rendered; every high thing bends before it, every obstacle yields, every created thing submits, and this without the intervention or help of any creature, corporeal or spiritual. He teaches or He warns without a tongue; He gives or withholds without the use of hands; without feet He runs, and comes to the succour of those who perish.

2. Thus He was wont to do with our fathers in former ages. Men felt a continual stream of benefits, but they did not know who was their Benefactor. By His strength He did indeed order all things from the height even unto the depth; but as He at this same time disposed them sweetly and gently, His action, though perpetual, was unfelt by men. In the good gifts of the Lord they rejoiced, but the Lord of Sabaoth was unknown to them, because all His judgments were calm and tranquil. From Him were men, but they were not with Him; by Him they lived, but not for Him; it was from Him that they had any wisdom, but they did not use it to gain the knowledge of Him; they were insensate, ungrateful, and altogether alienated from Him. Thus at length it came about that they no longer attributed their being, their life, their reason, to their Creator, but to nature, or even (which was still more utterly unreasonable) to chance; while there were many who attributed not a few of the good things which came to them to their own labour and skill. How great praise these seducing spirits thus arrogated to themselves! How much was given to the sun and moon! how much attributed to earth and to water! Even things which the hand of man had made, plants, shrubs, and the commonest of seeds, were honoured as divinities.

3. Alas! it is thus that men have degraded the object of their worship, and changed their glory into the similitude of a calf that eateth hay (Ps. cvi. 20). And God had pity upon their errors; He deigned to come forth from the clouds and darkness of His holy mountain, and to set His tabernacle in the light of the sun ( Ps. xviii. 6). To those who knew only the flesh, He offered His Flesh, in order to teach them by it to know also the Spirit. For whilst He was in the Flesh, He made use of the Flesh indeed, but to do by it, not the works of the flesh, but the works of God; commanding nature, fixing and rendering certain the uncertainty of chance, rendering the wisdom of men foolishness, and breaking down the tyranny of the demons, and thus plainly manifested that it was He by whom the same wonders were worked in earlier ages also. He did, 1 repeat, in the flesh and by means of the flesh actions of power, plainly miraculous; He spake words of salvation, He endured cruel indignities; and yet He showed evidently that it was He who had created the world by His power, sovereign, though invisible; who ruled it by His wisdom, and protected it in His love and mercy. Lastly, when He preached the Gospel to those ungrateful ones, when He gave signs and wonders to those who were unbelieving, when He prayed even for those who crucified Him, did He not clearly declare Himself to be that High and Lofty One, who, with His Father, makes His sun to shine daily upon the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain upon the just and upon the unjust? (Matt. v. 45). As He Himself said \ If I do not the works of My Father, believe Me not (John x. 37).

4. Behold Him! He who in a deep adorable silence imparts eternal wisdom to the angels in heaven, He in the Flesh opens His Mouth and teaches His disciples upon the mount. See how the leper is healed at the mere touch of His Hands, how blindness is dispersed, hearing restored, the silent tongue set free, the disciple about to be whelmed in the deep caught by the hand and saved: and can you fail to recognise that great Being to whom David had said long before: Thou openest Thine Band and satisfiest the desire of every living thing (Ps. cxlv. 16); and again, Thou openest Thine Hand and they all are filled with good (Ps. civ. 28). See how the woman that was a sinner, now a penitent and upon her knees at His Feet, hears Him say: Thy sins are forgiven (Luke vii. 48), and recognises Him of whom she may have read what had been written many ages before: The devil shall go forth from before His Feet (Hab. iii. 5, Vulg.). For where sin is remitted, there without doubt, the devil is driven forth from the heart of the sinner. Therefore it is that He speaks in general terms of all true penitents: Now is the judgment of this world; now shall the frince of this world be cast out (John xii. 31), because God forgives sins to him who humbly confesses them; and thus the devil loses the dominion which he had usurped in the sinner's heart.

5. Lastly, He walks with the Feet of His Flesh upon the waves (Matt. xiv. 25); He of whom the Psalmist had sung before as yet He was incarnate: Thy way is in the sea, and Thy path in the great

waters (Ps. lxxvii. 19). That is to say, Thou shalt tread under foot the swelling hearts of the proud, and repress the disordered desires of carnal men; shalt render the ungodly righteous, and lower the pride of the arrogant. Yet because He does this invisibly, the carnal man does not recognize whose Hand it is that brings it to pass. Wherefore also it is that the Psalmist adds: And Thy Footsteps are not known. Hence also the Almighty Father saith to the Son: Sit Thou at My Right Hand until 1 make Thine enemies Thy footstool (Ps. ex. 1), that is, Until I shall render all those who despise Thee subject to Thy will, whether unwillingly and to their destruction, or gladly and to their happiness. Now, since the flesh was not capable of comprehending this, which is a work of the Spirit (for the natural man receive th not the things of the Spirit of God (1 Cor. ii. 14), it was needful that the sinner should prostrate herself in the body, kneeling upon mortal knees, and with mortal lips imprinting a kiss upon the Feet of the Redeemer, and thus receive the pardon of her sins. Thus is this change which the Right Hand of the Most High hath wrought (Ps. lxxvii. 10), by which He marvellously, yet invisibly, justifies the unrighteous, made apparent even to carnal men.

6. But I must not omit to refer to those spiritual Feet of God which it behoves the penitent, first of all, in a spiritual and mystical sense, to kiss. I know the inquiring temper of your minds, which will not, with its own goodwill, pass over the least detail without thorough examination. Nor is it a matter to be neglected as of

. small importance to know what is meant by the Feet of God so frequently referred to in Scripture. At one time He is represented as standing, as in this: We will worship in the place where His Feet have stood (Ps. exxxii. 7); at another as walking, as in the verse: I will dwell in them and walk in them (Lev. xxvi. 12, and 2 Cor. vi. 16); at another even as running, as here: He rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race (Ps. xix. 5). If it seemed right to the Apostle to speak of the Head of Christ as the Deity (i Cor. xi. 3), then I think that we may not unfitly speak of His Feet as the Humanity, and call the one mercy, the other judgment These two words are well known to you, and if you reflect, many passages of Scripture will occur to you in which they are each so employed. That God has taken the Foot of mercy in assuming the Flesh which He united with Himself, is taught in the Epistle to the Hebrews, whence we learn that Christ was tempted in all points like as we are, though without sin, that He might be compassionate and merciful (Heb. iv. 1 5). And as for that other, which has been named the foot of judgment, does not He who is God and Man plainly signify that it belongs to Himself as Incarnate, where He declares that the Father hath given Him authority to execute judgment also, because He is the Son of Man f (John v. 27).

7. With these two Feet, then, fitly conjoined under the one Divine Head, it was that the invisible Emmanuel was born of a woman, made under the Law, was seen upon earth, and had converse among men (Baruch iii. 37). It is, again, on these two Feet that He passes to and fro even now, but spiritually and invisibly, benefiting and healing all those who are oppressed by the devil. On these, I repeat, He traverses the souls of those vowed to His service, enlightening and penetrating constantly the hearts and reins of the faithful. These are, it may be, the legs of the Bridegroom which are so strikingly commended by the Bride in a later passage of this book, where she likens them, if I do not mistake, to pillars of marble, set upon sockets of fine gold (Cant. v. 15). And this is very beautifully phrased, for it is in the Incarnate wisdom of God, which is represented as gold, that mercy and truth have met together (Ps. lxxxv. 10), and elsewhere it is said that all the paths of the Lord are mercy and truth (Ps. xxv. 10).

8. Happy is the soul1 in which the Lord Jesus has once set these His Feet! There are two signs by which you may recognise the soul in which this is the case, and such a soul bears of necessity the prints of those Divine footsteps. These are fear and hope: the one bearing the print of judgment, the other of mercy. With reason it is that God takeih pleasure in them that fear Himy in them that hope in His mercy (Ps. cxlvii. 11); since the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom (Prov. i. 7); hope, the progress in it; and charity its consummation and perfectness. And since that is the case, the benefit (functus) is of no small value which is derived from that first kiss2 which is imprinted upon the Feet of Christ, provided only that neither the one nor the other of them be neglected. For if you are deeply touched with grief for your sins and with fear of God's judgment, then you have pressed your lips upon the footprints of truth and of judgment If you temper that fear and that grief by a consideration of the Divine goodness, and by a hope of obtaining pardon, then you may know that you are embracing the foot of mercy. But to embrace the one without the other is not expedient, for the remembrance of judgment alone precipitates the soul into the abyss of despair, and a deceptive assurance of mercy wherewith a mind flatters itself, generates a most pernicious security.

9. It has been given even to me, a miserable sinner, sometimes to sit at the Feet of the Lord Jesus, and to embrace now the one, now the other, with a devotion as full and complete as His benignity deigned to enable me to feel. But if it ever happened that, being pressed by the reproaches of conscience, I was forgetful of mercy, and attached myself too long to judgment, I was soon cast down by incredible fear and pitiable shame, and surrounded by the darkness of horror, so that trembling in the shadow, I could only cry: Who knoweth the power of Thine anger; even according to Thy fear, so is Thy wrath (Ps. xc. 1 1). But if, on the other hand, leaving that, I had embraced the other, the foot of Mercy, more than was meet, I was dissolved in negligence and indifference so great that I speedily became less earnest in prayer, less prompt in action, more inconsiderate in speech, more given to idle laughter — in short, less