so heavy to bear as our own conscious unworthiness. S. Gregory of Nazianzum says of himself: "This held me in a lower state, and made me humble, that it was better to hear 'the voice of praise' than to profess myself a teacher of things beyond my powers; namely, the majesty, the sublimity, the greatness (of God), and the pure natures which hardly apprehend the splendour of God, whom the abyss hides, whose hiding-place is the darkness, being the purest light, and inaccessible to the multitude, who is in all and out of all; who is all beauty and above all beauty; who illuminates and eludes the speed and the sublimity of the mind, always withdrawing in the measure in which He is apprehended, and raising him who loves Him upwards by fleeing from him, and when held passing from his hands."[1]
Who has not remembered the day of his ordination, and said, "Who will grant me that I might be according to the months past, according to the day in which God kept me? When His lamp shined over my head, and I walked by His light in darkness. As I was in the days of my youth, when God was secretly in my tabernacle."[2]
2. Another sorrow of a priest arises from the sins of his bad people. The chief and lifelong
- ↑ Orat. ii. § lxxvi. tom. i. p. 49.
- ↑ Job xxix. 2-4.
