On Repentance 7

So far, Christ our Lord, may your servants learn or hear about the discipline of repentance: so far as it is fitting for the hearers too not to sin; that is, let them know nothing more of repentance, and seek nothing more of it. I am reluctant to add a mention of the second, or rather the last, hope, lest by treating of the remaining help of repentance we seem to point out a further space for sinning. God forbid that anyone should so interpret it, as if the way still lay open to him for sinning because it lies open for repenting, and the overflow of heavenly clemency should create license for human rashness. Let no one be the worse because God is the better, sinning as often as he is forgiven. Otherwise he will certainly find an end of escaping when he finds no end of offending. We have escaped once; thus far and no further let us expose ourselves to dangers, even if we seem likely to escape again. Many who have been rescued from shipwreck from then on divorce both ship and sea, and honor God's benefit, their deliverance, by remembering the danger. I praise their fear; I love their modesty: they do not want to be a burden on divine mercy again; they dread seeming to trample on what they have obtained; with a good anxiety they avoid experiencing a second time what they have once learned to fear. So restraint in rashness is a witness to fear; and the fear of man is the honor of God. But that most stubborn enemy never gives his malice any rest. Indeed he rages most when he feels that a man has been fully freed; he is most inflamed when he is being extinguished. He must grieve and groan that, by the granting of pardon for sins, so many works of death in man have been destroyed, so many titles of his former condemnation erased. He grieves that that sinner, the servant of Christ, is to judge him and his angels. So he watches, attacks, besieges, to see whether he can strike the eyes with carnal lust, or entangle the mind in worldly allurements, or overturn faith by fear of earthly power, or twist it from the sure way by perverse traditions; he does not run short of stumbling blocks or temptations. Foreseeing these poisons of his, God, although the door of forgiveness has been shut and barred with the bolt of baptism, has allowed something still to stand open. He has placed in the vestibule a second repentance, to open to those who knock; but only once, because it is already the second time; but never again, because the last time was in vain. For is not even this once enough? You have what you no longer deserved; for you had lost what you had received. If the Lord's indulgence grants you the means of restoring what you had lost, be grateful for a benefit repeated, not to say enlarged. For it is greater to restore than to give, since it is more wretched to have lost than never to have received at all. But the mind must not at once be cut down and undermined by despair if someone has become a debtor to the second repentance. Let him indeed be sorry to sin again, but let him not be sorry to repent again; let him be sorry to be endangered again, but not to be freed again. Let no one be ashamed. Repeated sickness calls for repeated medicine. You will show yourself grateful to the Lord if you do not refuse what the Lord offers you. You have offended, but you can still be reconciled. You have one to whom you may make satisfaction, and one who is willing.