On Patience 14

By these strengths of patience Isaiah is sawn in two and does not keep silent about the Lord; Stephen is stoned and asks pardon for his enemies. O most happy too was he who discharged every kind of patience against every force of the devil! Neither the driving off of his flocks, nor those riches in cattle, nor his sons taken away in one onslaught of ruin, nor finally the torment of his own body in its wounds shut him out from the patience and faith devoted to the Lord; the devil struck him with all his strength in vain. For he was not drawn away from his regard for God by so many griefs, but stood as an example and testimony for us of practising patience, in spirit as in flesh, in mind as in body, so that we may not give way either to losses of worldly goods, or to the deaths of those dearest to us, or even to the afflictions of the body. What a bier God built for the devil in that man! What a banner of his glory he raised over the enemy, when that man, at every bitter message, uttered nothing from his mouth except “Thanks be to God”; when he cursed his wife, already worn out by evils and urging him to wicked remedies! How God laughed, how the evil one was torn asunder, when Job with great equanimity scraped off the unclean overflow of his ulcer, when he playfully called back the little worms breaking out of it into the same caves and pastures of his dug-out flesh! So that workman of God's victory, all the darts of temptations blunted by the breastplate and shield of patience, soon recovered from God the soundness of his body, possessed doubled what he had lost, and, if he had wished his sons restored too, would again have been called father. But he preferred that they be given back to him on that day; secure about the Lord, he postponed so great a joy; he endured now a voluntary bereavement, so as not to live without some patience.