For
so, as I said in the beginning of this letter, shall you come to
regard your tribulation as nought, or at any rate as little, in
comparison with mine, and so shall you bear it more lightly in
measure as you regard it as less. Take comfort ever in the saying
of Our Lord, what he foretold for his followers at the hands of the
followers of the devil: "If they have persecuted me, they will also
persecute you (John xv, 20). If the world hate you, ye know that it
hated me before it hated you. If ye were of the world, the world
would love his own" (ib. 18-19). And the apostle says: "All that
will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution" (II Tim.
iii, 12). And elsewhere he says: "I do not seek to please men. For
if I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ"
(Galat. i, 10). And the Psalmist says: "They who have been pleasing
to men have been confounded, for that God hath despised them."
Commenting on this, St. Jerome, whose heir methinks I am in the
endurance of foul slander, says in his letter to Nepotanius: "The
apostle says: 'If I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of
Christ.' He no longer seeks to please men, and so is made Christ's
servant" (Epist.
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