remember, I commended to you when the law of our order compelled me
for a time to be separated from you; the peace which, now I have
returned, I find (Thanks be to God!) among you; the peace of Christ,
which, with a certain foretaste of love, feeds you in the way that
shall satisfy you with the plentitude of the same love in your
country. Well, beloved brethren, all that I am, all that I have,
all that I know, I offer to your profit, I devote to your advantage.
Use me as you will; spare not my labor if it can in any way serve to
your benefit. Let us return, therefore, if you please, or rather
because you please, to the work which we have intermitted; and let
us examine the Holy Ghost enduing us with the light of truth, the
heavenly treasures which holy Isaiah has laid up under the guise of
parables, when he writes that parable which the people, freed from
his tyranny, shall take up against the king of Babylon. "And it
shall come to pass in the day that the Lord shall give thee rest
from thy sorrow, and from thy fear, and from the hard bondage
wherein thou wast made to serve, that thou shalt take up this
parable against the king of Babylon." Let us, therefore, understand
the parable as a parable. Not imagining that it was spoken against
Nebuchadnezzar, the prince of that earthly Babylon, but rather
against him who is from the North, the prince of confusion. ... If
any one of us, then, who was once set in the confusion of vices, and
oppressed by the yoke of iniquity, now rejoices that he rests from
his labors, and is without confusion for that which is past, and has
cast off the yoke of that worst of slaveries, let him take up this
parable against the king of Babylon. There is labor in vice, there
is rest in virtue; there is confusion in lust, there is security in
chastity; there is servitude in covetousness, there is liberty in
charity. Now, there is a labor in vice, and labor for vice, and
labor against vice. A labor in vice, when, for the sake of