My little children, of whom I travail in birth again until Christ be formed in you,
All Commentaries on Galatians 4:19 Go To Galatians 4
Cornelius a Lapide
AD 1637
My little children. I begat you to Christ by the Gospel, and now that you have left Him for Judaism, I travail in birth of you again, till you learn to look to Christ for grace and justification, and not to the law. "The Apostle here," says Chrysostom, "Speaks of a mother"s anxiety over her children. You see the feelings of a mother rather than of a father; you see his nervousness, and the cry of pain, much more agonising than that of a woman in travail." As the Blessed Virgin bore Christ in the flesh but without pain, so did Paul labour with Christ spiritually, though with pain and grief, and strive to form the Galatians for Christ, that He might be all in all to them.
S. Ambrose (de Isaac et Anim, c8) says, with equal piety and point: "There [in the Cross and in baptism] did your mother travail; there did she who bore you labour. There are we born again, for they are brought forth in whom the image of Christ is formed. He tells us how Christ was formed in His Spouse. Set me as a seal upon thy heart, as a seal upon thine arm. Christ is the seal upon the forehead, that we may ever confess Him; on the heart, that we may always love Him; on the arm, that we may always work for Him; so that, if it be possible, His whole likeness may be expressed in us, and He be our seal whom God the Father hath sealed."
Let those note who desire to convert souls to Christ, that they must labour and toil like a woman in travail. Hence the question is asked in Job xxxix1: "Knowest thou the time when the wild goats of the rock bring forth? or canst thou mark when the hinds do calve? . . . They bow themselves, they bring forth their young ones, they cast out their sorrows"—where the reference is to the belief that the hinds suffer more acutely than most animals in parturition, a belief that was shared by Aristotle and Pliny. S. Gregory takes this passage mystically of preachers who, like hinds in labour, bring forth offspring to Christ with tears and sorrow.
"I see," he says, "that Paul is like a hind bringing forth its young with great pain; for he says, "My little children, of whom I travail in birth again." See the pain, see the labour he suffered; even after he was delivered he was conspelled to give life again to his offspring when it had perished." (Morals xxx21)
Let bishops, too, learn from S. Paul to be not so much fathers as mothers to their subjects, as S. Bernard says excellently (Serm25 in Cant.). "Learn to be mothers, not lords, to those under your charge. Seek to be loved rather than feared; and if sometimes there is need of severity, let it be that of a father, not of a tyrant."
