He is the tower of salvation for his king: and shows mercy to his anointed, unto David, and to his descendants forevermore.
All Commentaries on 2 Samuel 22:51 Go To 2 Samuel 22
Augustine of Hippo
AD 430
But, as we have said elsewhere on occasion, these heretics refuse to take the blame for what they do to us and they lay the blame on us for what they do to themselves. Who of us would wish them to lose anything, much less that they be lost themselves? If the house of David could win peace in no other way than through the death of Absalom, David’s son, in the war which he was carrying on against his father—although the latter had instructed his followers with great care to keep him safe and sound as far as it was possible for them to do so, that he might repent and receive pardon from his father’s love—what was left for him but to weep over his son’s loss and find comfort for his grief in the peace thus gained for his kingdom? In the same manner, then, our Catholic mother acts when others who are not her sons make war on her—because it is a fact that this little branch in Africa has been broken off from the great tree which embraces the whole world in the spreading of its branches—and although she is in labor with them in charity, that they may return to the root without which they cannot have true life, still, if she rescues so many others by losing some, especially when these fall by self-destruction, not by the fortune of war as Absalom did, she solaces the grief of her maternal heart and heals it by the deliverance of such numbers of people.
