Happy are your men, happy are these your servants, who stand continually before you, and that hear your wisdom.
All Commentaries on 1 Kings 10:8 Go To 1 Kings 10
Caesarius of Arles
AD 542
In almost all places from the east to the west where the Christian religion is practiced, your manner of life for the glory of God is preached with most illustrious fame. It is rightly required of you that what is believed in your case should also be proved. With the Lord’s help, then, do what you have always done, and preserve charity, humility, meekness and obedience in such a way that what is believed about you in the whole world may be augmented by the deeds of an ever spotless life. Then whoever has merited to see you will be able to give verbal utterance to the sentence uttered by that queen who wanted to seek out Solomon as a type of the church. When each one of you like living temples of Christ, adorned with the pearls of good works, filled with the burnt offerings of prayers and fragrant with the spices of virtues has merited to be contemplated, then immediately breaking forth with the voice of exultation, may he exclaim and say with that queen, “The report I heard in my country” about the life of this saintly community “is true.” Behold, now in truth “I have discovered that they were hardly telling me the half”; for I have merited to see with my eyes much greater things than I first heard with my ears. When anyone merited to seek and behold you like angels placed on earth, he rejoiced at such things and uttered words with his own lips. Then he happily announced throughout the whole world: Consider and see how much glory is added to you and how precious and holy a joy is produced for the universal church throughout the entire world.
