41. For ‘the eye is dim for indignation,’ when those very persons likewise, who in the Lord’s Body, i.e. in the Church, are endued with the light of truth, whilst they see themselves too long despised and disdained by the wicked, are confounded in astonishment at the inscrutable judgment, and fail to fathom the secret of God; for what reason it is that the wicked are suffered to prevail against the innocence of the good? For who is not amazed, when Herodias by her daughter’s dancing obtains at the hands of the drunken king, that the head of that Friend of the Bridegroom, that ‘Prophet, and more than a Prophet,’ should be brought before the faces of his guests upon a charger? Now when the just are ‘dimmed in indignation,’ the weak very commonly go headlong into actual infidelity; whence it is added, And any members are as it were brought to nothing. For by the term of ‘members,’ we have the tenderness of the weak set forth, who, while they behold bad men flourishing, and good men to...
