How can you believe, who receive honor one of another, and seek not the honor that comes from God only?
Read Chapter 5
Cornelius a Lapide
AD 1637
How can ye believe, &c. "Ye love human glory, brief and poor: wherefore ye contemn Me, who despise human glory, and teach that it ought to be contemned; and that the Divine and eternal glory ought to be aimed at, which God will begin in the saints on earth, and bring to perfection in Heaven."
He accuses the Pharisees of love of rule and of prizing honours from men, covertly hinting that they do exceeding ill, in unadvisedly putting the diseases of their own soul upon God Who can by no means know disease. Next He says that they, fast held by vain glory, thereby lose the fairest prize, meaning faith in Him: whereof Paul too speaketh clearly to us: for if (says he) I were yet pleasing men, I should not be Christ's servant. It usually then as of necessity befalls those who hunt for honours from men, to fail of the glory that cometh from above and from the only God, as saith the Saviour. He says only, opposing God to the gods of the Gentiles, and not excluding Himself from the honour of the Only. For as we have often said already, the Fullness of the Holy and Consubstantial Trinity mounteth up to One Nature and glory of Godhead.
Hence again He shows that they looked not to the things of God, but that under this pretense they desired to gratify private feeling, and were so far from doing this on account of His glory, that they preferred honor from men to that which comes from Him. How then were they likely to entertain such hostility towards Him for a kind of honor which they so despised, as to prefer to it the honor which comes from men?
Having told them that they had not the love of God, and having proved it by what was doing in His case, and by what should be in the case of Antichrist, and having demonstrated that they were deprived of all excuse, He next brings Moses to be their accuser, going on to say,
And, of course, that ought to have been chosen which keeps virgins veiled, as being known to God alone; who (besides that glory must be sought from God, not from men
