Friday, November 21, 2014

Matthew 5:20

For you are bidden to love your enemy and the stranger, in order that you may love your neighbour the better. [5] The requirement of the undue is an augmentation of the due benevolence. But the due precedes the undue, as the principal quality, and more worthy of the other, for its attendant and companion.283 Since, therefore, the first step in the reasonableness of the divine goodness is that it displays itself on its proper object284 in righteousness, and only at its second stage on an alien object by a redundant righteousness over and above that of scribes and Pharisees, how comes it to pass that the second is attributed to him who fails in the first, not having man for his proper object, and who makes his goodness on this very account defective? Moreover, how could a defective benevolence, which had no proper object whereon to expend itself, overflow285 on an alien one? [Tertullian Adv Marc 1.23.5 KROYMANN Aem., CCL 1 (1954),(p.465, l.16) BP1]


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