IT IS GOOD to preach God’s mercy before all men and to reveal to one’s brethren His great compassion and ineffable grace shed on us. I know a man who kept no long strict fasts, no vigils, did not sleep on bare earth, imposed on himself no other specially arduous tasks; but, recollecting in memory his sins, understood his worthlessness and, having judged himself, became humble—and for this alone the most compassionate Lord saved him; as the divine David says: “The Lord is nigh unto them that are of a contrite heart (Ps. 34:18)* and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit.” In short, he trusted the words of the Lord and for his faith the Lord received him. There are many obstacles obstructing the way to humility; but no obstacles bar the way to belief in the words of God. As soon as we wish with all our heart, straightway we believe. For faith is a gift of the all-merciful God, which He gave us to possess by nature (infused in our nature), subjecting its use to the authority of our own will. Consequently, even the Scythians and barbarians have natural faith and believe one another’s words. But to show you an actual example of whole-hearted faith, listen to a tale, which will confirm this.
There lived in Constantinople a young man by the name of George, about twenty years old. All this happened in our lifetime,** in our own memory. He had a handsome face and in his walk, his bearing and his manner there was something ostentatious. Owing to this, people, who see only what is on the surface and, ignorant of what is hidden inside each man, come to mistaken conclusions about others, made various evil suppositions about the youth. He made the acquaintance of a certain monk, who lived in one of the monasteries in Constantinople, a man of holy life. Revealing to this monk the innermost secrets of his heart, he also told him of his ardent desire to save his soul. The good father, after some needful words of direction, gave him a small rule to follow and a book of St. Mark the Ascetic in which he writes on spiritual law. The young man accepted the book with as much love and reverence as if it had been sent to him by God Himself, and conceived a strong faith in it, hoping to gain from it great benefit and much fruit. He read it through with much zeal and attention and received great help from it all. But three paragraphs made a particularly deep impression on his heart. The first was: “If you seek to be healed, take care of your conscience (listen to it), and do what it tells you: this will profit you” (§ 69). The second: “He who seeks (hopes to receive) active grace of the Holy Spirit before practising the commandments, is like a slave bought for money who, the moment he is bought, expects his freedom to be signed, together with the payment of his purchase price” (§ 64). The third: “He who prays physically, without having yet acquired spiritual reason, is like the blind man who cried: ‘Son of David, have mercy on me’ (Mark 10: 48). But another man who had been blind, when his eyes were opened and he saw the Lord, no longer called Him son of David, but worshipped Him as the Son of God” (John 9:35, 38) (§ 13, 14 On the Spiritual Law). These three paragraphs pleased him greatly and he believed that, as the first paragraph asserts, by attention to his conscience the ills of his soul would be cured; that he would be made active by the Holy Spirit through obedience to commandments, as the second paragraph teaches; and that, by the grace of the Holy Spirit, his inner eyes would be opened and he would see the ineffable beauty of the Lord, as the third paragraph promises. And so he became wounded by love for this beauty and, though as yet he did not see it, conceived a strong longing for it and sought it assiduously, in the hope of finding it in the end.
