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354 CITY OF GOD
ample of my humility thou wilt see clearly evident in the
special favors, as for instance, when He commanded a
temple to be built, in which I was to be honored and in
voked even during my mortal life. This, and other favors
Therefore, if
humbled me beyond all human imagination.
I thus humbled myself after performing such great things,
consider how much more thou must do it in response to
such great liberality of the Lord toward thee and after
such niggardly correspondence on thy part.
389. I wish also, my daughter, that thou imitate me
in being very careful to practice poverty of spirit con
cerning the use of necessities and comforts, offered thee by
thy sister-nuns or by thy well-wishers. Choose and accept
only the most poor and most ordinary, the most undesir
able and humble things for thy use; for otherwise thou
canst not imitate me in the spirit, in which without ostenta
of this life
tion I refused all comforts and good things
offered to me by the faithful of Jerusalem, and of which
I accepted only what was absolutely necessary during my
sojourn in Ephesus. In the exercise of this virtue is con
tained much that will make human beings happy, while
the deceived and blind worldlings please themselves in
pursuing what is entirely opposed to this virtue and truth.
390. Seek also to guard thyself from another very
common mistake :
namely that by which men, instead of
acknowledging that all the goods of body and soul be
long to the Lord, nevertheless appropriate all of them to
themselves and consider them so much their own, that
they not only refuse to offer them freely to their Creator,
but even, if at any time they must part with them, lament
and are aggrieved over their loss, as if they had been in
jured or as if God had treated them unjustly. With such
a disorderly affection parents are wont to love their chil
dren, and children their parents, married men their wives,
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