Gregory Nazianzen the Theologian To Those Who Had Invited Him and Not Come to Receive Him (Oration III), Complete

Translated by Ch. Browne and J. Swallow.

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V. On this account I was filled with despondency and perplexity—for I will not keep silence about what I have suffered—and I was very near withholding the discourse which I was minded to bestow as a Marriage-gift, the most beautiful and precious of all I had; and I very nearly let it loose upon you, whom, now that the violence had once been done to me, I greatly longed for: for I thought I could get from this a splendid theme, and because my love sharpened my tongue—love which is very hot and ready for accusation when it is stirred to jealousy by grief which it conceives from some unexpected neglect. If any of you has been pierced with love's sting, and has felt himself neglected, he knows the feeling, and will pardon one who so suffers, because he himself has been near the same frenzy.

VI. But it is not permitted to me at the present time to say to you anything upbraiding; and God forbid I ever should. And even now perhaps I have reproached you more than in due measure, the Sacred Flock, the praise-worthy nurselings of Christ, the Divine inheritance; by which, O God, Thou art rich, even wert Thou poor in all other respects. To Thee, I think, are fitting those words, "The lot is fallen unto Thee in a fair ground: yea Thou hast the goodliest heritage." [2925] Nor will I allow that the most populous cities or the broadest flocks have any advantage over us, the little ones of the smallest of all the tribes of Israel, of the least of the thousands of Judah, [2926] of the little Bethlehem among cities, [2927] where Christ was born and is from the beginning well-known and worshipped; amongst those whom the Father is exalted, and the Son is held to be equal to Him, and the Holy Ghost is glorified with Them: we who are of one soul, who mind the same thing, who in nothing injure the Trinity, neither by preferring One Person above another, nor by cutting off any: as those bad umpires and measurers of the Godhead do, who by magnifying One Person more than is fit, diminish and insult the whole.

[2925] Ps. xvi. 6.

[2926] 1 Sam. xxiii. 23.

[2927] Mic. v. 2.

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