33.

The love of many, however, waxes cold because of offences, which abound increasingly the more that, within the communion of the sacraments of Christ, there are gathered to the glory of His name even those who are wicked, and who persist in the obstinacy of error; whose separation, however, as chaff from the wheat, is to be effected only in the final purging of the Lord's threshing-floor. ¹ These do not destroy those who are the Lord's wheat--few, indeed, when compared with the others, but in themselves a great multitude; they do not destroy the elect of God, who are to be gathered at the end of the world from the four winds, from the one end of heaven to the other. ² For it is from the elect that the cry comes, "Help, Lord! for the godly man ceaseth, for the faithful fail from among the children of men;" ³ and it is of them that the Lord saith, "He that shall endure to the end (when iniquity shall abound), the same shall be saved." ⁴ Moreover, that the psalm quoted is the language not of one man, but of many, is shown by the following context: "Thou shalt keep us, O Lord; Thou shalt preserve us from this generation for ever." ⁵ On account of this abounding iniquity which the Lord foretold, it is said in another place: "When the Son of man cometh, shall He find faith on the earth?" This doubt expressed by Him who knoweth all things prefigured the doubts which in Him we entertain, when the Church, being often disappointed in many from whom much was expected, but who have proved very different from what they were supposed to be, is so alarmed in regard to her own members, that she is slow to believe good of any one. Nevertheless it would be wrong to cherish doubt that those whose faith He shall find on the earth are growing along with the tares throughout the whole field.