Jesus Christ, the immortal God, came not to save himself but to save those condemned to death; he suffered not for his own sake but for ours. He took upon himself our wretchedness and poverty so as to enrich us by his own wealth. His suffering is our freedom from pain; his death is our immortality; his grief is our joy, his burial our resurrection, his baptism our sanctification. For their sake, he says, I consecrate myself, that they also may be consecrated in truth. His bruising is our healing, for by his stripes we were healed. His chastisement is our peace, for the chastisement of our peace is upon him, that is to say, for the sake of our peace he is chastised.
Moreover, when on the cross he says: Father, into your hands I commend my spirit, Jesus commends us all to the Father through himself, all of us who are being brought to life in him. They are his members, and many members are one body, and the body is the Church. As Saint Paul writes to the Galatians: You are all one in Christ Jesus. In himself, therefore, Jesus commends us all to the Father.
(On the Incarnation and Against the Arians 2-5: PG 26, 987-991.)
Marcellus worked with Saint Athanasius to support the faith against the Arians.
ST AUGUSTINE: The Glory of the Cross
Let us declare that Christ was crucified for our sake, proclaiming it with joy and pride, not with fear and shame. Paul the Apostle saw in this reason for boasting.
He could have told us many great and holy things about Christ: how as God he shared with his Father the work of creation, and how as man like us he was master of the world. But Paul would not glory in any of these wonderful things.
-- Sermon 218C, 1
Prayer. Lord, in case I would falter, you gave me a remedy through your admonishments. You established the law of forgiveness, so that as I forgive I may be forgiven.
-- Commentary on Psalm 129, 3
ST FRANCIS DE SALES:
Live totally united to God and in Him alone, because life separated from Him is nothing but death! You do well not to influence your daughter's will; it is solely the work of the Holy Spirit to send good inspirations according to His own pleasure. On my part, I still have some hope and good indications that He will make her totally and perfectly His own. I do not doubt that she will obtain sufficient help to discover the truth, seeing that she seems marked for divine favor.
(Letters 1090; O. XVII, p. 10)
GK CHESTERTON:
SOCIAL reformers have fired a hundred shots against the public-house, but never one against its really shameful character. The sign of decay is not in the public-house, but in the private bar; or rather the row of five or six private bars, into each of which a respectable dipsomaniac can go in solitude, and by indulging his own half-witted sin violates his own half-witted morality. Nearly all these places are equipped with an atrocious apparatus of ground-glass windows which can be so closed that they practically conceal the face of the buyer from the seller. Words cannot express the abysses of human infamy and hateful shame expressed by that elaborate piece of furniture. Whenever I go into a public-house, which happens fairly often, I always carefully open all these apertures and then leave the place in every way refreshed.
('George Bernard Shaw.')
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