God’s RightsSt. Bernard of Clairvaux
God certainly is well within His rights in claiming to Himself the works of His own hands, the gifts Himself He has given!
How should the thing made fail to love the Maker, provided that it have from Him the power to love at all?
How should it not love Him with all its powers, since only by His gift has it got anything?
Man, called into being out of nothing by God’s free act and raised to such with high honour, how patent is his debt of love to God’s most just demand!
How vastly God has multiplied His mercy too, in saving man and beast in such a way!
Why, we had turned our glory into the likeness of a calf that eateth hay; our sin had brought us to the level of the beasts that know not God at all!
If then I owe myself entire to my Creator, what shall I give my Re-creator more? The means of our remaking too, think what they cost!
It was far easier to make than to redeem; for God had but to speak the word and all things were created, I included;
but He who made me by a word, and made me once for all, spent on the task of my re-making many words and many marvellous deeds, and suffered grievous and humiliating wrongs.
What a reward therefore shall I give the Lord for all the benefits that He has done to me? By His first work He gave me to myself; and by the next He gave Himself to me.
And when He gave Himself, He gave me back myself that I had lost.
Myself for myself, given and restored, I doubly owe to Him.
But what shall I return for Himself?
A thousand of myself would be as nothing in respect of Him.
[God be Praised!]
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