EPISTOLA IV

servants, lest they perish from want of food. You know what the creditor coming asks of you. Whatever you have given to us will not be diminished for you. Be mindful of the multitude satisfied by small loaves and that the leftovers of the fragments exceeded the magnitude of the loaves. Do you think the gift conferred upon you was given for you alone? It is both yours and ours; it is common, not private. And who, even if insane, would presume to say that you may rejoice in your private possession, when you know that you should only rejoice without blame in what is common? For since God has granted you to hold the oeconomiam stewardship of his treasury and riches, of salvation, wisdom, and knowledge, why do you not pour out with a generous hand what you do not diminish by giving? Or, since in the members of the heavenly head each one possesses what he has not received in such a way that he knows what he has belongs to another to be possessed, are you perhaps parsimonious toward us because you do not find what you might receive from us in return? But if you "give to him who has," you carry back the fruit of a small reward. If, however, "you have bestowed upon him who has not," you satisfy evangelical precepts, so that "it may be repaid to you in the retribution of the just." Therefore, I too am stung by my conscience in that I feel no communicable good in myself, since we are commanded "to serve one another through charity" and "each one, as he has received grace, to administer it to one another, as good dispensers of the multiform grace of God," and "to each one as God has divided the measure of faith in one structure of members," he ought to communicate it to the other parts, because "one and the same Spirit works all these things, dividing to each one as He wills." But I recur to the one and peculiar support which I mentioned before, namely, to importunity, the friend of those deprived of friendship and adorned by no grace of honorable members. Therefore, hear my voice, with so many lands lying between us: "Give back, give back what you owe." For you are a servant, a servant of Christ and of Christians, so that you may be the greatest of all of us there, and may you not disdain to impart to thirsting souls, tortured by the hunger for knowledge, the grace which was conferred upon you for our sake. I am not even a foot, which to the commanded [tasks]...