After this no one dared
to do so, and they lived together with a wonderful sweetness of
mutual good will.
21. This other great gift thou also didst bestow, O my God,
my Mercy, upon that good handmaid of thine, in whose womb thou
didst create me. It was that whenever she could she acted as a
peacemaker between any differing and discordant spirits, and when
she heard very bitter things on either side of a controversy --
the kind of bloated and undigested discord which often belches
forth bitter words, when crude malice is breathed out by sharp
tongues to a present friend against an absent enemy -- she would
disclose nothing about the one to the other except what might
serve toward their reconciliation. This might seem a small good
to me if I did not know to my sorrow countless persons who,
through the horrid and far-spreading infection of sin, not only
repeat to enemies mutually enraged things said in passion against
each other, but also add some things that were never said at all.
It ought not to be enough in a truly humane man merely not to
incite or increase the enmities of men by evil-speaking; he ought
likewise to endeavor by kind words to extinguish them.
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