Page:The Eternal Priesthood (4th ed).djvu/71

Rh coming often one after another when for a moment he has gone to rest; the weary and continual importunities of people and of letters till the sound of the bell or the knock at the door is a constant foreboding too surely fulfilled: all these things make a pastor's life as wearisome and, strange to say, as isolated as if he were in the desert. No sackcloth so mortifies the body as this life of perpetual self-abnegation mortifies the will. But when the will is mortified the servant is like his Master, and his Master is the exemplar of all perfection. "Si ergo dilectionis est testimonium cura pastionis, quisquis virtutibus pollens gregem Dei renuit pascere, pastorem summum convincitur non amare."

To this must be added that the pastor's office is the highest discipline of charity; and charity is the perfection of God and man. It was charity that moved him to become a pastor, and charity binds him to give his life for his flock. Between the beginning and the ending of his life charity is the urgent motive which constrains, sustains, and spends all his living powers. He knows himself to be vicarius charitatis Christi. Every action of a faithful pastor is prompted habitually, virtually, or actually by charity. And in every action, from the