All discipline
food either slays or else wounds. I am a liar, if the Lord Himself, when
upbraiding Israel with forgetfulness, does not impute the cause to "fulness: ""
(My) beloved is waxen thick, and fat, and distent, and hath quite forsaken
God, who made him, and hath gone away from the Lord his Saviour." In
short, in the Self-same Deuteronomy, when bidding precaution to be taken
against the self-same cause, He says: "Lest, when thou shalt have eaten, and
drunken, and built excellent houses, thy sheep and oxen being multiplied,
and (thy) silver and gold, thy heart be elated, and thou be forgetful of the
Lord thy God." To the corrupting power of riches He made the enormity
of edacity antecedent, for which riches themselves are the procuring
agents. Through them, to wit, had "the heart of the People been made
thick, lest they should see with the eyes, and hear with the ears, and
understand with a heart" obstructed by the "fats" of which He had
expressly forbidden the eating, teaching man not to be studious of the
stomach.
On the other hand, he whose "heart" was habitually found "lifted up"
rather than fattened up, who in forty days and as many nights maintained a
fast above the power of human nature, while spiritual faith subministered
strength (to his body), both saw with his eyes God's glory, and heard with
his ears God's voice, and understood with his heart God's law: while He
taught him even then (by experience) that man liveth not upon bread alone,
but upon every word of God; in that the People, though fatter than he, could
not constantly contemplate even Moses himself, fed as he had been upon
God, nor his leanness, sated as it had been with His glory!
