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Early Fathers

Augustine, commenting on Galatians, hits many themes: grace, merit, freedom, and imitation of Christ. Paul, laboring with the Church which is a mother, experiences birth-pangs until Christ is formed in the children of God....

Ambrose  comments on Paul's Letter to the Galatians and its statement that we are heirs of God, coheirs with Christ, co-heirs who are saved in hope. [dropcaps type='normal' font_size='100' color='' background_color='' border_color='']T[/dropcaps]he person who puts to death by the Spirit the deeds of our sinful nature...

Augustine, in his commentary on Galatians, here comments on the Apostle Paul’s insistence that Christians are no longer under the law but have received salvation as a free gift of grace. The context is the controversy over whether Gentile converts must be circumsised. The circumsisers...

Irenaeus here comments on the famous line of John's Last Supper discourse in which Jesus tells us that he no longer calls us servants but friends.   Friendship with God and service to him leads to immortality. [dropcaps type='normal' font_size='100' color='' background_color='' border_color='']O[/dropcaps]ur Lord, the Word of...

[dropcaps type='normal' font_size='100' color='' background_color='' border_color='']G[/dropcaps]lory to God in the highest and peace to his people on earth,because the grain of wheat has fallen into the earth and has died. Christ has died in order to reign in heaven. Not only that: by his death...

Here John Chrysostom praises the zeal of Paul to win the crown of glory and calls us to imitate his example of virtue. It is most appropriate reading for the feast of Saints Timothy and Titus on January 26 since they were among the...

[dropcaps type='normal' font_size='100' color='' background_color='' border_color='']T[/dropcaps]he Apostle commands us to rejoice, but in the Lord, not in the world. For, you see, as Scripture says, whoever wishes to be a friend of this world will be counted as God’s enemy. Just as a man cannot...

St. Sebastian is is often depicted as tied to a tree and pierced by many arrows.  Ambrose says Sebastian was from Milan and was venerated there during Ambrose's episcopate in the latter part of the 4th century.  It appears Sebastian died in the great persecution...

This prayer is an excerpt from a sermon On the Trinity by Saint Hilary of Poitiers, a bishop and early Church Father of the fourth century who struggled valiantly against the Arian heresy, defending the divinity of Christ and the doctrine of the Trinity....

[dropcaps type='normal' font_size='100' color='' background_color='' border_color='']T[/dropcaps]hat Jesus should come and be baptized by John is surely cause for amazement. To think of the infinite river that gladdens the city of God being bathed in a poor little stream of the eternal, the unfathomable fountainhead that...