Gregory of Nazianzus : I seem, indeed, to hear that voice from him who gathers together those who are broken and welcomes the oppressed.… The measure of his kindness exceeds the measure of his discipline. The former things were owing to our wickedness, the present things to the adorable Trinity, the former for our cleansing, the present for my Glory. — THE LAST FAREWELL, ORATION 42:7 Jerome : These friends of the Jews insult the abandoned woman and the wife despised from her youth, whom the Lord left for a moment and for a little while, saying that Jerusalem is. He who hides his face for a little while will receive her in everlasting mercies and will change her past sorrow into joy. According to the Hebrew, it does not say that she was called a forsaken and despised woman by the Lord, nor like a wife who has been hated since her youth, but rather that He left her for a little while and turned His face away from her in order to have mercy on her forever. So if the Jews and those among us who are Judaizers say that Israel has been forsaken for a little while so that God may have mercy on them in the coming of Christ, and they interpret 'a little while' in comparison to all of eternity, why do they not allow us to say that there is a little while of time in which the Gentiles have been forsaken, so that those who were once of God in their youth may receive eternal mercy in their old age? Especially when, in the calling of Israel, the crowd of Gentiles was never excluded; but the door of return was always open to them through proselytes, so that just as we seem to be temporarily excluded by their calling, so may their perpetual exclusion grant us a return to God. But we said perpetual exclusion, if they do not repent. Otherwise, the Apostle Paul says: God has confined all under sin, so that he may have mercy on all (Galatians 3:22). We, who are gathered from both the Church of the people, are interpreted; and the Jews of Jerusalem receive: who follow only allegory, and in the most difficult places of free debate, they avoid nascent questions, referring them to the sinful soul, which, rejected by God, not out of hatred, but out of dispensation, so that, burdened by the weight of evils, she may return to her original man; and having lost her substance, she may not despair of the mercy of the Father (Luke 15). It is a great mercy to meet a returning son, to extend a ring and a robe, and a kiss, and to say to a blind brother, according to the likeness of another parable, 'Friend, if I am good, why is your eye wicked?' (Matthew 20:15). — Commentary on Isaiah