I.  How slow you are, my friends and brethren, to come to listen to my words, though you were so swift in tyrannizing over me, and tearing me from my Citadel Solitude, which I had embraced in preference to everything else, and as coadjutress and mother of the divine ascent, and as deifying man, S. Gregory very frequently uses this very strong expression to bring out the reality and intimacy of the Christian’s Union with Christ as the result of the sanctifying grace by which all the Baptized are made “partakers of the Divine Nature” (2 Pet. i. 4). I had especially admired, and had set before me as the guide of my whole life. The passage might also be rendered “had preferred to every other kind of life.”  How is it that, now you have got it, you thus despise what you so greatly desired to obtain, and seem to be better able to desire the absent than to enjoy the present; as though you preferred to possess my teaching rather than to profit by it?  Yes, I may even say this to you:  “I became a surfeit unto you before you tasted of me, or gave me a trial” Isa. i. 14.—which is most strange.