386 WiUideriny ofPreachers hrinysfood to Jewinlt Raven. Job 38, they Say to these their fathers in the flesh, who were opposing ^^L^ their spiritual preaching, We ought to speak the word of Acts i;i ^^^ ^^ y^^ fi^'^^-i ^^^ since ye reject it, and judge yourselves 4^- unworthy of eternal life^ lo ! we turn to the Gentiles ; knowing full surely that after the Gentiles believed, Judaea also would come to the faith. Whence also it is written, Rom. Until the fulness of the Gentiles should cojne in. and so all 11 25 ./ ^ 26*. Israel should he saved. Because therefore the holy Apostles especially endeavoured, first to preach to those who heard them, and afterwards to set before those that resisted the example of the converted Gentiles ; the hungry young ones sought its food for this raven, first by crying, and afterwards by wandering. For the raven finds food from the quarter where the young ones wander; for whilst the Jewish people beholds the Gentiles converted to God by the labour of preachers, it blushes sometime at the last, at the folly of its own unbelief, and then understands the sentences of Holy Scripture, when it perceives that they were known to the Gentiles before they were known to itself. And the wandering of its young ones having been fulfilled, it opens the mouth of its heart to take in the holy word ; because when the courses of the Apostles through the world have been completed, it at last spiritually understands those things, from which it had long abstained through the bondage of unbelief. But because the virtue of Divine Power alone effects all these things, it is rightly said. Who prepareth for the raven his food, when his young ones cry to God, wandering because they have no meat. Thou understandest, Except Myself, Who both bear with the unbelieving people, when its sons entreat, and feed it by their preaching, and support it, to be converted at length in the end, when they w^ander to other places. MoR. 33. There is something further, which can be understood of this raven in a moral sense. For when its young are hatched, it declines, as is said, to give them food to the full, before they become dark in their plumage, and allows them to suffer from want of food, until its own resemblance appears in them, through the blackness of their wings. But they wander hither and thither in the nest, and seek for the support of food with open mouth. But when