[.article__paragraph--cap][.small-caps]The first thing,[.small-caps] you see, that your graces should observe, is how the love involved in friendship ought to be gratuitous. I mean, the reason you have a friend, or love one, ought not to be so that he can do something for you; if that’s why you love him, so that he can get you some money, or some temporal advantage, then you aren’t really loving him, but the thing he gets for you. A friend is to be loved freely, for his own sake, not for the sake of something else. If the rule of friendship urges you to love human beings freely for their own sakes, how much more freely is God to be loved, who bids you love other people! There can be nothing more delightful than God. I mean, in people there are always things that cause offense; still, through friendship you force yourself to put up with things that offend you in a person, for the sake of friendship. So if you ought not to break the ties of friendship with a human being just because of some things in him you have to put up with, what things should ever force you to break the ties of friendship with God? You can find nothing more delightful than God. God is not something that can ever offend you, if you don’t offend him; there is nothing more beautiful, nothing more full of light than he is.[.article__paragraph--cap]

[.smalltext]Source: Saint Augustine, The Works of Saint Augustine: Vol. 1. Sermons on the Old ­Testament, 20–50 (New City Press, 1995), 387–388.[.smalltext]

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