Two lives are set before us in the Lord’s passion and resurrection: the life that we now endure and that for which we long. For he who deigned to endure this life, is well able to give us that other life. Indeed by this he shows us how much he loves us, and how he wishes us to believe that there we shall be given the good things that belong by right to him who willed to share in our ills. We are born, he is born; because we shall die, he has died. These two we have known in this life of ours—the beginning and the end, being born and dying: in being born, the beginning of labour; in dying, a passage to uncertainty. These two we have known, to be born and to die: this abounds in our land. Our land, the earth: the land of the angels, heaven. And so our Lord came to this our land out of that other: to the land of death from the land of life; to the land of toil from the land of bliss. He came bringing us his own bounty, and patiently he bore our ills.