Ibid. — Therefore reject not the chastisement of the Lord. 41. God's correction punishes some, proves others. — Whosoever is struck for a fault, but is lifted up into complaint about his own smiting, rejects the chastisement of the Lord, because he accuses himself of suffering it unjustly. But those who are smitten not for the purging of a crime, but for the proving of their fortitude, when they inquire the causes of their own smiting, are by no means to be said to reject the chastisement of the Lord, because in themselves they busy themselves to find what they know not. Whence too blessed Job, breaking forth into words of liberty amid the strokes of his smiting, all the more rightly questions the judgments of him who strikes concerning himself, the more truly within himself he is ignorant of the causes of his suffering.
Eliphaz therefore, because he judged this smitten man to be smitten not by the examination of proving, but of purging, while he freely spoke amid the scourges, believed that he had rejected the chastisement of God. Whom fitly too we have said to hold the character of heretics, who bend everything that is rightly done by holy Church, in their own judgment always to the vice of crookedness. But because he is led to speak with good intention, but takes no care to discern to whom he speaks, he still subjoins, by way of preaching, the governings of the supernal dispensation, saying: