Verse 24. — 'And thou shalt know that thy tabernacle is in peace.' 205. 53. In the Scriptures there is a full peace and an inchoate peace. In sacred Scripture peace is spoken of in one way as full, and in another as inchoate. For the Truth had given the inchoate peace to the disciples, when He said: 'Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you' (John 14:27); and Simeon had longed for the full peace, when he prayed, saying: 'Now lettest thou thy servant depart, O Lord, according to thy word, in peace' (Luke 2:29). For our peace is begun in the desire of the Creator, but is perfected in the manifest vision. For it will then be full, when our mind is neither blinded by ignorance nor shaken by the assault of its own flesh.
But because we touch its beginnings when we subject either the mind to God or the flesh to the mind, the tabernacle of the just is said to have peace, because namely his body, which the mind inhabits, is restrained from the perverse motions of the desires under the ordering of justice. But what does it profit to restrain the flesh through continence, if the mind know not how to enlarge itself in the love of the neighbour through compassion? For there is no chastity of the flesh which the sweetness of the mind does not commend. Whence after the peace of the tabernacle it is fitly subjoined: