phrase--"fervent in your love." This virtue, too, is incumbent on the
Christian who must contend against the devil and pray. For prayer is
hindered where love and harmony are displaced by wrath and ill-will.
The Lord's Prayer teaches: "Forgive us our debts as we forgive our
debtors."

How can they pray one for another who feel no interest in a neighbor's
wants, who rather are enemies, entertaining no good will toward one
another? Where hearts are inflamed with hatred toward men, prayer has
ceased; it is extinguished. Hence, antichristians and all popedom,
however holy their appearance, cannot pray while enemies to the Word
of God and persecutors of Christians. He who repeats the Lord's Prayer
while indulging wrath, envy and hatred, censures his own lips; he
condemns his own prayer when he seeks forgiveness from God but does
not think of forgiving his neighbor.

25. With Christians there must be, not merely natural human affection
such as exists even among heathen, but ardent, fervent love; not the
mere appearance of love, the smoke--false, hypocritical love, as Paul
calls it (Rom 12, 9)--but real fervor and fire, which consent not to
be easily extinguished, but which endure like the love between husband
and wife, or the love of parents for children. True conjugal and
parental love is not easily quenched, even though the object of its
affection be weak, diseased or dangerously ill. Rather the greater the
need and the danger of one individual, the more is the heart of the
other moved and the brighter does love burn.

26. Such sincere love, as the apostle elsewhere styles it, must exist
among Christians who are all children of one Father in heaven and
brothers and sisters. Indeed, they are under obligation to love even
their enemies--who are human beings of the same flesh and blood--and
to wish no one evil but rather to serve all wherever possible. This
love is the beautiful red robe for the adornment of Christians,
supplementing the pure white garment of faith received in baptism. It
is to be worn in obedience to the example of Christ, who for us, even
while we were enemies, wore the same red garment of love when he was
sprinkled with his own blood. It was then he burned with the intense
fire of ineffable and most exalted love.

27. The apostles were moved to admonitions of this character because
they clearly perceived the great weakness and imperfection bound to
exist among Christians even in their outward lives. The