All these terms of love are drawn from the resemblance there is between the affections of the mind and the passions of the body. Grief, fear, hope, hatred, and the rest of the affections of the soul, only enter the heart when love draws them after it. We do not hate evil except because it is contrary to the good which we love: we fear future evil because it will deprive us of the good we love. Though an evil be extreme yet we never hate it except in so far as we love the good to which it is opposed. He who does not much love the commonwealth is not much troubled to see it ruined: he who scarcely loves God, scarcely also hates sin. Love is the first, yea the principle and origin, of all the passions, and therefore it is love that first enters the heart; and because it penetrates and pierces down to the very bottom of the will where its seat is, we say it wounds the heart. "It is sharp," says the apostle of France, [304] "and enters into the spirit most deeply." The other affections enter indeed, but by the agency of love, for it is this which piercing the heart makes a passage for them. It is only the point of the dart that wounds, the rest only increases the wound and the pain.

 Now, if it wound, it consequently gives pain. Pomegranates, by their vermilion colour, by the multitude of their seeds, so close set and ranked, and by their fair crowns, vividly represent, as S. Gregory says, most holy charity, all red by reason of its ardour towards God, loaded with all the variety of virtues, and alone bearing away the crown of eternal rewards: but the juice of pomegranates, which as we know is so agreeable both to the healthy and to the sick, is so mingled of sweet and sour that one can hardly discern whether it delights the taste more because it has a sweet tartness or because it has a tart sweetness. Verily, Theotimus, love is thus bitter-sweet, and while we live in this world it never has a sweetness perfectly sweet, because it is not perfect, nor ever purely satiated and satisfied: and yet it fails not to be of very agreeable taste, its tartness correcting the lusciousness of its sweetness, as its sweetness heightens the relish of its tartness. But how can this be? You shall see a young man enter into a company, free, hearty, and in the best of spirits, who, being off his guard, feels, before he goes away, that love, making use of the glances, the gestures, the words, yea even of the hair of a silly and weak creature, as of so many darts, has smitten and wounded his poor heart, so that there he is, all sad, gloomy and depressed. Why I pray you is he sad? Without doubt because he is wounded. And what has wounded him? Love. But love being the child of complacency, how can it wound and give pain? Sometimes the beloved object is absent, and then, my dear Theotimus, love wounds the heart by the desire which it excites; this it is which, being unable to satiate itself, grievously torments the spirit.