Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Having gathered up, as best we could, these principal occasions of impatience, why should we go wandering further among the rest, whether at home or abroad? The working of evil is broad and far-flung, hurling its manifold provocations, now trivial ones, now the greatest. But you should hold the trivial ones in contempt for their very smallness, and yield to the great ones in proportion to their weight. Where the injury is smaller, there is no great need of patience; but where the injury is greater, there the remedy for injury — patience — is the more necessary. Let us strive, then, to bear what is inflicted by the Evil One, so that the enemy's rivalrous effort may be baffled by our even temper. But if there are certain things we bring upon ourselves, whether unwittingly or even on purpose, let us face with that same evenness of temper whatever we have no one to blame for but ourselves. And where we believe certain blows are dealt to us directly by the Lord, is there anyone toward whom patience is more owed than toward him? Nay, he even teaches us to be glad and rejoice at the honor of divine chastisement: Those I love, he says, I chastise. O blessed that servant whose correction the Lord presses on, whom he thinks worthy of his anger, whom he does not deceive by pretending not to notice him and so neglecting to warn him!
On every side, then, patience is a debt we owe and must keep paying, since to some degree we are forever entangled either in our own faults, or in the traps laid by the Evil One, or in the corrections sent by the Lord. And the reward for paying it is great: nothing less than happiness. For whom, after all, did the Lord pronounce happy, if not the patient man, when he said: Happy are the poor in spirit, since the kingdom of heaven belongs to them? For surely no one is poor in spirit unless he is humble; and who is humble unless he is patient, since no one can subject himself to another without the prior patience of submission itself? Blessed, he says, are those who weep and mourn. Who bears such things without patience? And so to such as these both advocacy and laughter are promised. Blessed are the meek. By this very word, the impatient cannot possibly be reckoned among them at all. Likewise, when he marks out the peacemakers with the same title of blessedness and calls them sons of God — surely the impatient have no kinship with peace? Only a fool could think so! And where he tells them, Be glad and leap for joy, every time you are cursed and hunted down, since your wages in heaven are great — this certainly does not promise the exultation of impatience, since no one will exult amid adversities unless he has first held them in contempt, and no one holds them in contempt unless he has practiced patience.