[86] Now let us consider what is meant by “Noah found grace before the Lord God” (Gen. 6:8). Finders sometimes find again what they possessed and have lost, sometimes what they did not own in the past and now gain for the first time. People who seek exactitude in the use of words are wont to call the process in the second case “finding” or “discovery” and in the first “refinding” or “recovery.”
[87] We have a very clear example of the former in the commandment of the Great Vow (Num. 6:2). Now a vow is a request for good things from God, while a “great vow” is to hold that God Himself and by Himself is the cause of good things, that though the earth may seem to be the mother of fruits, rain to give increase to seeds and plants, air to have the power of fostering them, husbandry to be the cause of the harvest, medicine the cause of health, marriage of childbirth, yet nothing else is His fellow-worker that we may think of them as bringing us benefit.
[88] For all these things, through the power of God, admit of change and transition, so as often to produce effects quite the reverse of the ordinary. He who makes this vow then, says Moses, must be “holy, suffering the hair of his head to grow” (Num. 6:5). This means that he must foster the young growths of virtue’s truths in the mind which rules his being; these growths must be to him as it were heads, and he must take pride in them as in the glory of the hair.
[89] But sometimes he loses these early growths, when as it were a whirlwind swoops suddenly down upon the soul and tears from it all that was beautiful in it. This whirlwind is a kind of involuntary defection straightway defiling the soul, and this he calls death (Num. 6:9).
[90] He has lost, yet in time, when purified, he makes good the loss, remembers what he had forgotten for a while, and finds what he has lost, so that the “former days,” the days of defection, are regarded as not to be counted (Num. 6:12), either because defection is a thing beyond all calculation, discordant with right reason and having no partnership with prudence, or because they are not worthy to be counted. For of such as these there is, as has been said, no count or number.