Job 9:26

"Or the eagle lowering its flight and seeking its prey. From this high rank, where creatures endowed with reason taste the happiness merited by their acts of virtue, they have lowered themselves to carnal voluptuousness.

They are passed away as the ships carrying fruits. They that traverse seas transporting fruits, do themselves indeed enjoy the smell of the same, but the food thereof they convey to others. What else then did the ancient Fathers shew themselves, saving ships carrying fruits? They indeed in foretelling the mystery of God's Incarnation, themselves enjoyed the sweet odour of hope, but to ourselves they brought down the fruit by the completion of that hope. For what they but smelled at in expecting, we are replenished with in seeing and receiving. And hence That Same Redeemer saith to His disciples, Other men laboured, and ye are entered into their labours. And their days are likened to ships, because they pass by on their way, and very properly to those bearing fruits, for all the Elect severally, whom they carried before the Redeemer's coming, through the Spirit of prophecy, they were enabled to refresh with the expectation, but not to feed with the manifest appearing. Or, surely, whereas when ships carry fruits, they mix chaff with them, in order that they may transport them to land without injury, the days of the Fathers of yore are rightly described as like to ships bearing fruits, for in that the sayings of the Ancients tell of the mysteries of the spiritual life, they preserve these by means of the intermingled chaff of the history, and they bring down to us the fruit of the Spirit under a covering, when they speak to us carnal things. For often whilst they relate circumstances proper to themselves, they are exalted to the secrets of the Divine Nature. And often while they gaze at the loftiness of the Divine Nature, 'they are suddenly plunged into the mystery of the Incarnation. Hence it is still further added with fitness, As the eagle that hasteth to the prey. For it is of the habits of the eagle to gaze at the sun's rays with unrecoiling eye; but when it is pressed by need of sustenance, it turns the same pupil of the eye, which it had fixed on the rays of the sun, to the ken of the carcase, and though it flies high in air, it seeks the earth for the purpose of getting flesh. Thus, surely, thus was it with the old fathers, who as far as the frailty of human nature permitted it, contemplated the sight of the Creator with uplifted soul, but foreseeing Him destined to become incarnate at the end of the world, they as it were turned away their eyes to the…