The charity by which we love God and neighbor includes all that is great and broad in the Scriptures. For the one Teacher from heaven teaches us: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two precepts depend the whole Law and the Prophets (Mt 22:37-40). If, then, you do not have time to search all the sacred pages, to unwrap all that is contained in their words, to penetrate all the secrets of the Scriptures, have charity on which depend all things. In this way you will maintain all that you learned there and also all that you have not yet learned there. For if you have come to know charity, you have come to know that on which depends even what you have perhaps not yet learned. Charity is apparentin what you have understood in the Scriptures; it lies latent in what you have not understood. A person who is charitable in his life, then, maintains both what is clear and what is hidden in the Scriptures.Pursue charity, then, brothers and sisters, that sweet and wholesome link between souls, without which a rich man is poor, and with which a poor man is rich [sine qua dives pauper est, et cum qua pauper dives est]. (Augustine, Sermon 350, 2-3; PL 39, 1534)