|
21. These people also blame us for believing the resurrection of the
flesh, and rather wish us to believe themselves concerning these
things. As though, because they have been able to understand the high
and unchangeable substance by the things which are made, for this
reason they had a claim to be consulted concerning the revolutions of
mutable things, or concerning the connected order of the ages. For
pray, because they dispute most truly, and persuade us by most certain
proofs, that all things temporal are made after a science that is
eternal, are they therefore able to see clearly in the matter of this
science itself, or to collect from it, how many kinds of animals there
are, what are the seeds of each in their beginnings, what measure in
their increase, what numbers run through their conceptions, births,
ages, settings; what motions in desiring things according to their
nature, and in avoiding the contrary? Have they not sought out all
these things, not through that unchangeable wisdom, but through the
actual history of places and times, or have trusted the written
experience of others? Wherefore it is the less to be wondered at,
that they have utterly failed in searching out the succession of more
lengthened ages, and in finding any goal of that course, down which,
as though down a river, the human race is sailing, and the transition
thence of each to its own appropriate end. For these are subjects
which historians could not describe, inasmuch as they are far in the
future, and have been experienced and related by no one. Nor have
those philosophers, who have profiled better than others in that high
and eternal science, been able to grasp such subjects with the
understanding; otherwise they would not be inquiring as they could into
past things of the kind, such as are in the province of historians,
but rather would foreknow also things future; and those who are able to
do this are called by them soothsayers, but by us prophets:
|
|