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I promised to write of the rise, progress, and appointed end of the
two cities, one of which is God's, the other this world's, in
which, so far as mankind is concerned, the former is now a stranger.
But first of all I undertook, so far as His grace should enable me,
to refute the enemies of the city of God, who prefer their gods to
Christ its founder, and fiercely hate Christians with the most deadly
malice. And this I have done in the first ten books. Then, as
regards my threefold promise which I have just mentioned, I have
treated distinctly, in the four books which follow the tenth, of the
rise of both cities. After that, I have proceeded from the first man
down to the flood in one book, which is the fifteenth of this work;
and from that again down to Abraham our work has followed both in
chronological order. From the patriarch Abraham down to the time of
the Israelite kings, at which we close our sixteenth book, and thence
down to the advent of Christ Himself in the flesh, to which period
the seventeenth book reaches. the city of God appears from my way of
writing to have run its course alone; whereas it did not run its course
alone in this age, for both cities, in their course amid mankind,
certainly experienced chequered times together just as from the
beginning. But I did this in order that, first of all, from the
time when the promises of God began to be more clear, down to the
virgin birth of Him in whom those things promised from the first were
to be fulfilled, the course of that city which is God's might be made
more distinctly apparent, without interpolation of foreign matter from
the history of the other city, although down to the revelation of the
new covenant it ran its course, not in light, but in shadow. Now,
therefore, I think fit to do what I passed by, and show, so far as
seems necessary, how that other city ran its course from the times of
Abraham, so that attentive readers may compare the two.
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