|
We had promised, then, that we would say something against those who
attribute the calamities of the Roman republic to our religion, and
that we would recount the evils, as many and great as we could remember
or might deem sufficient, which that city, or the provinces belonging
to its empire, had suffered before their sacrifices were prohibited,
all of which would beyond doubt have been attributed to us, if our
religion had either already shone on them, or had thus prohibited their
sacrilegious rites. These things we have, as we think, fully
disposed of in the second and third books, treating in the second of
evils in morals, which alone or chiefly are to be accounted evils; and
in the third, of those which only fools dread to undergo, namely,
those of the body or of outward things, which for the most part the
good also suffer. But those evils by which they themselves become
evil, they take, I do not say patiently, but with pleasure. And
how few evils have I related concerning that one city and its empire!
Not even all down to the time of Caesar Augustus. What if I had
chosen to recount and enlarge on those evils, not which men have
inflicted on each other; such as the devastations and destructions of
war, but which happen in earthly things, from the elements of the
world itself. Of such evils Apuleius speaks briefly in one passage of
that book which he wrote, De Mundo, saying that all earthly things
are subject to change, overthrow, and destruction. For, to use his
own words, by excessive earthquakes the ground has burst asunder, and
cities with their inhabitants have been clean destroyed: by sudden
rains whole regions have been washed away; those also which formerly
had been continents, have been insulated by strange and new-come
waves, and others, by the subsiding of the sea, have been made
passable by the foot of man: by winds and storms cities have been
overthrown; fires have flashed forth from the clouds, by which regions
in the East being burnt up have perished; and on the western coasts
the like destructions have been caused by the bursting forth of waters
and floods. So, formerly, from the lofty craters of Etna, rivers
of fire kindled by God have flowed like a torrent down the steeps. If
I had wished to collect from history wherever I could, these and
similar instances, where should I have finished what happened even in
those times before the name of Christ had put down those of their
idols, so vain and hurtful to true salvation? I promised that I
should also point out which of their customs, and for what cause, the
true God, in whose power all kingdoms are, had deigned to favor to
the enlargement of their empire; and how those whom they think gods can
have profited them nothing, but much rather hurt them by deceiving and
beguiling them; so that it seems to me I must now speak of these
things, and chiefly of the increase of the Roman empire. For I have
already said not a little, especially in the second book, about the
many evils introduced into their manners by the hurtful deceits of the
demons whom they worshipped as gods. But throughout all the three
books already completed, where it appeared suitable, we have set forth
how much succor God, through the name of Christ, to whom the
barbarians beyond the custom of war paid so much honor, has bestowed on
the good and bad, according as it is written, "Who maketh His sun
to rise on the good and the evil, and giveth rain to the just and the
unjust."
|
|