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| Chapter CXLI.—Free-will in men and angels.
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Chapter CXLI.—Free-will in men and
angels.
“But that you may not
have a pretext for saying that Christ must have been crucified, and that
those who transgressed must have been among your nation, and that the
matter could not have been otherwise, I said briefly by anticipation,
that God, wishing men and angels to follow His will, resolved to
create them free to do righteousness; possessing reason, that they may
know by whom they are created, and through whom they, not existing
formerly, do now exist; and with a law that they should be judged by Him,
if they do anything contrary to right reason: and of ourselves we, men
and angels, shall be convicted of having acted sinfully, unless we repent
beforehand. But if the word of God foretells that some angels and men
shall be certainly punished, it did so because it foreknew that they
would be unchangeably [wicked], but not because God had created them so.
So that if they repent, all who wish for it can obtain mercy from God:
and the Scripture foretells that they shall be blessed, saying,
‘Blessed is the man to whom the Lord imputeth not sin;’2491
that is, having repented of his sins, that he
may receive remission of them from God; and not as you deceive
yourselves, and some others who resemble you in this, who say, that even
though they be sinners, but know God, the Lord will not impute sin to
them. We have as proof of this the one fall of David, which happened
through his boasting, which was forgiven then when he so mourned and
wept, as it is written. But if even to such a man no remission was
granted before repentance, and only when this great king, and anointed
one, and prophet, mourned and conducted himself so, how can the impure
and utterly abandoned, if they weep not, and mourn not, and repent not,
entertain the hope that the Lord will not impute to them sin? And this
one fall of David, in the matter of Uriah’s wife, proves,
sirs,” I said, “that the patriarchs had many wives, not to
commit fornication, but that a certain dispensation and all mysteries
might be accomplished by them; since, if it were allowable to take any
wife, or as many wives as one chooses, and how he chooses, which the men
of your nation do over all the earth, wherever they sojourn, or wherever
they have been sent, taking women under the name of marriage, much more
would David have been permitted to do this.”
When I had said this, dearest Marcus Pompeius, I came
to an end.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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