Bad Advertisement?
Are you a Christian?
Online Store:Visit Our Store
| Chapter II.
PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP 
Chapter II.
Then, again, every one is ready with the
argument350
| 350 [Kaye (p. 366), declares
that all the arguments urged in this tract are comprised in two
sentences of the Apology, cap. 38.] | that all things, as
we teach, were created by God, and given to man for his use, and that
they must be good, as coming all from so good a source; but that among
them are found the various constituent elements of the public shows,
such as the horse, the lion, bodily strength, and musical voice. It
cannot, then, be thought that what exists by God’s own creative
will is either foreign or hostile to Him; and if it is not opposed to
Him, it cannot be regarded as injurious to His worshippers, as
certainly it is not foreign to them. Beyond all doubt, too, the
very buildings connected with the places of public amusement, composed
as they are of rocks, stones, marbles, pillars, are things of God, who
has given these various things for the earth’s embellishment;
nay, the very scenes are enacted under God’s own heaven. How
skilful a pleader seems human wisdom to herself, especially if she has the fear of
losing any of her delights—any of the sweet enjoyments of worldly
existence! In fact, you will find not a few whom the imperilling
of their pleasures rather than their life holds back from us. For
even the weakling has no strong dread of death as a debt he
knows is due by him; while the wise man does not look with contempt on
pleasure, regarding it as a precious gift—in fact, the one
blessedness of life, whether to philosopher or fool. Now nobody denies
what nobody is ignorant of—for Nature herself is teacher of
it—that God is the Maker of the universe, and that it is good,
and that it is man’s by free gift of its Maker. But having no
intimate acquaintance with the Highest, knowing Him only by natural
revelation, and not as His “friends”—afar off, and
not as those who have been brought nigh to Him—men cannot but be
in ignorance alike of what He enjoins and what He forbids in regard to
the administration of His world. They must be ignorant, too, of the
hostile power which works against Him, and perverts to wrong uses the
things His hand has formed; for you cannot know either the will or the
adversary of a God you do not know. We must not, then, consider merely
by whom all things were made, but by whom they have been perverted. We
shall find out for what use they were made at first, when we find for
what they were not. There is a vast difference between the corrupted
state and that of primal purity, just because there is a vast
difference between the Creator and the corrupter. Why, all sorts of
evils, which as indubitably evils even the heathens prohibit, and
against which they guard themselves, come from the works of God. Take,
for instance, murder, whether committed by iron, by poison, or by
magical enchantments. Iron and herbs and demons are all equally
creatures of God. Has the Creator, withal, provided these things for
man’s destruction? Nay, He puts His interdict on every sort of
man-killing by that one summary precept, “Thou shalt not
kill.” Moreover, who but God, the Maker of the world, put in its
gold, brass, silver, ivory, wood, and all the other materials used in
the manufacture of idols? Yet has He done this that men may set up a
worship in opposition to Himself? On the contrary idolatry in His eyes
is the crowning sin. What is there offensive to God which is not
God’s? But in offending Him, it ceases to be His; and in ceasing
to be His, it is in His eyes an offending thing. Man himself, guilty as
he is of every iniquity, is not only a work of God—he is His
image, and yet both in soul and body he has severed himself from his
Maker. For we did not get eyes to minister to lust, and the tongue for
speaking evil with, and ears to be the receptacle of evil speech, and
the throat to serve the vice of gluttony, and the belly to be
gluttony’s ally, and the genitals for unchaste excesses, and
hands for deeds of violence, and the feet for an erring life; or was
the soul placed in the body that it might become a thought-manufactory
of snares, and fraud, and injustice? I think not; for if God, as the
righteous ex-actor of innocence, hates everything like
malignity—if He hates utterly such plotting of evil, it is clear
beyond a doubt, that, of all things that have come from His hand, He
has made none to lead to works which He condemns, even though these
same works may be carried on by things of His making; for, in fact, it
is the one ground of condemnation, that the creature misuses the
creation. We, therefore, who in our knowledge of the Lord have obtained
some knowledge also of His foe—who, in our discovery of the
Creator, have at the same time laid hands upon the great corrupter,
ought neither to wonder nor to doubt that, as the prowess of the
corrupting and God-opposing angel overthrew in the beginning the virtue
of man, the work and image of God, the possessor of the world, so he
has entirely changed man’s nature—created, like his own,
for perfect sinlessness—into his own state of wicked enmity
against his Maker, that in the very thing whose gift to man, but not to
him, had grieved him, he might make man guilty in God’s eyes, and
set up his own supremacy.351
| 351 [For the demonology of
this treatise, compare capp. 10, 12, 13, 23, and see Kaye’s full
but condensed statement (pp. 201–204), in his account of the
writings, etc.] | E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
|
