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| Chapter VI.
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Chapter VI.
Demanding then a law of God, you have that common
one prevailing all over the world, engraven on the natural tables to
which the apostle too is wont to appeal, as when in respect of the
woman’s veil he says, “Does not even Nature teach
you?”399
—as when to the
Romans, affirming that the heathen do by nature those things which the
law requires,400
he suggests both
natural law and a law-revealing nature. Yes, and also in the first
chapter of the epistle he authenticates nature, when he asserts that
males and females changed among themselves the natural use of the
creature into that which is unnatural,401
by
way of penal retribution for their error. We first of all indeed
know God Himself by the teaching of Nature, calling Him God of gods,
taking for granted that He is good, and invoking Him as Judge. Is it a
question with you whether for the enjoyment of His creatures, Nature
should be our guide, that we may not be carried away in the direction
in which the rival of God has corrupted, along with man himself, the
entire creation which had been made over to our race for certain uses,
whence the apostle says that it too unwillingly became subject to
vanity, completely bereft of its original character, first by vain,
then by base, unrighteous, and ungodly uses? It is thus, accordingly,
in the pleasures of the shows, that the creature is dishonoured by
those who by nature indeed perceive that all the materials of which
shows are got up belong to God, but lack the knowledge to perceive as
well that they have all been changed by the devil. But with this topic
we have, for the sake of our own play-lovers, sufficiently dealt, and
that, too, in a work in Greek.402
| 402 [Plays were
regarded as pomps renounced in Baptism.] | E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
|
