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| Chapter VII.
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Chapter VII.
If the scorpion, swinging his tail in the air,
still reproach us with having a murderer for our God, I shall shudder
at the altogether foul breath of blasphemy which comes stinking from
his heretical mouth; but I will embrace even such a God, with assurance
derived from reason, by which reason even He Himself has, in the person
of His own Wisdom, by the lips of Solomon, proclaimed Himself to be
more than a murderer: Wisdom (Sophia), says He has slain her own
children.8257
| 8257 Prov. ix. 2: “She hath killed her
beasts.” The corresponding words in the Septuagint are
ἔσφαξε τα
εαυτῆς
θύματα. Augustine, in his De
Civ. Dei, xvi. 20, explains the victims (θύματα) to be Martyrum
victimas.—Tr. | Sophia is
Wisdom. She has certainly slain them wisely if only into life, and
reasonably if only into glory. Of murder by a parent, oh the clever
form! Oh the dexterity of crime! Oh the proof of cruelty, which has
slain for this reason, that he whom it may have slain may not die! And
therefore what follows? Wisdom is praised in hymns, in the places of
egress; for the death of martyrs also is praised in song. Wisdom
behaves with firmness in the streets, for with good results does she
murder her own sons.8258
Nay, on the top of
the walls she speaks with assurance, when indeed, according to Esaias,
this one calls out, “I am God’s;” and this one
shouts, “In the name of Jacob;” and another writes,
“In the name of Israel.”8259
O good mother!
I myself also wish to be put among the number of her sons, that I may
be slain by her; I wish to be slain, that I may become a son. But does
she merely murder her sons, or also torture them? For I hear God also,
in another passage, say, “I will burn them as gold is burned, and
will try them as silver is tried.”8260
Certainly by the means of torture which fires and punishments supply,
by the testing martyrdoms of faith. The apostle also knows what kind of
God he has ascribed to us, when he writes: “If God spared not His
own Son, but gave Him up for us, how did He not with Him also give us
all things?”8261
You see how divine
Wisdom has murdered even her own proper, first-born and only Son, who is certainly
about to live, nay, to bring back the others also into life. I can say
with the Wisdom of God; It is Christ who gave Himself up for our
offences.8262
Already has Wisdom
butchered herself also. The character of words depends not on the sound
only, but on the meaning also, and they must be heard not merely by
ears, but also by minds. He who does not understand, believes God to be
cruel; although for him also who does not understand, an announcement
has been made to restrain his harshness in understanding otherwise
than aright. “For who,” says the apostle,
“has known the mind of the Lord? or who has been His counsellor,
to teach Him? or who has pointed out to Him the way of
understanding?”8263
But, indeed, the
world has held it lawful for Diana of the Scythians, or Mercury of the
Gauls, or Saturn of the Africans, to be appeased by human sacrifices;
and in Latium to this day Jupiter has human blood given him to taste in
the midst of the city; and no one makes it a matter of discussion, or
imagines that it does not occur for some reason, or that it occurs by
the will of his God, without having value. If our God, too, to have a
sacrifice of His own, had required martyrdoms for Himself, who would
have reproached Him for the deadly religion, and the mournful
ceremonies, and the altar-pyre, and the undertaker-priest, and not
rather have counted happy the man whom God should have
devoured?E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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