49. And since you compare Christ
and the other deities as to the blessings of health bestowed, how many
thousands of infirm persons do you wish to be shown to you by us; how
many persons affected with wasting diseases, whom no appliances
whatever restored, although they went as suppliants through all the
temples, although they prostrated themselves before the gods, and swept
the very thresholds with their lips—though, as long as life
remained, they wearied with prayers, and importuned with most piteous
vows Æsculapius himself, the health-giver, as they call him?
Do we not know that some died of their ailments? that others grew old
by the torturing pain of their diseases? that others began to live a
more abandoned life after they had wasted their days3338
| 3338
So the edd. reading tri-v-erunt, for the ms. tri-bu-erunt—“given
up,” which is retained in the first ed. |
and nights in incessant prayers,
and in expectation of
mercy?
3339
| 3339
Pietatis, “of mercy,” in which sense the word
is often used in late writers. Thus it was from his clemency that
Antoninus, the Roman emperor, received the title of
Pius. |
Of what avail is it, then, to
point to one or another who may have been
healed, when so many
thousands have been left unaided, and the
shrines are full of all the
wretched and the unfortunate? Unless, perchance, you say that the
gods help the good, but that the miseries of the
wicked are
overlooked. And yet
Christ assisted the good and the bad alike;
nor was there any one
rejected by Him, who in
adversity sought help
against
violence and the ills of fortune. For this is the mark of
a true
god and of kingly
power, to deny his
bounty to none, and not to
consider who merits it or who does not; since
natural infirmity and not
the choice of his desire, or of his sober
judgment, makes a
sinner. To say, moreover, that aid is given by the gods to the
deserving when in
distress, is to leave undecided and render doubtful
what you assert: so that both he who has been made whole may seem
to have been preserved by chance, and he who is not may appear to have
been unable to banish infirmity, not because of his demerit, but by
reason of a heaven-sent weakness.
3340
| 3340 So
most edd., following a marginal reading of Ursinus, which prefixes
in—to the ms.
firmitate. |
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