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| That All Things Exist that They May Perish, and that We are Not Safe Unless God Watches Over Us.
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Chapter X.—That All Things Exist
that They May Perish, and that We are Not Safe Unless God Watches
Over Us.
15. “Turn us again, O Lord God of Hosts, cause Thy face to shine;
and we shall be saved.”307
For whithersoever the soul of man
turns itself, unless towards Thee, it is affixed to sorrows,308
| 308 See iv. cc. 1, 12, and vi. c. 16, below. | yea, though
it is affixed to beauteous things without Thee and without itself.
And yet they were not unless they were from Thee. They rise and
set; and by rising, they begin as it were to be; and they grow,
that they may become perfect; and when perfect, they wax old and
perish; and all wax not old, but all perish. Therefore when they
rise and tend to be, the more rapidly they grow that they may be,
so much the more they hasten not to be. This is the way of them.309
| 309 It is interesting in connection with the above
passages to note what Augustin says elsewhere as to the
origin of the law of death in the sin of our first parents. In
his De Gen. ad Lit. (vi. 25) he speaks thus of their
condition in the garden, and the provision made for the maintenance
of their life: “Aliud est non posse mori, sicut quasdam
naturas immortales creavit Deus; aliud est autem posse non
mori, secundum quem modum primus creatus est homo
immortalis.” Adam, he goes on to say, was able to avert
death, by partaking of the tree of life. He enlarges on this
doctrine in Book xiii. De Civ. Dei. He says (sec. 20):
“Our first parents decayed not with years, nor drew nearer to
death—a condition secured to them in God’s marvellous grace by
the tree of life, which grew along with the forbidden tree in the
midst of Paradise.” Again (sec. 19) he says: “Why do the
philosophers find that absurd which the Christian faith preaches,
namely, that our first parents were so created, that, if they had
not sinned, they would not have been dismissed from their bodies by
any death, but would have been endowed with immortality as the
reward of their obedience, and would have lived eternally with
their bodies?” That this was the doctrine of the early Church has
been fully shown by Bishop Bull in his State of Man before the
Fall, vol. ii. Theophilus of Antioch was of opinion (Ad
Autolyc. c. 24) that Adam might have gone on from strength to
strength, until at last he “would have been taken up into
heaven.” See also on this subject Dean Buckland’s Sermon on
Death; and Delitzsch, Bibl. Psychol. vi. secs. 1 and
2. | Thus much
hast Thou given them, because they are parts of things, which exist
not all at the same time, but by departing and succeeding they
together make up the universe, of which they are parts. And even
thus is our speech accomplished by signs emitting a sound; but
this, again, is not perfected unless one word pass away when it has
sounded its part, in order that another may succeed it. Let my soul
praise Thee out of all these things, O God, the Creator of all; but
let not my soul be affixed to these things by the glue of love,
through the senses of the body. For they go whither they were to
go, that they might no longer be; and they rend her with pestilent
desires, because she longs to be, and yet loves to rest in what she
loves. But in these things no place is to be found; they stay
not—they flee; and who is he that is able to follow them with the
senses of the flesh? Or who can grasp them, even when they are
near? For tardy is the sense of the flesh, because it is the sense
of the flesh, and its boundary is itself. It sufficeth for that for
which it was made, but it is not sufficient to stay things running
their course from their appointed starting-place to the end
appointed. For in Thy word, by which they were created, they hear
the fiat, “Hence and hitherto.”
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