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| Of Those Things Which are Contained in Books Second and Third.
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Chapter 2.—Of Those Things Which
are Contained in Books Second and Third.
We had promised, then, that we
would say
something against those who attribute the calamities of
the Roman republic to our religion, and that we would recount the
evils, as many and great as we could remember or might deem
sufficient, which that city, or the provinces belonging to its
empire, had suffered before their sacrifices were prohibited, all
of which would beyond doubt have been attributed to us, if our
religion had either already shone on them, or had thus prohibited
their sacrilegious rites. These things we have, as we think,
fully disposed of in the second and third books, treating in the
second of evils in morals, which alone or chiefly are to be
accounted evils; and in the third, of those which only fools dread
to undergo—namely, those of the body or of outward things—which
for the most part the good also suffer. But those evils by which
they themselves become evil, they take, I do not say patiently, but
with pleasure. And how few evils have I related concerning that
one city and its empire! Not even all down to the time of Cæsar
Augustus. What if I had chosen to recount and enlarge on those
evils, not which men have inflicted on each other; such as the
devastations and destructions of war, but which happen in earthly
things, from the elements of the world itself. Of such evils
Apuleius speaks briefly in one passage of that book which he wrote,
De Mundo, saying that all earthly things are subject to
change, overthrow, and destruction.161
| 161 Comp. Bacon’s Essay on the
Vicissitudes of Things. | For, to use his own words, by
excessive earthquakes the ground has burst asunder, and cities with
their inhabitants have been clean destroyed: by sudden rains
whole regions have been washed away; those also which formerly had
been continents, have been insulated by strange and new-come waves,
and others, by the subsiding of the sea, have been made passable by
the foot of man: by winds and storms cities have been overthrown;
fires have flashed forth from the clouds, by which regions in the
East being burnt up have perished; and on the western coasts the
like destructions have been caused by the bursting forth of waters
and floods. So, formerly, from the lofty craters of Etna, rivers
of fire kindled by God have flowed like a torrent down the
steeps. If I had wished to collect from history wherever I could,
these and similar instances, where should I have finished what
happened even in those times before the name of Christ had put down
those of their idols, so vain and hurtful to true salvation? I
promised that I should also point out which of their customs, and
for what cause, the true God, in whose power all kingdoms are, had
deigned to favor to the enlargement of their empire; and how those
whom they think gods can have profited them nothing, but much
rather hurt them by deceiving and beguiling them; so that it seems
to me I must now speak of these things, and chiefly of the increase
of the Roman empire. For I have already said not a little,
especially in the second book, about the many evils introduced into
their manners by the hurtful deceits of the demons whom they
worshipped as gods. But throughout all the three books already
completed, where it appeared suitable, we have set forth how much
succor God, through the name of Christ, to whom the barbarians
beyond the custom of war paid so much honor, has bestowed on the
good and bad, according as it is written, “Who maketh His sun to
rise on the good and the evil, and giveth rain to the just and the
unjust.”162
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