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| Of the Adversaries of the Name of Christ, Whom the Barbarians for Christ’s Sake Spared When They Stormed the City.
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Chapter 1.—Of the Adversaries of
the Name of Christ, Whom the Barbarians for Christ’s Sake Spared
When They Stormed the City.
For to this earthly city belong the
enemies against whom I have to defend the city of God. Many of
them, indeed, being reclaimed from their ungodly error, have become
sufficiently creditable citizens of this city; but
many are so
inflamed with hatred against it, and are so ungrateful to its
Redeemer for His signal benefits, as to forget that they would now
be unable to utter a single word to its prejudice, had they not
found in its sacred places, as they fled from the enemy’s steel,
that life in which they now boast themselves.33
| 33
[Aug. refers to the sacking of the city of Rome by
the West-Gothic King Alaric, 410. He was the most humane of the
barbaric invaders and conquerors of Rome, and had embraced Arian
Christianity (probably from the teaching of Ulphilas, the Arian
bishop and translator of the Bible). He spared the Catholic
Christians.—For particulars see Gibbon’s Decline and
Fall, and Millman’s Latin
Christianity.—P.S.] | Are not those very Romans, who
were spared by the barbarians through their respect for Christ,
become enemies to the name of Christ? The reliquaries of the
martyrs and the churches of the apostles bear witness to this; for
in the sack of the city they were open sanctuary for all who fled
to them, whether Christian or Pagan. To their very threshold the
blood-thirsty enemy raged; there his murderous fury owned a
limit. Thither did such of the enemy as had any pity convey those
to whom they had given quarter, lest any less mercifully disposed
might fall upon them. And, indeed, when even those murderers who
everywhere else showed themselves pitiless came to those spots
where that was forbidden which the license of war permitted in
every other place, their furious rage for slaughter was bridled,
and their eagerness to take prisoners was quenched. Thus escaped
multitudes who now reproach the Christian religion, and impute to
Christ the ills that have befallen their city; but the preservation
of their own life—a boon which they owe to the respect
entertained for Christ by the barbarians—they attribute not to
our Christ, but to their own good luck. They ought rather, had
they any right perceptions, to attribute the severities and
hardships inflicted by their enemies, to that divine providence
which is wont to reform the depraved manners of men by
chastisement, and which exercises with similar afflictions the
righteous and praiseworthy,—either translating them, when they
have passed through the trial, to a better world, or detaining them
still on earth for ulterior purposes. And they ought to attribute
it to the spirit of these Christian times, that, contrary to the
custom of war, these bloodthirsty barbarians spared them, and
spared them for Christ’s sake, whether this mercy was actually
shown in promiscuous places, or in those places specially dedicated
to Christ’s name, and of which the very largest were selected as
sanctuaries, that full scope might thus be given to the expansive
compassion which desired that a large multitude might find shelter
there. Therefore ought they to give God thanks, and with sincere
confession flee for refuge to His name, that so they may escape the
punishment of eternal fire—they who with lying lips took upon
them this name, that they might escape the punishment of present
destruction. For of those whom you see insolently and shamelessly
insulting the servants of Christ, there are numbers who would not
have escaped that destruction and slaughter had they not pretended
that they themselves were Christ’s servants. Yet now, in
ungrateful pride and most impious madness, and at the risk of being
punished in everlasting darkness, they perversely oppose that name
under which they fraudulently protected themselves for the sake of
enjoying the light of this brief life.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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