The City of God: Book 18

In the first ten books, I refuted those who contemned Christ in favor of their idols, along with the hostile enemies of Christianity. There I promised to continue by tracing the origin, progress, and limits of the two cities, God's and the world's, as they relate to the history of humanity. Of this threefold promise, I have already fulfilled one part: the origin of the two cities, covered in the four books that followed. I then addressed part of the second, the progress of these cities, from Adam to the flood in Book 15, and from there to Abraham in the books that followed. But from the time of Abraham's father down to the kingdom of Israel (where I ended Book 16), and from there to the birth of our Savior (where I ended Book 17), I carried only the City of God forward with my pen, even while both cities were running their course together through human history. My reason was this: I wanted first to trace the unfolding of God's great and manifold promises from the very beginning, all the way to the birth of Him in whom all those promises were gathered and fulfilled, born of the Virgin, without interrupting that account with the affairs of the earthly city in the meantime. This approach was meant to make the City of God stand out more clearly, even though throughout that period, prior to the revelation of the New Testament, it remained wrapped in figures and shadows. Now, therefore, I must return to where I left off and bring the earthly city forward from the time of Abraham to the point where I must now set the heavenly city aside, so that by bringing both their histories to the same moment, the comparison between them may illuminate each one more fully.

Humanity, then, was scattered across the world, separated by geography yet united by nature. Each person pursued their own desires, and since those desires could not be satisfied for everyone, and since none of them pointed toward the true good, humanity began to fracture from within. The weak were crushed by the strong, and weaker kingdoms or peoples surrendered their independence to more powerful ones, preferring peace and safety on any terms. Those who chose death over submission were regarded with astonishment, because nature speaks with one voice across nearly the whole world: "It is better to serve the conqueror than to be destroyed by war." This is why some are kings and others are subjects, not without God's providence, since both ruler and ruled are equally before Him and equally in His power. Yet among all those earthly kingdoms, where divided humanity chased after temporal gain and worldly prestige, two stand out above the rest: Assyria first, and then Rome. They were separated by both time and place, the one rising in the East long before the other emerged in the West, and the fall of the first became, in effect, the birth of the second. All other kingdoms were little more than satellites of these two. In Assyria, Ninus reigned as the second king, succeeding his father Belus, the first, and it was during Belus's reign that Abraham was born.

Then Sicyon was but a small thing, which is where the great scholar Varro begins his account of the Roman nation, moving from the Sicyonians to the Athenians, from the Athenians to the Latins, and from the Latins to the Romans. But those were trifles compared to the Assyrians, who rose to power long before Rome was built. Though the Roman Sallust calls Athens very famous in Greece, I think it was more famous than it deserved to be. Speaking of the Athenians, he says: "The Athenians' exploits I think were worthy indeed, but short of their report, as being enhanced by their eloquence in relations, and so came the world to ring of Athens, and the Athenians' virtues held as powerful in their acts as their wits were copious in their reports." Beyond this, philosophers continually gathered there, and the city's reputation as a center of learning added greatly to its fame. But when it came to power, no kingdom in those times was so famous or so vast as Assyria. Ninus, the son of Belus, ruled all of Asia under his dominion, a region that was a third of the world by number of nations and half by sheer size, stretching as far as the furthest limits of Libya. Only the Indians, of all the Eastern peoples, he had not subdued; but his wife Semiramis made war on them after his death. In this way, all the governors of those lands answered to the princes of Assyria. And it was during the reign of this Ninus that Abraham was born in Chaldea. But because we know the state of Greece better than that of Assyria, and because the ancient writers who traced Rome's origins worked from the Greeks to the Latins and then to the Romans (who are indeed Latins), we need only recount the Assyrian kings as far as is necessary to trace the progress of Babylon, the first Rome, alongside that heavenly pilgrim on earth, the holy City of God. For the matters that will directly concern this work, and the comparison of both cities, we must draw more from the Greeks and Latins, in whose world Rome, the second Babylon, is seated.

At Abraham's birth, then, Ninus was the second king of Assyria and Europs the second of Sicyonia, since Belus was the first of the one and Aegialeus the first of the other. But when Abraham left Chaldea on God's promise of universal blessing to the nations through his descendants, the fourth king ruled in Assyria and the fifth in Sicyonia. Ninus, the son of Ninus, had by then succeeded his mother Semiramis, whom tradition says he killed because she harbored an incestuous desire for him. Some believe she built Babylon, though it is more likely she only restored it; when it was actually built and by whom, we explain in our sixteenth book. This son of Ninus and Semiramis, who succeeded his mother, is called Ninus by some and Ninius by others, the latter being a derivative of his father's name. By this time, Sicyonia was governed by Telexion, whose reign was so prosperous that after his death the people worshipped him as a god, with sacrifices and theatrical games, of which they are said to have been the first inventors.

In his time, Sarah, though old, barren, and long past any hope of children, gave birth to Isaac for Abraham, just as God had promised. Aralius was then reigning as the fifth king of Assyria. When Isaac was sixty years old, Rebecca bore him twin sons, Esau and Jacob, while his father Abraham was still alive at the age of one hundred and sixty. Abraham lived fifteen more years before he died, during the reign of Xerxes the Elder (also called Balaeus), the seventh king of Assyria, and Thuriachus (whom some call Thurimachus), the seventh king of Sicyon. The kingdom of the Argives began around the time of Isaac's sons, with Inachus as its first king. We should also note, on the authority of Varro, that the Sicyonians traditionally offered sacrifices at the tomb of their seventh king, Thurimachus. When Armamitres was the eighth king of Assyria, Leucippus ruled Sicyon, and Inachus was the first king of Argos, God promised the land of Canaan to Isaac and his descendants, just as He had previously promised it to Abraham, along with the blessing that would extend to all nations. This same promise was made a third time to Jacob (later called Israel), Abraham's grandson, during the reign of Belocus, the ninth Assyrian monarch, while Phoroneus, the son of Inachus, was the second king of the Argives, and Leucippus still reigned in Sicyon.

In Phoroneus' time, Greece became famous for its many good laws and customs. After his death, however, his brother Phegous built a temple over his tomb, declared him a god, and ordered oxen to be sacrificed in his honor. I think he considered Phoroneus worthy of this because, in the portion of the kingdom he had governed (their father having divided the realm between them), Phoroneus had established shrines for worshipping the gods and taught people the proper reckoning of months and years. The common people, amazed by these achievements, either genuinely believed he had become a god at his death or simply wanted others to believe it. In the same way, they say that Io, the daughter of Inachus, was later called Isis and honored as a great goddess in Egypt. Some writers, however, claim she came from Ethiopia to rule Egypt, and that because her reign was powerful and benevolent, and because she taught her subjects many useful arts, they granted her divine honors after her death. They enforced this reverence so strictly that it was a capital offense to claim she had ever been mortal.

Baleus was the tenth king of Assyria, and Messappus (also called Cephisus, though both names were used by different authors to refer to the same man) was the ninth king of Sicyonia, and Apis was the third king of Argos, when Isaac died at the age of a hundred and eighty years, leaving his sons at the age of a hundred and twenty. The younger son, Jacob, belonged to God's city, and the elder to the world's. Jacob had twelve sons, one of whom, Joseph, was sold by his brothers to merchants traveling into Egypt, during the lifetime of their grandfather Isaac. Joseph lived in great favor and advancement under Pharaoh, having risen through his humility by the time he was thirty years old. He interpreted the king's dreams, foretelling seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine that would consume all the abundance of the earlier years. For this, the king released him from prison, where he had been confined for his genuine chastity in refusing the advances of his master's wife and fleeing from her, leaving his garment in her hands, which she then used as false evidence against him to her husband. After his release, the king made him viceroy over all Egypt. In the second year of the famine, Jacob came into Egypt with his sons at the age of a hundred and thirty, as he himself told the king. Joseph was thirty-nine when the king elevated him to this position, which is arrived at by adding the seven years of plenty and the two years of famine to his age of thirty.

At this time, Apis, king of Argos, sailed into Egypt, and dying there, was called Serapis, the greatest god of Egypt. The reason for the name change, says Varro, is this: a dead man's coffin (which everyone now calls *sarcophagus*) is also called *soros* in Greek. So at first they worshipped at his coffin and tomb, before his temple was built, calling him first Sorosapis or Sorapis, and afterwards (by the ordinary change of a letter) Serapis. They also made a law that anyone who claimed he had once been a man would be put to death. And because in all the temples of Isis and Serapis there was an image with a finger laid upon the mouth, as if commanding silence, this was (says Varro) to show that no one must say those two had ever been mortal. The ox that Egypt (being wonderfully and foolishly deceived) raised in all comfort and fatness in honor of Serapis was not called Serapis but Apis, because they did not worship him in a coffin. When this ox died and they went searching for another, they found one marked with exactly the same coloring, and in this they believed they had laid hold of a great god. It was not, in truth, so difficult for the devils to imprint the image of such a shape on a cow's imagination at the moment of conception, as a means of overturning human souls. The cow's imagination would surely shape the conception into such a form, just as Jacob's ewes and she-goats were shaped by the sight of the parti-colored sticks. For what a man can do with real colors, the devil can do with apparitions, and so can very easily produce such shapes.

Apis, the king of Argos (not of Egypt) died in Egypt, and his son Argus succeeded him on the throne, giving his name to the Argives. Neither the city nor the country had carried that name before his time. While Argus was reigning in Argos, Eratus in Sicyonia, and Baleus still ruling in Assyria, Jacob died in Egypt at the age of one hundred and forty-seven. At his death he blessed his sons and grandsons and prophesied clearly of Christ in the blessing of Judah: "The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor the law-giver from between his feet, until that come which is promised him: and He shall be the nations' expectation." During Argus' reign, Greece began to learn agriculture, importing seeds from other peoples. After his death, Argus was worshipped as a god and honored with temples and sacrifices. A private man named Homogyrus had received this same honor before him, having been struck by lightning, because he was the first person ever to yoke oxen to a plow.

During the reign of Mamitus, the twelfth Assyrian king, and Phennaeus, the eleventh king of Sicyonia (with Argus still alive in Argos), Joseph died in Egypt at the age of one hundred and ten. After his death, God's people remained in Egypt and multiplied remarkably over the next one hundred and forty-five years, until everyone who had known Joseph was gone. Then, because their rapid growth aroused envy and their freedom was viewed with suspicion, a harsh and crushing bondage was imposed on them. Even so, they continued to grow in number despite the persecution and oppression. Throughout this period, the same rulers governed Assyria and Greece as those we named before.

In the time of Saphrus, the fourteenth Assyrian king, when Orthopolus was the twelfth king of Sicyon and Criasus the fifth of Argos, Moses was born in Egypt. He was the man who led God's people out of their slavery, a bondage through which God had tested their patience according to His will. During this same king's reign, Prometheus is said by some to have lived. The legend holds that he made men out of clay, because he taught wisdom so remarkably well, yet no wise men from his time are actually recorded. His brother Atlas is said to have been a great astronomer, which gave rise to the fable of his holding up the heavens on his shoulders. There is, in fact, a great mountain by that name whose height might appear to an untrained eye to be propping up the sky. It was around this period that Greece began filling its histories with myths, though from the earliest times up to the reign of Cecrops, king of Athens, in whose time the city received that name and Moses led Israel out of Egypt, some of the dead kings were elevated to the status of gods through the vanity and habitual superstition of the Greeks. Among these were Melantonice, wife of Crias; Phorbas, their son and the sixth king of Argos; the son of Triopas, the seventh king; Jasus; and Sthelenas, or Sthelenus, or Sthenelus (the name is spelled differently in different sources), the ninth king. In these same times lived Mercury, grandson of Atlas and son of his daughter Maia, a story well known to most readers. He was a skilled inventor of many useful things, and for that reason people believed, or at least wanted others to believe, that he was a god. Hercules came somewhat later, though he was roughly contemporary with the Argive kings. Some place him before Mercury, but I think they are mistaken. In any case, the most reliable historians who have written about both men confirm that they were human beings, honored as gods because of the benefits they brought to civilization and to the practical needs of human life. Minerva, however, predates all of these. According to tradition, she appeared in the time of Ogyges, at Lake Triton, in the form of a young woman, which is why she was called Tritonia. She was a woman of many remarkable inventions, and the more likely to be regarded as a goddess precisely because her origins were unknown. The story of her springing from Jupiter's brain is pure poetry and has no basis in history. There was indeed a great flood in the time of Ogyges, though not as catastrophic as the one in which all perished except those in the ark (a flood that neither Greek nor Latin authors mention), but still greater than the flood of Deucalion's day. As for the precise date of Ogyges' time, the writers offer no certainty. I noted earlier where Varro begins his account, and he traced Roman origins no further back than the flood of Ogyges. Our own chroniclers, Eusebius first and then Jerome, following older sources, place the flood of Ogyges in the reign of Phoroneus, the second king of Argos, three hundred years before the period just mentioned. Whatever the exact date, this much is certain: in the time of Cecrops, who either founded or rebuilt Athens, Minerva was already being worshipped there with divine honors.

Varro explains the name of Athens (derived from ἀθήνη, which is Minerva) as follows. An olive tree suddenly appeared in one place, and a spring burst forth just as suddenly in another. These strange events prompted the king to consult the oracle at Delphi, which told him that the olive tree represented Minerva and the spring represented Neptune, and that the city could take its name from whichever of the two the people preferred. Cecrops then gathered all the people of both sexes together (for it was the custom in that place at the time to include women in public deliberations as well) to cast their votes in this choice. The men voted for Neptune and the women for Minerva; and since the women outnumbered the men, Minerva carried the day. Neptune, furious at this outcome, flooded all the land of Attica (for demons can direct the waters wherever they wish), and to appease him, the Athenian women were made to suffer a threefold punishment. First, they would never again have a vote in public assembly. Second, they would never again be called Athenians. Third, their children would never bear their mothers' names. And so this ancient and celebrated city, the acknowledged mother of arts and learning, the pride and glory of Greece, was named Athens after the female deity who had won the contest, thanks to a devil's mockery played out in a rivalry between a male and a female god, decided by a feminine majority. Yet the city was then punished by the very god who had lost, and was forced to penalize the very people who had secured the victor's triumph, making plain that it feared Neptune's floodwaters far more than Minerva's weapons. For Minerva herself was effectively punished through the women who had championed her cause: she could not even protect those who had raised her to victory to the point of letting them keep her name, let alone their votes in public affairs or the right to pass their own names on to their sons. In this way, the women lost the name of the goddess they had made victorious over a male god. You can imagine what I might say about all of this, but my purpose here carries me on to other matters.

Varro refuses to accept any myths that reflect badly on the gods, for fear of diminishing their dignity. For this reason, he will not trace the name "Areopagus" (the place where St. Paul debated with the Athenians, and from which the city's judges took their name) to the story that Mars (in Greek, *ἀρης*) was charged with homicide and tried before twelve gods in that court, then acquitted by six votes: absolved because, when the votes are evenly split, acquittal outweighs condemnation. Though this is the common account, Varro rejects it and tries to propose a different origin for the name, unwilling to let the Athenians derive "Areopagus" from *ἀρης* and *Pagus*. To do so, he argues, would be to slander the gods by attributing brawls and quarrels to them. On the same grounds, he declares both this story and the goddesses' dispute over the golden apple to be equally false, even though the stage presents them to the gods as true, and the gods themselves seem to take pleasure in them, whether true or false. All of this Varro refuses to believe, out of concern for the gods' reputation. And yet he goes on to tell a story about the origin of Athens' name that is just as frivolous: a contest between Neptune and Minerva, which he treats as the most plausible explanation for why the city bears the name it does. According to this account, the two gods competed through miraculous signs, and Apollo, unwilling to judge between them, appointed an arbiter in the dispute, much as Paris had been called to settle the quarrel among the three goddesses. In this contest, Minerva won through her supporters, yet was also defeated through them: she secured the name "Athens" for herself, but could not leave the name "Athenians" to the people who bore it. During this period, Varro says, Cranaus, the successor of Cecrops, was reigning at Athens, though Eusebius and Jerome both maintain it was Cecrops himself. It was at this time that the great flood known as Deucalion's deluge occurred, named after him because it struck his kingdom with the greatest force. Egypt and its surrounding regions, however, were untouched by it.

In the latter part of Cecrops' reign at Athens, Moses led Israel out of Egypt, while Ascatades, Marathus, and Triopas were kings of Assyria, Sicyon, and Argos respectively. Moses brought the people to Sinai, where he received the law from above, known as the Old Testament, which contained all earthly promises. The New Testament, containing the spiritual promises, would come with Christ our Savior, for this order was the most fitting, as St. Paul explains: the natural must come first, and the spiritual afterward. As he rightly said, "the first man is of earth, earthy, and the second man is of heaven, heavenly." Moses ruled this people in the desert for forty years, dying at the age of one hundred and twenty. Through countless figures embedded in the physical observances of the tabernacle, the priesthood, the sacrifices, and other symbolic commands, he had prophesied Christ throughout. Joshua succeeded Moses, led the people into the promised land, and by God's guidance drove out all the pagan peoples who occupied it. After ruling for twenty-seven years, Joshua died during the reign of Amintas, the eighteenth king of Assyria; Corax, the sixteenth king of Sicyon; Danus, the tenth king of Argos; and Ericthonius, the fourth king of Athens.

Between Israel's departure from Egypt and the death of Joshua, who led them into the promised land, the Greek princes established many kinds of sacrifices to their false gods. These were solemn memorials of the flood, of humanity's deliverance from it, and of the misery people endured during it: driven up to the hills, then coming back down into the plains once the waters receded. This, they say, is what the Luperci running up and down the sacred street represents, namely, how people fled to the mountains during the great inundation and descended again into the plains when it ended. They also say that Dionysius (otherwise called Father Liber, and made a god after his death) first demonstrated the planting of the vine in Attica at this time. Musical plays were then dedicated to Apollo of Delphi to appease him, since the Greeks believed he had afflicted all of Greece with barrenness because they had failed to defend his temple when Danaus burned it during his invasion. The oracle itself commanded them to establish those plays. Ericthonius was the first to present them in Attica, both to Apollo and to Minerva, where the victor received a reward of oil, which Minerva is said to have invented, just as Liber had discovered wine. During this same period, Xanthus, King of Crete, carried off Europa and fathered Rhadamanthus, Sarpedon, and Minos, who are reported to be the sons of Jove and Europa. The pagans, however, concede the historical truth about the King of Crete, while dismissing what hangs on every poet's pen and every actor's lips as mere fable, as if to prove that their deities took wholehearted delight in shameless falsehoods.

At this time Hercules was famous at Tyre, though not the one we mentioned earlier, for the more obscure histories record that there were many men named Hercules and many named Father Liber. This Hercules is celebrated for twelve remarkable exploits (not counting the killing of the African Antaeus, which belongs to the other Hercules), and this same Hercules is said to have burned himself on Mount Oeta, the virtue that had helped him subdue so many monsters having failed him when it came to bearing his own suffering with patience. Also at this time, Busiris, son of Neptune and Libya, daughter of Epaphus, and king (or rather tyrant) of Egypt, was in the habit of murdering strangers and offering them to his gods. But of course, we must never suppose that Neptune could have committed adultery, or the gods will be implicated. Let the poets have their license to fill the stage and please the gods with it.

It is said that Vulcan and Minerva were the parents of this Ericthonius, at the end of whose reign Joshua died. But because they hold Minerva to be a virgin, they claim that in their struggle together, Vulcan's seed fell upon the ground, and from that the king was born, as his very name suggests: for *eris* means "strife" and *chthon* means "earth," and joined together they form Ericthonius. The more learned among them, however, reject this filthiness outright and offer a different explanation: in the temple shared by Vulcan and Minerva at Athens, a small child was found with a dragon coiled around him, a sign that he would become a great man. Because no other parents were known for him beyond this temple, he was called the son of Vulcan and Minerva. Even so, the fable explains his name more convincingly than this historical account does.

But what does any of this matter to us? One version is written in serious books to instruct religious people; the other is performed on public stages to delight unclean devils, whom even their most reputable writers honor as gods alongside those same religious people. And even if they deny these stories about their gods, they cannot clear them of all guilt, since the gods are said to desire such performances and to take pleasure in watching these shameful things acted out, things that wisdom would suggest are better denied altogether. For even if the fables slander them, if the gods delight in hearing such lies told about themselves, that delight makes their guilt entirely real.

After Joshua died, Israel came to be governed by judges. During this period, the people prospered or suffered according to God's mercy or the consequences of their sins. It was around this time that the fiction of Triptolemus took hold: the story of a man who, at Ceres' command, flew across the world on a chariot drawn by dragons, teaching humanity the cultivation of grain. Other fictions spread alongside it: the Minotaur, locked inside a labyrinth from which no one who entered could ever escape; the Centaurs, creatures that were half human and half horse; Cerberus, the three-headed dog guarding the underworld; Phryxus and Helle, who fled on the back of a ram; the Gorgon, whose hair was made of snakes and whose gaze turned all who looked upon her to stone; Bellerophon and his winged horse Pegasus; Amphion, whose harp music could move stones; and Oedipus, with his answer to the monster. These stories include the Sphinx's riddle, which caused her to break her own neck from her perch; Antaeus, the son of the earth, who was killed by Hercules in midair because every time he was thrown to the ground he rose again as strong as before; and others I may have left out. Those myths, up to the time of the Trojan War (where Varro ended his second book of *De Gente Romanorum*), were shaped by human invention in ways that drifted from historical truth, yet without bringing any obvious disgrace upon the gods. But then there were those who invented stories claiming that Jupiter abducted the beautiful boy Ganymede for his own lustful purposes (a crime actually committed by Tantalus and falsely attributed to Jove), or that he came down to sleep with Danae disguised as a shower of gold (the woman having been seduced by the promise of wealth): whether these things were actually done in those times, done by others and blamed on Jove, or simply invented out of whole cloth, it is hard to say just how much damage the audacity of these myth-makers did to the hearts of ordinary people, who were willing to tolerate such shameful slanders against their own gods. And not only did they tolerate them, they welcomed them warmly, whereas anyone who truly honored Jupiter would have punished his slanderers severely. Instead, they were so far from restraining these stories that they feared divine retribution if they failed to promote them, staging these fictions before large public audiences. Around this same period, Latona gave birth to Apollo, not the god of oracles mentioned earlier, but the one who tended the herds of King Admetus alongside Hercules. He was later elevated to divine status and identified as one and the same figure as the other Apollo. Then father Liber waged war in India, leading a company of women through his campaigns known as the Bacchae, who were more notorious for their frenzy than for any martial virtue. Some writers claim that this Liber was defeated and imprisoned; others say that Perseus killed him in battle and even identify his burial place. And yet those wicked, sacrilegious rites known as the Bacchanals were instituted in his honor as a god, appointed by unclean spirits. The Roman Senate eventually, after long tolerating them, recognized the barbarous filth of these rituals and drove them out of the city. During this same era, Perseus and his wife Andromeda died, and the world genuinely believed they had been taken up into heaven. Without any shame or hesitation, people gave their names to two magnificent constellations and shaped their images among the stars.

Around that time lived poets called theologians, who composed verse about their human-invented gods, about the elements of the world (which are the true God's handiwork), and about the principalities and powers that God's will, not their own merit, had elevated to such heights. These subjects became the raw material of their poems, treated as though they were divine. If their fables contained anything that touched on the true God, it was so tangled up with everything else that He could not be distinguished from their false gods, nor could the poets find their way to giving Him alone what He alone deserved. Instead, they were compelled to worship the creatures alongside God the Creator, and yet they couldn't even refrain from disgracing those same gods with obscene fables. Such were Orpheus, Musaeus, and Linus. But these men were only servants of the gods, not made gods themselves, though Orpheus, by some means I cannot explain, came to preside over the infernal rites, or rather the sacrileges, of the city of the devil. Ino, the wife of Athamas, threw herself into the sea with her child Melicertes, and yet both were counted among the gods, as were others of that era, such as Castor and Pollux. Ino was called Leucothea by the Greeks and Matuta by the Latins, and both peoples honored her as a goddess.

Then the Argive kingdom passed to Mycenae, where Agamemnon ruled. Around this same time, the kingdom of the Laurentines arose in Italy, with Picus, son of Saturn, as its first king, while Deborah, a woman, was serving as judge over the Jews. God's Spirit truly judged through her, for she was a prophetess (her prophecy is too obscure to connect to Christ without a lengthy discussion). By this point, the Laurentines had established a kingdom in Italy, the very land from which the Romans would eventually trace their lineage after their descent from Greece. The Assyrian monarchy was still standing: Lampares, the twentieth king, was ruling there when Picus began his reign in Laurentum. As for his father Saturn, the pagans claim he was no ordinary man, but that is their problem to sort out. Some of them have actually written that he was a man, and that he ruled this land before his son Picus. Ask Virgil's verses, and they will tell you:

"The undocile sort on mountains high dispersed

He did compose, and gave them laws, and first

Would call it Latium, when he latent lay,

In whose reign was the golden age men say."

But all of this, they say, is poetic fiction. Sterces was Saturn's father, the man who invented the practice of fertilizing the ground with dung, which was named *stercus* after him. Some call him Stercutius. Whatever name he went by, this same Sterces or Stercutius was deified for his contribution to farming. His son Picus was likewise deified after him: a skilled soothsayer and, by all accounts, a formidable soldier. Picus fathered Faunus, the second king of Laurentum, who was later worshipped as a woodland god. All of these men were deified before the Trojan War.

Troy, whose destruction the great minds of antiquity preserved for all posterity alongside its former glory, fell during the reign of Latinus, son of Faunus (from whom the Latin name derived, as the Laurentine name faded away). The Greek victors, returning each to his homeland, were battered on all sides and perished in great numbers; yet some of them were made into gods. Diomedes was counted among these, never having made it home, while his companions were said to have been turned into birds. This claim belongs to history, not poetry alone, yet neither his new divine status nor his appeals to Jupiter were enough to restore his companions to human form. It is also said that he has a temple on the island of Diomedea, not far from Mount Garganus in Apulia, where these birds continually circle the temple and dwell there with a remarkable obedience: they will wash the temple with water carried in their beaks, and whenever a Greek or someone of Greek descent arrives, they grow calm and gentle. But if anyone else approaches, they attack his face with fierce aggression, and some visitors have been wounded to the point of death, for their beaks are said to be large, sharp, and powerful.

Varro, hoping to lend this some credibility, recounts several strange tales: the famous witch Circe, who turned Ulysses' companions into beasts; the Arcadians, who swam across a certain lake and became wolves, living among the wild wolves of the forest; and who, if they refrained from eating human flesh, could swim back across that same lake after nine years and return to human form. He even names a certain Daemonetus, who tasted the sacrificial offerings that the Arcadians made to their god Lycaeus (a ritual involving the killing of a child), was turned into a wolf, and after ten years regained his human form, went on to become a champion athlete, and won the victory at the Olympic games. Varro also believes that Pan and Jupiter were called Lycaei in Arcadian tradition for no other reason than their power to transform men into wolves, since the Arcadians considered such transformation impossible for any but a divine power. The Greek word for wolf is *lykos*, and from this came the name Lycaeus; and the Roman Luperci, he adds, traced their origins back to these same mysteries.

Some readers may want to know what a Christian should make of these devilish deceptions, given the reports of miracles circulating among unbelievers. What can we say but this: "Get out of the midst of Babylon" (Jer 51:6)? That prophetic command urges us to move as quickly as faith can carry us, to leave behind this worldly city packed with a confused mass of sinners and evil angels, and press on toward the living God. The greater the power we see in the deceiver, the more firmly we must hold to our Mediator, through whom we leave behind the dregs and rise toward the heights of purity. Now, if we were to dismiss all these stories as lies, there would still be people who insist they have either heard them as reliable accounts from trustworthy sources, or witnessed them firsthand. When I was in Italy, for instance, I heard a report that certain women in one town would slip a drug into a traveler's cheese, and he would promptly turn into a donkey, after which they would use him to carry their goods wherever they needed, then restore his original form. Through all of this, he supposedly retained his human reason, just as Apuleius did during his time as a donkey, as Apuleius himself describes in *The Golden Ass*, whether that account is true or invented. Either these things are false, or they are simply too unusual to be believed. What we must hold firmly is that God's power is omnipotent over all things, while the devils can do nothing beyond the limits of their own nature (which is angelic, though malevolent) unless He permits it, He whose judgments are always secret but never unjust. Nor can the devils actually create anything, whatever appearances they produce to raise these doubts; they can only cast a changed shape over what God has already made, altering the appearance alone. I do not believe the devil can genuinely transform any soul or body into the actual limbs and substance of a beast. What they can do is transport a person's imagination, in a bodily form, to other senses in ways that defy description. This happens routinely in dreams, where the mind passes through countless scenes that, though not physical, seem to move through physical forms, while the person's actual body lies elsewhere, alive but in a trance far deeper than ordinary sleep. This imagined form may then appear to other senses as something bodily, and a man may seem to himself to be exactly what he often imagines himself to be in dreams, even carrying loads. If those loads are real, the devils carry them, deceiving onlookers with the appearance of real burdens and false shapes. A man named Præstantius told me that his father once took such a drug in cheese at home, after which he fell into so deep a sleep that no one could wake him. After a few days he woke on his own and described everything he had experienced in his dreams during that time: he had been turned into a horse and had carried soldiers' provisions in a pack. The account was accurate in its details, yet to him it had only been a dream. Someone else told me how, one night before he fell asleep, an old acquaintance of his, a philosopher, came to him and explained certain Platonic ideas that he had previously refused to explain. When the man later asked the philosopher why he had done there what he had refused to do at home when asked, the philosopher replied: "I did not do it. I dreamed that I did." So what one man dreamed, the other witnessed in a visionary appearance. These stories were told to me by people I believe were not lying, because if anyone else had told them, they would have been impossible to credit. On this basis, those Arcadians whom the god (or rather the devils) supposedly turned into wolves, and those companions of Ulysses whom Circe charmed into animal shapes, had only their imaginations occupied with such forms, if any of this happened at all. As for the birds of Diomedes, since they exist as a real species, I do not take them to be transformed men. Rather, I think the men were removed and the birds brought in to replace them, just as a hind was substituted in place of Iphigenia, the daughter of Agamemnon. The devil can perform such tricks of substitution easily, with God's permission. Since the girl was later found alive, it was clearly a deception: she was taken away and the hind placed there instead. As for Diomedes' companions, since they were never seen again (the evil angels having destroyed them), people believed they had been turned into the birds that appeared in their place from unknown locations. As for the birds washing his temple, their apparent affection for Greeks, and their hostility toward others, all of this can be explained by the devil's prompting. His aim was to convince people that Diomedes had become a god, so that they would dishonor the true God by worshiping invented deities and dead men, building temples, altars, priesthoods, and sacrifices for people who, while they lived, had no divine life in them at all. All those honors, when rightly given, belong exclusively to the one true God.

Troy having been taken and razed, Aeneas sailed to Italy with ten ships carrying the survivors of Troy. At that time, Latinus was king in Italy, Mnestheus ruled Athens, Poliphydos ruled Sicyon, Tautanos ruled Assyria, and Abdon was judging Israel. When Latinus died, Aeneas reigned for three years under the same kings, except that Pelasgus had become king of Sicyon and Samson was now judge of the Hebrews. Samson was regarded as a kind of Hercules for his extraordinary strength. After Aeneas died and his body could not be found, the Latins declared him a god. The Sabines did the same for Sangus, also called Sanctus. Around this same time, Codrus, king of Athens, disguised himself and went out to be killed by the Peloponnesians, who were enemies of Athens, and he succeeded. By doing so, he saved his country from destruction. The Peloponnesians had received an oracle telling them they would conquer Athens only if they did not kill the Athenian king. Codrus outwitted them by going in disguise, provoking them with insults until they killed him without knowing who he was. Virgil alludes to this in the phrase "or the quarrels of Codrus." The Athenians afterward honored him with divine worship. During the reign of Sylvius, the fourth Latin king (a son of Aeneas by Lavinia, not by Creusa, and therefore not the brother of Ascanius), when Oneus was the twenty-ninth king of Assyria, Melanthus the sixteenth king of Athens, and Eli the priest was judging Israel, the kingdom of Sicyon finally collapsed after enduring, by the historical record, 959 years.

Shortly after this period, during the reigns of those kings, the judges of Israel gave way to a monarchy, and Saul was anointed as the first king of Israel during the time of the prophet Samuel. Around the same time, the Latin kings began to be called Sylvii, after Sylvius, the son of Aeneas. All who came after him kept their own individual names but shared this surname in common, much as the emperors who succeeded Caesar were called Caesars long afterward. But Saul and his line were rejected, and after his death David was crowned, forty years after Saul had begun his reign. The Athenians, for their part, had no more kings after Codrus and moved instead to an aristocracy. David reigned forty years, and his son Solomon succeeded him: the man who built that magnificent temple of God at Jerusalem. During Solomon's reign, the Latins founded Alba, and their kings were from that point on called the Alban kings, though they ruled over Latium. Rehoboam succeeded Solomon, and during his reign Israel was divided into two kingdoms, each with its own king.

After Aeneas, their first deified king, Latium had eleven more kings, none of whom were deified. But Aventinus, the twelfth, was killed in battle and buried on the hill that now bears his name, and he was added to their calendar of divine men. Some say he was not killed at all but simply vanished, and that Mount Aventine took its name not from him but from someone else. After him, no more gods were made in Latium until Romulus, the founder of Rome, with two kings standing between him and Aventinus. One of these Virgil names, writing:

*Proximus ille Procas Troianæ gloria gentis.*

("Next came Procas, the glory of the Trojan race.")

During his reign, with Rome now on the verge of being founded, the great Assyrian empire came to an end. After one thousand three hundred and five years (counting the reign of Belus in that small kingdom at its beginning), power passed to the Medes. Procas reigned before Amulius.

Amulius had made Rhea (also called Ilia), the daughter of his brother Numitor, a vestal virgin. Mars, they say, then slept with her (and so they honor her adultery) and fathered twin sons on her. To support their earlier excuse for her, they claim the twins were abandoned, yet a she-wolf, the sacred beast of Mars, came and nursed them at her teats, as if recognizing the sons of her lord. Some say, however, that it was actually a prostitute who found them when they were first abandoned and nursed them. (Prostitutes were called *lupae*, "she-wolves," and brothels are called *lupanaria* to this day.) After that, a shepherd named Faustulus took them in, and his wife Acca raised them. But consider this: what if God, in order to judge the bloodthirsty king who had ordered the twins drowned, preserved them from the water and sent this beast to feed them? Is that so hard to believe? Numitor, the grandfather of Romulus, succeeded his brother Amulius on the throne of Latium, and in the first year of his reign Rome was built, so that from that point on he and Romulus reigned together in Italy.

Briefly, Rome, the second Babylon and daughter of the first (through which it pleased God to bring the whole world under one sovereignty) was now founded. The world was full of hardened men, seasoned by war and difficult to subdue without enormous effort and danger. The Assyrian conquests across Asia had been far easier by comparison: the peoples there were weak in their defenses, and the world was far less populous. It was not even a thousand years after the great flood, in which everyone perished except Noah and his family, that Ninus conquered all of Asia except India. But the Romans did not rise to dominance so easily. They expanded slowly, meeting fierce resistance at every turn. Rome was built when Israel had already lived in the promised land for 718 years: 27 under Joshua, 329 under the Judges, and 362 under the Kings, up to Ahaz, King of Judah, or by some reckonings up to his successor Hezekiah, that good and godly king who reigned, by all accounts, in the time of Romulus. Hosea was king of Israel throughout this period.

In those days, the Erythraean Sibyl prophesied (some say): according to Varro, there were many sibyls, more than one. But this Sibyl of Erythrea wrote what appear to be prophecies of Christ, which we have read in rough Latin verses that don't correspond well to the Greek, since the translator, as we later learned, was not among the better poets. Flaccianus, a learned and eloquent man who had served as a Consul's Deputy, was in conversation with us about Christ when he showed us a Greek book, saying these were the sibyl's verses. In one passage, he pointed out a series of verses composed so that the first letter of each verse, taken together, spelled out these words: *ἰησοῦς χριστος θεοῦ υἱος, σωτὴρ* (Jesus Christus, Dei Filius, Salvator), "Jesus Christ, Son of God, the Saviour." Some have translated these verses into Latin, and you will find the English rendering in the note below, arranged as an acrostic from the Greek.

Now this translator could not make his verse endings carry the same meaning as the Greek endings do. For example, the Greek letter *u* begins one verse, but Latin has no word starting with *u* that fits the sense. This problem occurs in three verses: the fifth, the eighteenth, and the nineteenth. Furthermore, we do not take these letters strictly from the heads of the verses in their exact number, but rather express these five words: *Jesus Christus Dei Filius, Salvator*.

In sign of Doomsday, the whole earth shall sweat:

Ever to reign, a King in heavenly seat,

Shall come to judge all flesh, the faithful and

Unfaithful too, before this God shall stand,

Seeing Him high with saints, in time's last end.

Corporeal shall He sit; and thence, extend

His doom on souls. The earth shall quite lie waste,

Ruined, overgrown with thorns, and men shall cast

Idols away, and treasure. Scorching fire

Shall burn the ground, and thence it shall inquire,

Through seas, and sky, and break Hell's blackest gates:

So shall free light salute the blessed states

Of saints; the guilty, lasting flame shall burn.

No act so hid, but then to light shall turn;

Or breast so close, but God shall open wide.

Everywhere shall cries be heard, and noise beside

Of gnashing teeth. The sun shall from the sky

Fly forth; and stars no more move orderly.

Great Heaven shall be dissolved, the moon deprived

Of all her light; places at height arrived

Depressed; and valleys raised to their seat:

There shall be nought to mortals, high or great.

Hills shall lie level with the plains; the sea

Endure no burden; and the earth, as they,

Shall perish cleft with lightning: every spring

And river burn. The fatal trump shall ring

Unto the world, from heaven, a dismal blast

Including plagues to come for ill deeds past.

Old Chaos, through the cleft mass, shall be seen,

Unto this bar shall all earth's kings convene:

Rivers of fire and brimstone flowing from heaven."

The verses total twenty-seven, which form a perfect cube: three times three is nine, and three times nine is twenty-seven. Take the first letters of the first five words from the Greek sentence embedded in the opening lines of those verses, and they spell ἰχθὺς, meaning "fish," a mystical name for Christ, who could live in this mortal world as if in a deep sea, untouched by sin. Now this Sibyl of Erythrae, or (as some prefer to think) of Cumae, has not a single word in all her verses tending toward idolatry. Everything points against the false gods and their worshippers, so that she seems to me to have been a citizen of the City of God. Lactantius also draws prophecies of Christ from one of the sibyls, though he does not say which one. The passages he scatters in brief fragments throughout his work I think it worthwhile to gather together and present as one continuous prophecy assembled from his many small pieces. It reads as follows: "Afterwards He shall be taken by the ungodly, and they shall strike God with wicked hands, and spit their venomous spirits in His face. He shall yield His holy back to their strokes, and endure their blows in silence, lest they should know that He is the Word, or from where He came to speak to mortals. They shall crown Him with thorns; they gave Him gall instead of vinegar to drink, this being the hospitality they offered Him. You foolish nation, that did not know your God, but crowned Him with thorns and feasted Him with bitterness. The veil of the temple shall be torn in two, and darkness shall fall for three hours at midday. Then He shall die and rest three days, and then He shall rise again from death and show the first fruits of the Resurrection to those who are called." All of this Lactantius drew from the sibyl and used in various places as his argument required. We have gathered it here into one passage, distinguishing it only by the chapter headings, provided the copyist takes care to follow our arrangement. Some say the Sibyl of Erythrae lived during the Trojan War, long before Romulus.

In Romulus' time lived Thales, one of those who (after the theological poets, among whom Orpheus was chief) were called the wise men or sages. Around this same period, the Chaldeans conquered the ten tribes of Israel, who had already broken away from Judah, and carried them off as captives to Chaldea, leaving only the tribes of Judah and Benjamin free, with their royal seat at Jerusalem. When Romulus died and his body could not be found, he was declared a god, though this practice had by then nearly fallen out of use, so that by the time of the Caesars it was done more out of flattery than genuine belief. Cicero speaks highly of Romulus for having earned such honors in so wise and learned an age, even though philosophy had not yet reached its peak of subtle argument and disputation. But although in later times men no longer made new gods out of other men, they kept their old ones all the same and never abandoned their worship of them. Superstition only grew, fed by a proliferation of images that earlier generations had never known, while the demons worked so powerfully among them that they persuaded the people to stage public performances depicting the gods' shameful acts, things that, had they been unheard of before, those same people would have been too embarrassed to invent. After Romulus came Numa, who packed the city full of false religion, yet for all his consecrations he could not carve out a place among the gods for himself. It seems he crowded heaven so full of deities that he left no room for his own admission. While he reigned at Rome, and Manasseh ruled over the Hebrews (that wicked king who killed the prophet Isaiah), the Sibyl of Samos is said to have lived.

During the reign of Zedekiah over the Hebrews and Tarquinius Priscus (successor to Ancus Martius) over the Romans, the Jews were carried captive to Babylon, Jerusalem was destroyed, and Solomon's temple was razed to the ground. The prophets had warned them long before that their wickedness would bring this upon them, chiefly Jeremiah, who even specified the time it would last. Around this same period lived Pittacus of Mitylene, another of the celebrated sages. The other five as well (who together with Thales and Pittacus make up the famous seven) all lived, according to Eusebius, within the period of Israel's captivity in Babylon. Their names were Solon of Athens, Chilo of Lacedaemon, Periander of Corinth, Cleobulus of Lindum, and Bias of Prienæum. All of these men came after the theological poets, and they were more celebrated for the quality of their personal conduct than for anything others observed in them, and for the various sound instructions they offered on the reform of morals. They left no written records of their learning for later generations, with the sole exception of Solon, who bequeathed the Athenians a body of laws he had composed. Thales was a natural philosopher who left books setting out his views; and in this same period lived Anaximander, Anaximenes, and Xenophon, all natural philosophers, as well as Pythagoras, from whom philosophy seemed to take its beginning.

At the same time, Cyrus, King of Persia, Chaldea, and Assyria, gave the Jews a kind of release: he sent fifty thousand of them back to rebuild the Temple. These, however, only managed to build the altar and lay the foundations, because their enemies harassed them with such frequent raids that construction was abandoned until the reign of Darius. The story of Judith also belongs to this same period, though the Jews, it is said, do not include it in their canon. When the seventy years Jeremiah had foretold came to an end during Darius's reign, the Jews received their full freedom. At that time, Tarquin the Proud was the seventh King of Rome, the king whom the Romans eventually expelled and after whom they refused to submit to any king again. Up to this point, Israel had prophets in great numbers, though only a few of their prophecies have been preserved in the canonical record. I promised at the close of my last book to say something about these prophets in this one, and this is the right place to do so.

To understand the timing properly, let us look back a little. The prophecy of Hosea, the first of the twelve minor prophets, begins this way: "The word of the Lord that came to Hosea, in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, Hezekiah, kings of Judah." Amos also writes that his prophecy came during Uzziah's reign, adding that Jeroboam was alive in those times as well, which he was. Isaiah, the son of Amos (either the prophet or some other man, with the latter being the more widely accepted view), names the same four kings at the opening of his prophecy that Hosea named. So does Micah. All of these prophets can be shown to have lived in the same era, along with Jonah and Joel: the first under Uzziah, and the latter under his son Jotham. We do not find the dates of these last two in their own books, but in the Chronicles. Now these times stretch from Procas or Aventinus, the predecessor of the Latin kings, all the way to Romulus, the first king of Rome, and even to his successor Numa Pompilius, for Hezekiah's reign in Judah lasted that long. It was therefore at the fall of the Assyrian Empire and the rise of the Roman that these springs of prophecy burst forth. Just as Abraham had received the promise that all the world would be blessed through his seed at the very founding of the Assyrian state, so too it was fitting that the testimonies pointing to the one who would fulfill that promise should multiply in word and writing at the founding of the western Babylon. The prophets who had spoken continuously in Israel from the time of their first kings had served Israel's own particular good and had no direct bearing on the nations at large. But the more explicit prophecies, which were meant for the benefit of the nations as well, fittingly began when that city began which would become the mistress of the nations.

Hosea is a prophet as inspired as he is profound. Let us keep our promise and see what he says: "In the place where it was said unto them, ye are not My people, it shall be said, ye are the sons of the living God." The apostles themselves interpreted this testimony as referring to the calling of the Gentiles, who, as the spiritual sons of Abraham, are rightly called Israel. The passage continues: "Then the children of Judah and the children of Israel shall be gathered together and appoint themselves one head, and they shall come up out of the land." To press further into this would only dull the sharp pleasure of the prophet's eloquence. Simply recall the cornerstone and the two walls, the Jews and the Gentiles, each represented under their respective names, both founded on that one head and acknowledged to rise from the earth. As for the unbelieving, carnal Israelites, the same prophet assures us that they will one day believe, succeeding the faithful as sons follow fathers into their places. He says: "The children of Israel shall sit many days without a king, without a prince, without an offering, without an altar, without a priesthood, and without manifestations." Who could fail to recognize the Jews in that description? Now notice what follows: "Afterwards shall the children of Israel convert, and seek the Lord their God, and David their king, and shall fear the Lord and His goodness in these latter days." Nothing could be plainer. David here means Christ, who, as the apostle says, was the Son of David in the flesh. This same prophet also foretold the third day of His resurrection. Hear his own words: "After two days will He revive us, and in the third day He will raise us up." Paul strikes exactly the same note when he writes: "If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above." Amos carries a similar prophecy: "Prepare to meet thy God, O Israel, for lo, I form the thunder, and the winds, and declare mine anointed in men." And in another place: "In that day will I raise up the tabernacle of David that is fallen down, and close up the breaches thereof, and will raise up his ruins, and build it as in the days of old: that the residue of mankind, and all the heathen, may seek Me, because My name is called upon them, said the Lord that doeth this."

Isaiah is not one of the twelve minor prophets. They are called the lesser prophets because their writings are brief compared to those who wrote at greater length, and Isaiah was among the latter. Since he lived during the same era as the two prophets just mentioned, I include him here. In his rebukes of sin, his calls to righteousness, and his warnings of judgment for those who offend God, he also proclaims Christ and His Church more fully than any other prophet, so much so that some have called him an evangelist rather than a prophet. Consider one of his prophecies briefly, since I cannot dwell on many. Speaking in the voice of God the Father, he says: "Behold, My Son shall understand, He shall be exalted and be very high: as many were astonied at Thee (Thy form was so despised by men, and Thy beauty by the sons of men), so shall many nations admire Him, and the kings shall be put to silence at His sight: for that which they have not heard of Him, shall they see, and that which hath not been told them, they shall understand. Lord, who will believe our report? to whom is the Lord's arm revealed? we will declare Him as an infant, and as a root out of a dry ground: He hath neither form nor beauty, when we shall see Him He shall have neither goodliness nor glory; but His look shall be despised and rejected before all men. He is a man full of sorrows, and hath experience of infirmities. For His face is turned away: He was despised and we esteemed Him not. He hath borne our sins and sorrows for us: yet did we judge Him as plagued of God, and smitten and humbled. But He was wounded for our transgressions, and broken for our iniquities: our peace we learned by Him, and with His stripes we are healed. We have all strayed like sheep: man had lost his way, and upon Him hath God laid all our guilt. He was afflicted, yet never opened He His mouth: He was led as a sheep to the slaughter, and as a lamb before the shearer is dumb, so was He, and opened not His mouth. He was cut from prison unto judgment: O who shall declare His generation? For He shall be taken out of life. For the transgression of My people was He plagued: and I will give the wicked for His grave, and the rich for His death: because He hath done no wickedness, nor was there any deceit found in His mouth! The Lord will purge Him from His affliction: if ye give your soul for sin, ye shall see the seed continue long, and the Lord shall take His soul from sorrow, to shew Him light, to confirm His understanding, to justify the righteous, serving many, for He bare their iniquities. Therefore I will give Him a portion with the great: He shall divide the spoils of the strong, because He hath poured out His soul unto death: He was reckoned with the transgressors, and hath borne the sins of many, and was betrayed for their trespasses." So much for Christ; now what does Isaiah say of His Church? "Rejoice, O barren, that bearest not: break forth and cry out for joy, thou that bringest not forth: for the desolate hath more children than the married wife. Enlarge the place of thy tents, and fasten the curtains of thy tabernacles: spare not, stretch out thy cords, and make fast thy stakes: spread it yet further to the right hand and the left, and thy seed shall possess the Gentiles, and dwell in the desolate cities: fear not, because thou art ashamed: be not afraid, because thou art upbraided, for thou shalt forget thine everlasting shame, and shalt not remember the reproach of thy widowhood any more, for the Lord that made thee is called the Lord of Hosts, and the Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel, shall be called the God of all the world," and so on. This is enough, and needs little explanation, for these passages are so clear that even our enemies are forced, despite themselves, to acknowledge their truth. These, then, are sufficient.

The prophet Micah, prefiguring Christ as a great mountain, says: "In the last days shall the mountain of the Lord be prepared upon the tops of the hills, and shall be exalted above the hills: and the nations shall haste them to it, saying: Come, let us go up into the mountain of the Lord, into the house of the God of Jacob, and He will teach us His ways, and we will walk in His paths, for the law shall go forth of Zion, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. He shall judge amongst many people, and rebuke mighty nations afar off" (Mic 4:1-3). The same prophet also foretells Christ's birthplace: "And thou, Bethlehem, of Ephratah, art little to be amongst the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall a Captain come forth unto me that shall be the Prince of Israel; whose goings forth have been everlasting. Therefore will He give them up until the time that the child-bearing woman do travail, and the remnant of her brethren shall return into the children of Israel. And He shall stand and look, and feed His flock in the strength of the Lord, in the honor of God's name shall they continue: for now shall He be magnified unto the world's end" (Mic 5:2-4). Jonah, for his part, prophesied Christ less through his words than through his suffering, and this in the most vivid way imaginable, pointing to the passion and resurrection. Why else was he three days in the whale's belly before being released, if not to signify Christ's resurrection from the depths of hell on the third day? Joel's prophecies of Christ and the Church require extensive explanation, but there is one passage I will not pass over: it was recalled by the apostles at the descent of the Holy Spirit on the faithful, just as Christ had promised. "Afterwards," he says, "I will pour out My Spirit upon all flesh; your sons and daughters shall prophesy, and your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men see visions: even upon the servants and the handmaids in those days will I pour My Spirit" (Joel 2:28-29).

The minor prophets Obadiah, Nahum, and Habakkuk never mention specific dates, and neither Eusebius nor Jerome fills that gap. Eusebius and Jerome place Obadiah and Micah together, but not in the section where they record the time of Micah's prophesying, which I believe was simply the fault of careless copyists. The other two we cannot find named in our copies at all. Yet since they are canonical, we cannot leave them out. Obadiah is the briefest of all the prophets in his writing; he speaks against Idumea, the rejected line of Esau, the elder son of Isaac and grandson of Abraham. Now if we take Idumea, by a figure of speech (synecdoche), to represent all the nations, we may read his prophecy as pointing to Christ: "On Mount Zion there shall be salvation, and it shall be holy," and shortly after, "Those who are saved shall come out of Zion" (that is, the believers in Christ, the Apostles, shall come out of Judah) "to defend Mount Esau." And how will they defend it? By preaching the gospel, saving those who believe, and bringing them out of the power of darkness into the kingdom of God, as the conclusion makes clear: "And the kingdom shall be the Lord's." Mount Zion signifies Judea, the source of salvation and the holy mother of Christ in the flesh; Mount Esau is Idumea, prefiguring the church of the Gentiles, whom those saved out of Zion came to defend, so that the kingdom might belong to the Lord. This was hidden before it happened, but once it came to pass, who could fail to see it? The prophet Nahum (or rather, God speaking through him) said: "I will abolish the carved and molten image, and make them your grave. Behold, on the feet of him who declares and proclaims peace. O Judah, keep your solemn feasts, fulfill your vows, for the wicked shall no more pass through you; he is utterly cut off. He who breathes in your face and frees you from tribulation ascends." Who is this who does all this? Think of the Holy Spirit; think of the Gospel. For this belongs to the New Testament, whose feasts are renewed and will never cease. We can see that the Gospel has abolished all those carved and molten images, those false idols, and buried them in oblivion as in a grave. In this we see the prophecy fulfilled. As for Habakkuk, what can he mean but the coming of Christ when he says: "The Lord answered, saying, write the vision and make it plain on tablets, that he may run who reads it. For the vision is yet for an appointed time, but at the last it shall speak and not lie; though it tarry, wait for it, for it shall surely come and shall not tarry."

And in his prayer and song, who does Habakkuk speak to but Christ, saying, "O Lord I heard Thy voice, and was afraid, Lord I considered Thy works, and was terrified." What is this but an overwhelming sense of wonder at that sudden and unexpected salvation of humanity? "In the midst of two shalt Thou be known": what are those two? The two Testaments, the two thieves, or the two prophets Moses and Elijah. "In the approach of years shalt Thou be known": this is plain enough and needs no explanation. But what follows, "My soul being troubled therewith, in Thy wrath remember mercy," speaks of the Jews, from whose nation He came. In their furious rage they crucified Christ, and yet He, remembering His mercy, said, "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do."

"God shall come from Teman, and the Holy One from the thick and dark mountain." From Teman (as some interpret it), meaning from the south, signifies the warmth of charity and the light of truth. The thick dark mountain can be understood in several ways, but I prefer to take it as referring to the depths of Holy Scripture, which prophesies Christ: for within those depths are many layers for the diligent to work through, and those who search them find Him whom they concern. "His glory covers the heavens, and the earth is full of His praise" (Hab 3:3): this is exactly what the psalm says: "Exalt yourself, O God, above the heavens, and let your glory be above all the earth" (Ps 57:5). "His brightness was as the light": His glory will enlighten the nations. "He had horns coming out of His hands" (Hab 3:4): that was His outstretched arms on the cross. "There was the hiding of His power" (Hab 3:4): this is plain enough. "Before Him went the word, and followed Him into the field" (Hab 3:5): that is, He was proclaimed before He came, and preached after He departed. "He stood, and the earth moved" (Hab 3:6): He stood to save, and the earth was moved by believing in Him. "He beheld the nations, and they were dissolved" (Hab 3:6): that is, He had compassion on them, and they repented. "He broke the mountains with violence" (Hab 3:6): His miracles humbled the proud. "The eternal hills did bow" (Hab 3:6): the people were brought low for a time, so that they might be glorified forever. "For my pains I saw His goings in" (Hab 3:16): that is, I received the reward of eternity for my labors in charity. "The tents of Ethiopia trembled, and so did they of Midian" (Hab 3:7): even those nations that were never under Rome will, through the terror of His name and the preaching of His power, become subject to Christ. "Was the Lord angry against the rivers, or was your anger against the sea?" (Hab 3:8): this implies that He came not to judge the world, but to save it. "You rode upon horses, and your chariot brought salvation" (Hab 3:8): the evangelists are His horses, for He guides them, and the gospel is His chariot, bringing salvation to all who believe. "You shall bend your bow above scepters; your judgment shall restrain even the kings of the earth; you shall cleave the earth with rivers" (Hab 3:9): that is, your abundant teaching will open the hearts of people to receive it. To such people it is said, "Rend your hearts, and not your garments" (Joel 2:13). "The people shall see you, and tremble; you shall spread the waters as you go" (Hab 3:10): your preachers will pour out the streams of your teaching on every side. "The deep made a noise" (Hab 3:10): the depths of the human heart gave voice to what it saw. "The height of His fantasy" (Hab 3:10): that is, the deep gave out its voice, expressing, as I said, what it had seen. This vision was not concealed but proclaimed openly. "The sun was extolled, and the moon kept her place" (Hab 3:11): Christ was taken up into heaven, and through Him the Church is governed. "Your arrows flew in the light" (Hab 3:11): your word was taught openly, and by the brightness of your shining arm your arrows flew; for Christ Himself had said, "What I tell you in darkness, that speak in the light" (Matt 10:27). "You shall tread down the land in anger" (Hab 3:12): you will humble proud spirits by afflicting them. "You shall thrash the heathen in displeasure" (Hab 3:12).

"You will quell the ambitious by Your judgments: 'You went forth to save Your people and Your anointed, You laid death upon the heads of the wicked'" ; all of this is plain. "You have cut them off with amazement": You have cut down the wicked and raised up the good in a wonderful way. "The mighty shall crown their heads, marveling at this; they shall gape after You like a poor man eating in secret." For just this way, many great men among the Jews, hungry for the bread of life, came to eat in secret, fearing their fellow Jews, as the Gospel shows. "You put Your horses into the sea, which troubled the waters": that is, the people; for unless all were troubled, some would not become fearful converts and others furious persecutors. "I marked it, and my body trembled at the sound of my lips; fear came into my bones, and I was altogether troubled in myself." Notice how the height of his prayer and his foresight of those great events amazed even him, and how he is troubled by those seas when he sees the imminent persecutions of the Church, of which he finally declares himself a member, saying, "I will rest in the day of trouble," as though he were one of those who suffer with hope and rejoice with patience. "That I may go up to the people of my pilgrimage": leaving behind his earthly kindred, who wander after nothing but worldly matters and never give a thought to their heavenly country. "For the fig tree shall not fructify, nor shall fruit be in the vines; the olive shall fail, and the fields shall be fruitless. The sheep have left their meat, and the oxen are not in their stalls." Here he sees the nation that crucified Christ stripped of all spiritual goods, prefigured in those physical abundances; and because that nation's ignorance of God had brought these plagues upon them, forsaking God's righteousness through their own pride, he adds: "I will rejoice in the Lord, and joy in God my Saviour; the Lord my God is my strength, He will establish my feet, He will set me upon high places, that I may be victorious in His song." What song? Precisely the one the Psalmist speaks of: "He has set my feet upon the rock, and ordered my goings, and has put into my mouth a new song of praise unto God." In such a song, and not in one composed for his own praise, Habakkuk conquers, glorying in the Lord his God. Some manuscripts read this passage more clearly as "I will joy in my Lord Jesus." The translators did not have that name itself available in Latin, but we much prefer that reading.

Jeremiah is one of the major prophets, as is Isaiah, who is not among the minor prophets I mentioned just now. Jeremiah prophesied during the reign of Josiah, king of Judah, when Ancus Martius was king of Rome, shortly before Israel's captivity; he continued prophesying until the fifth month of that captivity, as his own book confirms. Zephaniah, a minor prophet, was also active during this period and likewise prophesied in the time of Josiah, as he himself states, though he does not say for how long.

Jeremiah's ministry spanned the entire reign of Ancus Martius and extended into part of the reign of Tarquinius Priscus, the fifth king of Rome. It was at the beginning of Tarquinius's reign that the Jews were carried into captivity. We find this prophecy of Christ in Jeremiah: "The breath of our mouth, the Anointed our Lord was taken in our sins." In a single line, he captures both Christ's divine nature and His suffering on our behalf. Again: "This is my God, nor is there any besides Him: He hath found all the ways of wisdom, and taught them to His servant Jacob, and to Israel His beloved: afterwards was He seen upon earth, and He conversed with men." Some attribute this passage not to Jeremiah but to his scribe Baruch, though most scholars consider it Jeremiah's own. He also writes: "Behold, the days come (saith the Lord) that I will raise unto David a just branch, which shall reign as King, and be wise: and shall execute justice and judgment upon the earth. In His days shall Judah be saved, and Israel shall dwell safely, and this is the name that they shall call Him: The Lord our Righteousness." On the calling of the Gentiles, which we now see fulfilled before our eyes, he says: "O Lord my God and refuge in the day of evil, unto Thee shall the Gentiles come from the ends of the world, and shall say: Our fathers have adored false images wherein there was no profit." And because the Jews would refuse to acknowledge Christ and would put Him to death, the prophet says: "The heart is heavy in all things, He is a man and who shall know Him?" Jeremiah also bears witness to the New Testament and to Christ the Mediator, a passage I cited in my tenth book: "Behold the days come that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel," and so on. Zephaniah, who was a prophet of this same period, also speaks of Christ: "Wait upon Me (saith the Lord) in the day of My resurrection, wherein My judgment shall gather the nations." And again: "The Lord will be terrible unto them: He will consume all the gods of the earth: every man shall adore Him from his place: even all the isles of the heathen." A little further on he adds: "Then will I turn to the people a pure language, that they may all call upon the Lord, and serve Him with one consent, and from beyond the rivers of Ethiopia shall they bring Me offerings. In that day shalt thou not be ashamed for all the works wherein thou hast offended Me, for then will I cleanse thee of the wicked that have wronged thee: and thou shalt no more be proud of Mine holy mountain, and I will leave a meek and lowly people in the midst of thee, and the remnant of Israel shall reverence the name of the Lord." This is the remnant spoken of elsewhere in prophecy, and the very remnant the apostle has in mind when he says: "there is a remnant at this present time through the election of grace" (Rom 11:5). For it was indeed a remnant of that nation that came to believe in Christ.

During the captivity itself, Daniel and Ezekiel, two of the greater prophets, were the first to prophesy. Daniel foretold the exact number of years until the coming of Christ and His passion. To go into detail would take too long, and others have already done so before us. But concerning His power and glory, Daniel said this: "I beheld a vision by night, and behold, the Son of Man came in the clouds of heaven, and approached unto the Ancient of Days, and they brought Him before Him, and He gave Him dominion and honor, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages should serve Him; His dominion is an everlasting dominion, and shall never be taken away: His kingdom shall never be destroyed." Ezekiel also prefigured Christ through David (as the prophets customarily do), because Christ took His flesh and the form of a servant from David's seed. Speaking in the person of God the Father, Ezekiel prophesied of Him in this way: "I will set up a Shepherd over My sheep, and He shall feed them, even My servant David, He shall feed them and be their Shepherd. I, the Lord, will be their God, and My servant David shall be Prince among them: I the Lord have spoken it." And again: "One King shall be King to them all: they shall be no more two peoples, nor be divided from that point on into two kingdoms: nor shall they be any more polluted in their idols, nor with their abominations, nor with all their transgressions: but I will save them out of all their dwelling-places, wherein they have sinned, and will cleanse them: they shall be My people, and I will be their God: and David My servant shall be King over them, and they all shall have one Shepherd."

Three of the minor prophets remain: Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, all prophesying near the end of the captivity. Haggai prophesies of Christ and His Church in these varied and striking terms: "Yet a little while and I will shake the heavens, and the earth, and the sea, and the dry land: and I will move all nations, and the Desire of all nations shall come, saith the Lord of Hosts." This prophecy is partly fulfilled and partly still to be fulfilled at the end of all things. The angels and the stars bear witness to heaven's shaking at Christ's birth. The miracle of a virgin's childbirth shook the earth; the preaching of Christ across islands and continents moved both sea and dry land. We can see that the nations have been moved to faith. As for the coming of the Desire of all nations, we still await that on the day of judgment: for He must first be loved by believers, and then longed for by those who wait. Now Zechariah speaks of Christ and His Church in these words: "Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion, shout for joy, O daughter of Jerusalem: behold thy King cometh to thee, He is just, and thy Saviour: poor, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt, the foal of an ass: His dominion is from sea to sea, and from the river to the land's end."

The Gospels record Christ's entry in exactly this manner, and quote this prophecy as far as is needed. Elsewhere, speaking prophetically of the forgiveness of sins through Christ, Zechariah addresses Him in these words: "Thou in the blood of Thy testament hast loosed Thy prisoners out of the lake wherein is no water." This lake can be interpreted in more than one way without doing any harm to our faith. My own reading is that it refers to the barren, boundless depth of human misery, where no stream of righteousness flows and everything is thick with the mud of iniquity. This is also what the psalmist means: "He hath brought me out of the lake of misery, and out of the miry clay."

Now Malachi, prophesying of the Church (which we see so wonderfully spread through our Savior Christ), addresses the Jews directly in God's own voice: "I have no pleasure in you, neither will I accept an offering at your hand: for from the rising of the sun unto the going down thereof My name shall be great amongst the Gentiles, and in every place shall be incense offered unto Me, and a pure offering unto My name: for My name is great among the heathen, saith the Lord" (Mal 1:10-11). We see this offering made in every place through Christ's priesthood after the order of Melchizedek. As for the Jewish sacrifice, which God rejected and took no pleasure in, even they cannot deny that it has ceased. Why, then, do they still expect another Christ, when they can see this prophecy already fulfilled before their eyes? It could not have been fulfilled except through the true Christ. For shortly after, God speaks again through Malachi: "My covenant was with Him of life and peace: I gave Him fear, and He feared Me, and was afraid before My name. The law of truth was in His mouth: He walked with Me in peace and equity, and turned many away from iniquity: for the priest's lips should preserve knowledge, and they should seek the law at His mouth: for He is the messenger of the Lord of hosts" (Mal 2:5-7). No wonder Christ is called a messenger. Just as He is called a servant because of the servant's form He took when He came among us, He is called a messenger because of the good news He brought to humanity. The Greek word *evangelium* means, in our tongue, "glad tidings." And Malachi speaks of Him again: "Behold I will send My messenger and He shall prepare the way before Me: the Lord whom ye seek, shall come suddenly into His temple, and the Messenger of the covenant whom you desire: behold He shall come, saith the Lord of Hosts: but who may abide the day of His coming? who shall endure when He appeareth?" (Mal 3:1-2). This passage prophesies both comings of Christ directly. The first coming is foretold in the words "He shall come suddenly into His temple," referring to His flesh, as He Himself said: "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it again" (John 2:19). The second coming is foretold in the words "Behold, He shall come, saith the Lord of Hosts, but who may abide the day of His coming?" The words "the Lord whom ye seek, and the Messenger of the covenant whom ye desire" tell us that the Jews, reading Scripture on their own terms, do long and search for the coming of Christ. Yet many of them failed to recognize Him when He came, the very One they had so desperately awaited, their own sinful hearts having blinded them to the truth.

The covenant mentioned both here and in the passage where God says, "My covenant was with Him," refers to the New Testament, whose promises are eternal, not to the Old Testament, which is full of temporal promises. Weak men who place too much value on those temporal promises serve God entirely for their sake, and stumble when they see sinners enjoying them just as much. So the prophet, to draw a sharp distinction between the blessings of the New Testament (which belong only to the good) and the abundance of the Old Testament (which the wicked share as well), adds this passage: "Your words have been stout against Me (saith the Lord) and yet ye said, wherein have we spoken against Thee? ye have said it is in vain to serve God: and what profit have we in keeping His commandments, and in walking humbly before the Lord God of hosts? and now we have blessed others: they that work wickedness are set up, and they that oppose God, they are delivered." Then the text continues: "Thus spake they that feared the Lord: each to his neighbour, the Lord hearkened, and heard it, and wrote a book of remembrance in His sight, for such as fear the Lord, and reverence His name." That book points toward the New Testament. Hear what follows: "They shall be to Me, saith the Lord of Hosts, in that day wherein I do this, for a flock: and I will spare them as a man spareth his own son that serveth him. Then shall ye return, and discern between the righteous and the wicked, and between him that serveth God, and him that serveth Him not. For behold the day cometh that shall burn as an oven: and all the proud and the wicked shall be as stubble, and the day that cometh shall burn them up, saith the Lord of Hosts, and shall leave them neither root nor branch. But unto you that fear My name shall the Sun of Righteousness arise, and health shall be under His wings, and ye shall go forth and grow up as fat calves. Ye shall tread down the wicked, they shall be as dust under the soles of your feet in the day that I shall do this, saith the Lord of Hosts." This is the day known as the day of judgment, about which, God willing, we intend to say something more in the appropriate place.

After Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, the three final prophets of the captivity period, Esdras wrote his account, though he is generally regarded as a historian rather than a prophet. The same is true of the book of Esther, which covers events from roughly the same era, all of them pointing to the glory of God. One could argue that Esdras did prophesy in a certain sense: when a debate arose among young men about what force was most powerful in the world, one answered kings, another wine, and a third said women, since women so often command kings. Yet that third young man went further and added that truth conquers all things. And in the Gospel, Christ is revealed to be the truth itself. From that time forward, after the temple was rebuilt, the Jews had no more kings but only princes, right up to the time of Aristobulus. The record of those years is not found in the canonical Scriptures but in other writings, among which are the books of the Maccabees. The Church does hold these canonical, on account of the intense and remarkable sufferings of certain martyrs who died for the law of God before the coming of Christ, enduring torments that were almost beyond bearing. Among the Jews, however, these books are considered apocryphal.

In the time of our prophets, whose writings have now spread so widely, there were no philosophers yet. The first of them arose with Pythagoras of Samos, who began to gain fame near the end of the Babylonian captivity. All other philosophers must therefore be considerably later: Socrates of Athens, the leading moral thinker of his era, lived after Ezra, as the chronicles record. Plato, the most distinguished of his students, was born shortly after. If we add to these the earlier seven men known as sages rather than philosophers, along with the natural philosophers who followed in the tradition of Thales, namely Anaximander, Anaximenes, Anaxagoras, and others who were active before Pythagoras formally established philosophy, not one of them predates the prophets. Thales, the oldest among them, lived in the time of Romulus, precisely when this prophetic teaching was flowing from its source in Israel out to the rest of the world. The only figures who might claim greater antiquity are the theological poets: Orpheus, Linus, Musaeus, and any others of that kind. Yet even they were not older than our true divine Moses, who taught the one true God, and whose books stand at the head of our canon. Greece need not boast of its wisdom, therefore, since it is neither as ancient nor as excellent as our divine religion and the true wisdom it contains. We do acknowledge that non-Greek peoples, Egypt for instance, had their own distinctive teachings before the time of Moses, teachings they called wisdom. Scripture itself confirms this, since it says that Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians (Acts 7:22), the land where he was born, adopted, and raised by Pharaoh's daughter. But even that Egyptian wisdom could not predate our prophets, since Abraham himself was a prophet. And what wisdom could Egypt have possessed before Isis, their supposed goddess, taught them letters? This Isis was the daughter of Inachus, king of Argos, who reigned in the time of Abraham's grandchildren.

If I go back even further, there is the patriarch Noah, who lived before the great flood. We can rightly call him a prophet, since his very ark and his escape from that flood were prophetic references to our own times. And what about Enoch, the seventh from Adam? Does not the canonical epistle of Jude say that he prophesied? The reason we have none of their writings, and neither do the Jews, is their extreme antiquity, which raises the suspicion that these texts are forgeries attributed to those men rather than genuine works by them. Many people who believe what they like and say what they please defend themselves by citing books of dubious origin. But the canon neither allows us to dismiss the authority of such holy men, nor to abuse their names by circulating counterfeit writings. Nor should it surprise us that such ancient texts are treated with suspicion, since even in the histories of the Kings of Judah and Israel (which we hold as canonical) we find many things briefly mentioned but not explained, with a note that they can be found in other books of the prophets, sometimes named, yet absent from our canon and from the Jewish canon as well. I cannot say why this is, but my own view is this: the prophets whom the Holy Spirit chose to inspire wrote some things historically, as ordinary men, and other things prophetically, as if speaking directly from God. These two kinds of writing were genuinely distinct: some belonged to the prophets themselves as human beings, and some belonged to the Lord, speaking through them. The first kind served to increase knowledge; the second served to confirm religion, and it is this second kind alone that the canon preserves. As for any writings that circulate under prophets' names outside the canon, they carry no authority for increasing knowledge, because it is uncertain whether those prophets actually wrote them. We cannot trust them, especially when they contradict canonical truth, since in doing so they prove themselves to be exactly what they are: forgeries.

We should not think, as some do, that the Hebrew tongue passed only from Heber to Abraham, and that Moses first introduced Hebrew letters along with the law. No: that language was passed down from person to person through writing as well as speech. Moses actually appointed teachers for this purpose before the law was given. Scripture calls them *Grammaton Isagogos*, that is, introducers of letters, because they brought letters into the hearts of people, or rather brought people's hearts into the letters. No nation, then, can surpass our prophets and patriarchs in the antiquity of their wisdom, for they received divine inspiration. Even the Egyptians, who routinely make the most extravagant and transparent claims about their learning, are shown to fall short of our patriarchs in age. None of them dare claim any excellence of understanding before they had writing, that is, before Isis came and taught them. And what was this celebrated wisdom of theirs? Nothing more than astronomy and similar disciplines that seemed better suited to sharpen the mind than to elevate genuine knowledge. As for moral philosophy, it did not stir in Egypt until the time of Trismegistus, who was indeed long before the sages and philosophers of Greece, but came after Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, and Moses himself. For at the time of Moses' birth, Atlas, the brother of Prometheus and a great astronomer, was still living; and he was the maternal grandfather of the elder Mercury, who in turn fathered the father of this Trismegistus.

It is therefore absurd beyond measure to claim, as some do, that astronomy began in Egypt more than 100,000 years ago. What records do they have for this, given that Egypt only acquired writing about two thousand years ago (or a little more), through Isis? Varro's authority carries real weight here, since he agrees with the Holy Scriptures on this point. After all, it has not yet been six thousand years since the first man, Adam; how ridiculous are those who stretch the truth by such an enormous span of years! Whom should we trust on this question, if not the one who foretold what we now see fulfilled before our eyes? The contradictions among historical accounts give us every reason to favor those that agree with our faith. The citizens of Babylon, scattered as they are across the whole earth, find themselves reading two authors of comparable and legitimate authority who give conflicting accounts of the most ancient times, and they simply don't know which to believe. But we have a divine history to support us, and we know that whatever secular author, famous or obscure, contradicts it has wandered far from the truth. And whether his words are true or false, they are worthless for attaining true happiness.

But let us leave history behind and return to the philosophers we set aside earlier. Their studies seemed entirely aimed at achieving happiness. Why did students contradict their teachers? Because both were swept along by human passions: and while some vanity was certainly involved, each man thinking himself wiser and sharper than the rest, each wanting to be a founding thinker rather than someone else's follower, we can still grant that love of truth drove some (or most) of them away from their teachers' positions. Yet what mortal effort, what human act, can achieve true blessedness without divine instruction? As for our canonical authors, God forbid that they should contradict one another. They do not, and this is precisely why so many nations have rightly believed that God spoke either in them or through them. The multitude everywhere, learned and unlearned alike, affirm this, even if your small circle of academic conjurers denies it. Our prophets were few in number, lest greater numbers diminish the reverence that religion rightly owes them; yet they are not so few that their agreement fails to inspire genuine wonder. Let anyone search through the vast body of philosophical writing, and if he finds two thinkers who agree on everything, let him mark it as a rarity. It would take far too long for me to catalogue all their disagreements here. But what teacher in this entire demon-worshipping city enjoys such authority that others cannot challenge and oppose him, with both sides receiving a warm welcome? Were not the Epicureans held in high regard at Athens, insisting that God had nothing to do with human affairs? And were not the Stoics, who opposed them and held that the gods directed all things, received just as warmly? I am therefore puzzled that Anaxagoras was prosecuted for saying the sun was a fiery stone and denying its divine nature, while Epicurus was welcomed and celebrated in that same city, even though he stripped all divinity from the sun, the stars, Jupiter himself, and all the rest, denying any connection between them and the world or human prayer. Was not Aristippus there with his bodily *summum bonum* (highest good), and Antisthenes with his mental one? Both were famous students of Socrates, yet they stood at opposite ends on the question of what happiness consists in. One told the wise man to avoid public office; the other told him to seek it, and both drew large, eager audiences. Did not every philosopher defend his position in public: in the town gallery, in schools, in gardens, and in private gatherings alike? One held there was a single world; another held there were thousands. Some said it was created; others said it was not. Some called it eternal; others denied this. Some said it was governed by divine power; others attributed it to chance. Some said souls are immortal; others said they are mortal. Some believed souls pass into animals; others rejected this. Among those who held souls to be mortal, some said they perish immediately with the body; others said they survive longer, though not forever. Some placed the highest good in the body, some in the soul, some in both. Some extended it to external goods as well. Some said the senses are always reliable; some said only sometimes; some said never. These and countless other disagreements the philosophers toss back and forth. And what people, state, kingdom, or city in all this diabolical society has ever put these views to the test, rejected some and embraced others, rather than simply feeding all the confusion in its own heart and sustaining the rabble of curious arguers, not over land or legal disputes, but over the most fundamental questions of misery and happiness? In all of this, if they spoke truth, they had just as much freedom to speak falsehood, so perfectly did their society fit the name Babylon, which (as we noted) means "confusion." Nor does their king, the devil, care how much they quarrel; it only increases his harvest of varied impiety. But the people, state, nation, and City of Israel, to whom God's holy laws were entrusted, did not permit that reckless confusion of false prophets alongside true ones. With one voice they held and acknowledged the latter as the true authors, recording God's testimonies. These were their sages, their poets, their prophets, their teachers of truth and piety. Whoever lived by their rules followed not man but God, who spoke through them. The sacrilege forbidden there, God forbids. The command to "honor your father and mother," God commands. "You shall not commit adultery, nor murder, nor steal": God's wisdom pronounces this, not human cleverness. For whatever truth the philosophers managed to grasp and argue for amid their errors, such as the claims that God made the world and governs it with perfect wisdom, that virtue is honorable, that love of country matters, that friendship demands loyalty, that justice should govern dealings, and all the rest that belongs to good conduct, they did not know to what end all of it was to be referred. The prophets taught that from the mouth of God, speaking through human beings, not with floods of argument, but through the fear and reverence of the Lord that came upon all who truly understood them.

A king of Egypt named Ptolemy wanted to understand these scriptures. After Alexander of Macedon, surnamed "the Great," had made his astonishing conquest of Asia and nearly the whole world, partly by diplomacy and partly by force (a campaign that brought him into Judea as well), his nobles fell into bitter conflict after his death and tore his empire apart. Egypt passed into the hands of the Ptolemies. The first of these was the son of Lagus, who brought many Jews as captives into Egypt. The next was Philadelphus, who freed all those captives, sent gifts to the temple, and asked the priest Eleazar to provide him with the Old Testament. He had heard it highly praised and wanted to place it in his famous library. Eleazar sent it in Hebrew, and Philadelphus then asked him to send interpreters as well. Eleazar sent seventy-two men, six from each tribe, all of them fluent in both Greek and Hebrew. Their translation is what we now commonly call the Septuagint. The account of their remarkable agreement in the work is extraordinary: Ptolemy, wanting to test their integrity, had each man translate independently.

Yet not a single word differed between them, either in meaning or in order. The result was as uniform as if one person had done it all, because in truth there was only one Spirit working through them all. God granted them that remarkable gift as a divine endorsement of so sacred a work, so that the nations might see foreshadowed what we all now see fulfilled.

There were other translators who rendered the Hebrew scriptures into Greek: Aquila, Symmachus, Theodotion, and an unnamed interpreter whose translation is known as the fifth edition. But the Church has received the Septuagint as though no other existed, and many Greek Christians, relying on it exclusively, are unaware that any alternatives exist. Our Latin translation also derives from it. A learned priest and accomplished linguist named Jerome did translate the same scriptures from Hebrew into Latin, and the Jews affirm that his scholarly work is entirely accurate while charging the Seventy with frequent errors. Yet the churches of Christ refuse to place any single man above so many translators, especially ones selected by the high priest for this very purpose. Even if their agreement had resulted from mutual consultation rather than a unity of spirit, no one man could be considered more capable than all of them together. But given the divine character of their work, anyone who translates from Hebrew or any other language must either agree with the Seventy, or, if they differ, we should hold to the Seventy's prophetic depth. The same Spirit who spoke through the prophets also translated through them. That Spirit could express things differently in the translation than in the original prophecy and yet speak truthfully in both, since the meaning remains one for the true reader even when the words differ. The same Spirit could also add or omit material, precisely to show that this was not merely human effort but the work of the guiding Spirit. Some scholars thought it right to correct the Seventy against the Hebrew, yet they did not dare remove what appeared in the Seventy but not in the Hebrew; they only added what was in the Hebrew but not in the Seventy, marking those passages with asterisks at the head of the verses, and noting what was in the Seventy but not in the Hebrew with lines, similar to the marks used to indicate units of weight. Many Greek and Latin copies are scattered with these markings. As for the variations themselves, whether large or small, they can only be identified by comparing the texts directly. If we look to the Spirit of God alone, as is most fitting, then whatever appears in the Seventy but not in the Hebrew represents what God chose to speak through those later prophets rather than the earlier ones. The reverse holds equally: what appears in the Hebrew but not in the Seventy shows that both groups were prophets, since God spoke certain things through Isaiah, others through Jeremiah, and still others through different prophets as He saw fit. What appears in both texts the Spirit spoke through both: through the first as prophets, and through the latter as prophetic translators. For just as there was one Spirit of peace among the original prophets who spoke so many different things without contradiction, so that same Spirit was at work among the translators, who produced such remarkable agreement without ever consulting one another.

But someone will ask: how am I to know whether Jonah said, "Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be destroyed," or "Yet three days"? Anyone can see that a prophet foretelling their destruction could not have said both: if they were to be destroyed at the end of three days, then not at forty; if at forty, then not at three.

If I am asked, I answer in favor of the Hebrew. The Seventy, writing long afterward, may have said something different, yet not against the meaning, but just as relevant to the matter, though in a different sense. They were guiding the reader not to get so caught up in the literal circumstance of a word that they miss the deeper meaning of the history, nor to dismiss either authority. For those events truly happened at Nineveh, and yet they pointed beyond Nineveh, just as it was true that the prophet spent three days in the whale's belly, and yet that fact foreshadowed the Lord of all the prophets spending three days in the grave. If the Church of the Gentiles was prophetically figured by Nineveh, as something destroyed in repentance in order to become entirely different from what it had been, then it is Christ working in that Church who is signified by both numbers: by forty, because He spent that many days with His disciples after His resurrection before ascending into heaven; by three, because He rose again on the third day. It is as though the Septuagint translators intended to prompt the reader to look beyond the bare history, and as though the prophet himself had meant to hint at the depth of the mystery, saying in effect: "Seek Him in forty days whom you will find in three" - the three pointing to His Resurrection, the forty to His Ascension. Both numbers, then, carry their proper meaning; both were spoken by one Spirit, the first through Jonah, the second through the translators. Were it not for the risk of tedium, I could reconcile the Septuagint and the Hebrew in many places where they are thought to differ. But I am aiming for brevity, and following the apostles as best I can, since they drew from both versions whatever served their purposes, knowing that the Holy Spirit is one in both. But let us continue with our subject.

After the Jews were left without prophets, they declined steadily, from the end of their captivity onward, even though they had hoped that repairing the Temple would mark a turn for the better. That carnal nation understood Haggai's prophecy in purely physical terms: "The glory of this last house shall be greater than the first." Yet Haggai himself shows he was speaking of the New Testament in the words that precede this, where he promises Christ explicitly: "I will move all nations, and the Desire of all nations shall come." The Seventy translators rendered this in a way more applicable to the members than to the Head, saying: "And they that are God's elect shall come out of all nations," meaning the people of whom Christ said in the Gospel, "Many are called, but few are chosen." It is for those chosen ones that the house of God is built through the New Testament, constructed of living stones and far more glorious than anything Solomon built or the returning exiles repaired. From that point on, the Jewish nation had no more prophets, but suffered severely at the hands of foreigners, including the Romans themselves, as a demonstration that Haggai had not been speaking of the house they had rebuilt. Alexander arrived soon after and subdued them. He made no massacre of them, since they dared do nothing but submit at his first command, yet even so the Temple's glory proved inferior to what it had been in the days of their own free kings. Alexander sacrificed in the Temple, not in any true worship of God, but simply including Him among the false deities he honored. Then came Ptolemy, son of Lagus, after Alexander's death, and he led many of them captive into Egypt. His son Philadelphus, however, graciously freed them afterward and commissioned the Seventy to translate the Old Testament for him, as I mentioned earlier: and that is how it came into our hands.

After all this, the wars described in the books of Maccabees fell upon them. In time, Ptolemy, king of Alexandria (the one called Epiphanes), subdued them, and they were severely persecuted, forced to offer sacrifices to idols, while their temple was filled with sacrilegious pollution by Antiochus, king of Syria. Even so, Judas Maccabeus utterly destroyed Antiochus's forces and restored the temple to its former dignity.

Not long after, a man named Alcimus, born of priestly lineage, used ambition to seize the priesthood. Then, roughly fifty years later, after a period marked by the shifting fortunes of war, Aristobulus claimed a crown and became both king and priest. Before this, ever since the captivity, the people had been governed not by kings but by commanders, generals, and princes. (A king may be called a prince by virtue of his rank, but not every commander or prince is a king, as Aristobulus was.) Alexander succeeded him in both the kingdom and the priesthood, and history records him as a tyrant over his own people. He left the throne to his wife Alexandra, and from that point the Jews' sufferings grew extreme. Her two sons, Aristobulus and Hircanus, quarreled over power, and Hircanus invited Roman forces into Israel by seeking their help against his brother. By this time, Rome had already conquered all of Africa and Greece, and having extended its authority over countless other nations, the state had grown too heavy to support itself and began to collapse under its own weight. Factional strife had taken firm hold, erupting into conspiracies and civil wars that so weakened the republic that everyone began drifting toward monarchy. Pompey, Rome's great general, marched his forces into Judea, took Jerusalem, and threw open the temple doors: not to worship God, but to plunder Him. He entered the Holy of Holies as a profaner rather than a worshipper, crossing a threshold that only the high priest was permitted to enter. He then installed Hircanus in the priesthood, appointed Antipater as governor of the province, and departed, taking Aristobulus with him as a prisoner. This was the moment the Jews became tributaries of Rome. Cassius came afterward and plundered the temple. Within a few years, Herod, a foreigner, was made their ruler, and it was during his reign that our Savior Christ was born.

For the fullness of time had now arrived, which the patriarch had prophetically foreshadowed when he said, "The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor the law-giver from between his feet, until Shiloh come, and He shall gather the nations unto Him." The Jews had never been without a ruler of their own blood until the time of Herod, who was their first foreign king. The time of Shiloh had now come; the New Testament was to be proclaimed, and the nations were to be reconciled to the truth. It would have been impossible for the nations to long for His return in glorious power to judge (as we clearly see they do), unless they had first been united in genuine faith in Him when He came in humility to suffer.

Herod was reigning in Judea when Rome's government changed and Augustus Caesar became emperor. With the world at peace, Christ was born in Bethlehem of Judah, just as the earlier prophecies had foretold: openly human, born of His virgin mother, and secretly God, born of God His Father. The prophet had said as much: "Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a Son: and she shall call His name, Emmanuel, that is, God with us." He revealed His divinity through many miracles, which the Gospels record as far as they concern His glory and our salvation. The first of these was His miraculous birth; the last was His equally miraculous ascension. But the Jews who rejected Him and put Him to death (in accordance with the necessity of His death and resurrection) were afterward devastated by the Romans, driven into slavery under foreign rulers, and scattered across the face of the earth. They are found everywhere, carrying their scriptures with them, and this serves as proof that we did not fabricate the prophecies concerning Christ. Many of them, recognizing this, believed in Him, both before His passion and after His resurrection, and these are the remnant saved by grace. But the rest remained blind, as the Psalm says: "Let their table be made a snare unto them, and their prosperity their ruin: let their eyes be blinded that they see not, and make their loins alway to tremble." In refusing to believe our scriptures, they have brought their own scriptures to fulfillment upon themselves, reading them all the while without understanding.

Some argue that the Sibylline prophecies about the Jews are merely Christian inventions. But what we have from the books of our enemies is enough for us, and we acknowledge it precisely because they preserve it for us against their will. Both they and their books have been scattered as far as God's Church has spread, to every corner of the world, just as that prophecy in the Psalms foretells, which they themselves still read: "My merciful God will come before me: God will let me see my desire upon my enemies. Slay them not, lest my people forget it, but scatter them abroad with Thy power" (Ps 59:10-11). Here God showed mercy to His Church even through the Jews, His enemies, because, as the apostle says, "through their fall cometh salvation to the Gentiles" (Rom 11:11). And so He did not slay them, meaning He allowed them to keep the name of Jews, even as slaves of Rome, so that their complete destruction would not cause us to forget God's law and the testimony they bear. It would mean little to say "Slay them not" without what follows: "Scatter them abroad." For if they had not been dispersed throughout the whole world along with their Scriptures, the Church would lack their testimony to the prophecies fulfilled in our Messiah.

Whatever stranger may appear, whether born outside Israel or whose works the Jews never accepted as canonical, if he prophesied of Christ in ways we can identify and cite, he may be added to our list of witnesses. Not that we need his testimony, but because it is no mistake to believe that some among the Gentiles received knowledge of this mystery and were moved by the Spirit of prophecy to declare it, whether they were among the elect or the reprobate, or even taught by evil spirits (which we know confessed Christ when He came, though the Jews denied Him). Nor do I think the Jews would dare to claim that no one was saved after Israel came into being except Israelites. True, no other people was properly called the people of God. But they cannot deny that certain individuals in other nations belonged to the heavenly order. If they deny this, the story of holy Job refutes them. Job was neither a native Israelite nor a proselyte adopted under their law; he was born and buried in Idumea, and yet Scripture commends him so highly that none of his time appears to have equaled him in righteousness. Though the chronicles do not record exactly when he lived, the canonical authority of his own book suggests he belonged to the third generation after Israel. God's providence, without question, intended him as an example showing that others among the nations could live according to God's law, serve Him faithfully, and thereby secure a place in the heavenly Jerusalem. We should understand that none did so except those who foreknew the coming of the Messiah, the Mediator between God and man, who was foretold to the saints of old as One who would come in the flesh, just as we have seen Him come. In this way, one faith united all the predestined into one city, one household, and one Temple for the living God. As for whatever other prophecies concerning Christ may circulate, the skeptical may suspect we invented them; so there is no surer way to silence all such objections than by citing the prophecies found in the Jews' own books, whose people, scattered from their homeland across the entire world, have served to advance the Church of Christ.

This is the House of God, more glorious than the former in all its precious material. Haggai's prophecy was not fulfilled in the rebuilding of the Temple, which never recovered the glory it had in Solomon's time. Instead, it lost everything: the prophets fell silent, and destruction followed, carried out by the Romans as I described earlier. The House of the New Testament shines with a different light altogether, its workmanship more glorious and its stones more precious. Yet it was foreshadowed in the restoration of the old Temple, because the entire New Testament was prefigured in the Old. God's prophecy, "In that place will I give peace," must therefore be understood as referring to the place signified, not the place that signifies it. Just as the restoration of that Temple prefigured the Church that Christ was to build, God was saying, "in this place" (that is, in the place this Temple points toward) "will I give peace." Things that signify other things seem to take on the identity of what they signify, as Peter said: "the Rock was Christ" (1 Cor 10:4), meaning that the rock signified Christ. The glory of the House of the New Testament surpasses the glory of the Old by as much as will become clear at the final dedication. Then the Desire of all nations will appear (as the Hebrew reads it), for His first coming was not desired by all nations, since many did not know whom to long for or in whom to believe. And then, too, those who are God's elect from every nation will come (as the Septuagint reads it), for no one will truly come on that day except the elect, of whom the apostle says, "He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world" (Eph 1:4). The Architect Himself, who said, "Many are called, but few are chosen" (Matt 22:14), was not speaking of those who were invited to the feast and then thrown out; He meant to show that He had built a house of His elect that no force of time could ever destroy. But since the elect are still mixed together in the Church, waiting to be sifted later, the corn from the chaff, the glory of this House cannot be as great now as it will be then, when everyone who enters will remain there forever.

So in these troubled days, when the church labors in present humility for His future glory, amid fears, sorrows, toil, and temptation, rejoicing only in hope when she rejoices rightly, many reprobate live among the elect. Both are caught in the Gospel's net, and both swim at random in the sea of mortality, until the fishers draw them to shore and the bad are separated from the good. Among the good, as in His temple, God is all in all. We recognize, then, that His words in the Psalm are truly fulfilled: "I would declare and speak of them, but they are more than I am able to express" (Ps 40:5). This multiplication began the moment John, His forerunner, and then Christ Himself began to proclaim, "Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand." He chose disciples and named apostles: poor, obscure, unlearned men, so that whatever great work was accomplished, it would be clear that He had done it through them. He had one among them who abused His goodness, yet even this wicked man He turned to a good end, using him to fulfill His passion and to set before His church an example of patience in tribulation. Having sown the seed of salvation abundantly, He suffered, was buried, and rose again, showing through His suffering what we should endure for the truth, and through His resurrection what we should hope for from eternity, beyond the inexpressible mystery of His blood shed for the forgiveness of sins. He remained on earth with His disciples for forty days afterward, then ascended to heaven in their sight, and ten days later sent down upon them the Spirit He had promised. When the Spirit came, He gave that clear and necessary sign of speaking in the languages of all nations, to signify that there is one catholic church that would use all those tongues among all those peoples.

And then, as it is written, "The law shall go forth from Sion, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem," and as Christ had foretold: when His disciples were astonished at His resurrection, He opened their minds to the Scriptures and told them that it was written thus: "It behoved Christ to suffer, and to rise again the third day, and that repentance, and remission of sins should be preached in His name amongst all nations, beginning at Jerusalem." When they asked Him about His second coming, He answered, "It is not for you to know the times and seasons which the Father hath put in His own power: but ye shall receive power of the Holy Ghost when He shall come upon you, and ye shall be witnesses of Me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and in Samaria, and unto the utmost part of the earth." The Church spread first from Jerusalem, then through Judea and Samaria, and those lights of the world carried the Gospel to other nations. Christ had armed them with these words: "Fear not them that kill the body but are not able to kill the soul." They had the warmth of love to keep out the cold of fear. And so, through the witness of those who had seen Him alive, then dead, then alive again, and through the horrific persecutions endured by their successors, and through the never-defeated (though to others seemingly unbeatable) sufferings of the martyrs, the Gospel spread across the entire inhabited world. God accompanied it with miracles, with power, and with gifts of the Holy Spirit, so that the nations who came to believe in Him who suffered for their redemption began, in Christian love, to honor the blood of those very martyrs they had once shed in barbarism. The kings whose edicts had afflicted the Church came humbly to serve under the banner they had once cruelly sought to destroy, and now turned to persecuting the false gods for whose sake they had once persecuted the servants of the true God.

When the devil saw his temples emptying and everyone running to this Redeemer, he set heretics in motion to undermine Christ from within a Christian disguise, as if the heavenly Jerusalem allowed for competing factions the way his own Babylon allowed for rival schools of philosophy. Those within the Church of God who take offense at its teachings, and when warned and corrected stubbornly dig in against sound instruction, choosing to defend their corruptions rather than abandon them, become heretics. When they walk out of God's house, they must be regarded as our most determined enemies. Yet they do the members of the catholic Church a genuine service: their fall drives those members to take a firmer hold on God, who turns evil to good ends and works all things together for the good of those who love Him. Whatever form the Church's enemies take, if they have the power to inflict physical suffering, they train her patience; if they attack her only with words, they sharpen her wisdom. And in loving these enemies, she exercises His own generosity and grace, whether she approaches them with gentle persuasion or firm correction. So even though the devil, her chief opponent, marshals all his forces against her virtues, he cannot harm her in the slightest. She finds comfort in prosperity to be strengthened, and she finds steadiness in adversity to be kept from corruption in times of ease. God's providence governs the whole, balancing the two against each other, so that the Psalmist put it well: "In the multitude of the cares of mine heart Thy comforts have rejoiced my soul." The apostle echoes this: "Rejoicing in hope and patient in tribulation." For the same apostle's words, "All that will live godly in Christ shall suffer persecution," must be understood as a permanent reality. Even when things appear outwardly calm, with no storm of trouble visible from outside (which is a great comfort, especially to the weak), there is never a shortage of those within who offend and trouble the godly pilgrim by their wicked conduct, blaspheming Christ and the catholic name. The more dearly the godly hold that name, the more pain they feel when their destructive brothers treat it with less reverence than it deserves. The heretics themselves, who still claim to hold Christ and the sacraments, grieve the hearts of the righteous deeply: many who are genuinely drawn to Christianity stumble over their divisions, and many who oppose it seize on those divisions as grounds for heaping further blame on the faith, since the heretics also carry the Christian name. These trials come upon God's true servants through the foolishness of others' errors, even when their bodies are at peace; this persecution touches the heart, not the body, as the Psalm says: "In the multitude of the cares of mine heart," not of my body. But then, when we turn to the unchanging certainty of God's promises, and to the apostle's assurance that He "knoweth them that are His, whom He has predestinate to be made like the image of His Son," not one of these will be lost. So the Psalm adds: "Thy comforts have rejoiced my soul." The grief that the godly feel over the perverseness of evil or false Christians is itself good for their souls, provided it flows from genuine love and not from any desire for those people's destruction or the blocking of their salvation. When such people are reformed, it brings deep comfort to the devout soul, doubling the joy in proportion to the grief that their errors once caused. So it is that through these troubled days, not only from the time of Christ and His apostles but from holy Abel onward, slain by his wicked brother, the Church travels on her pilgrimage to the end of the world, now enduring worldly persecutions and now receiving divine consolations.

I don't think we should rashly affirm what some people claim: that the Church will suffer no more persecutions before Antichrist's time than the ten already past, and that his will be the eleventh and last. According to this view, the first persecution was under Nero, the second under Domitian, the third under Trajan, the fourth under Antoninus, the fifth under Severus, the sixth under Maximinus, the seventh under Decius, the eighth under Valerian, the ninth under Aurelian, and the tenth under Diocletian and Maximian. Some hold that the ten plagues of Egypt before Israel's liberation correspond to these persecutions, with Antichrist's eleventh persecution matching the Egyptians' pursuit of Israel into the Red Sea, where they were all drowned. But I don't find those events in Egypt relevant to these persecutions, either as prophecies or as figures. Those who hold otherwise have made a very ingenious comparison between the two, but they did so through human conjecture rather than the Spirit of prophecy, and human conjecture can be wrong just as easily as it can be right. For what will those who hold this view say about the persecution in which Christ Himself was killed? What place does that hold among the rest? If they exclude it on the grounds that only persecutions belonging to the body and not the Head should be counted, what do they say about the persecution that followed the ascension, when Stephen was stoned, James the brother of John was beheaded, and Peter was imprisoned for execution (though an angel freed him)? What about when the brethren were driven from Jerusalem, and Saul (later made an apostle and renamed Paul) acted as their pursuer, dragging them out to their destruction? And what about when Paul himself, after his conversion, preached the very faith he had once persecuted and suffered the same afflictions he had once inflicted on others, wherever he preached, whether to Jews or Gentiles? Why do they begin with Nero, when the Church was never free from persecution throughout all the time before him, the particulars of which would take too long to recount? If they insist on beginning only with persecutions carried out by a king, then Herod was a king who did the Church extreme harm after Christ's ascension. Again, why are Julian's crimes not counted among the ten? Was he not a persecutor who forbade Christians to be taught the liberal arts? Was not Valentinian the Elder (the third emperor after Julian) stripped of his military command for confessing Christ? To say nothing of all the massacres that wicked apostate began at Antioch, until one faithful and steadfast young man, lying in tortures for an entire day, singing psalms and praying without ceasing, so terrified the persecuting atheist by his endurance that the man was both afraid and ashamed to continue. And finally, was not Valens, an Arian and brother to the Valentinian just mentioned, afflicting the Eastern Church with every kind of cruelty, within living memory? What a flawed approach it is to count only the persecutions an entire Church endured under a single ruler in one nation but not in another. Can a Church spread so widely suffer affliction in one particular nation without it counting unless it suffers everywhere? Perhaps they will not count the Christian persecution in Gothland, carried out by its own king, who martyred many true Catholics, as we heard from various brethren who had lived in those parts as children. And what will they say about Persia? Have not the persecutions there driven many people all the way to Roman territory? It may be quiet there now, but we cannot say for certain. When all these considerations are weighed together, along with others like them, I am led to conclude that the number of the Church's persecutions cannot be fixed. But to assert that many more may yet come from other rulers before that great and certain persecution under Antichrist would be just as rash a claim as the other. Let us therefore leave the matter open, neither affirming nor denying, but simply checking the rashness of both positions wherever we find them.

Christ will personally destroy the final persecution under Antichrist, for, as the apostle says, "He shall consume him with the breath of His mouth, and abolish him with the brightness of His wisdom." And here a familiar question arises: when will this happen? It is an unreasonable question. If knowing the answer would have done us any good, who would have revealed it sooner than Christ Himself to His disciples? They were not silent when they were with Him; they asked Him directly: "Lord, wilt Thou at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?" And what did He say? "It is not for you to know the times or seasons which the Father hath put in His own power." They asked not about a specific day or hour, but about the time in general, and this was His answer. It is therefore pointless for us to stand here calculating how many years the world has left; the plain truth tells us clearly: "It befits us not to know them." Some say the world will last four hundred years after the ascension, some say five hundred, some a thousand; everyone has his own view, and it would be futile to go through each one's reasoning. In short, all these guesses are purely human, grounded in no certainty of Scripture. For He who said, "It is not for you to know the times," cuts off all your calculations and tells you to stop counting.

But since this is an evangelical statement, I'm not surprised it wasn't powerful enough to silence the audacious fictions that some unbelievers invented about the duration of the Christian religion. These people, observing that the greatest persecutions only increased rather than suppressed the faith of Christ, invented a set of Greek verses (presenting them as oracular prophecies) claiming that Christ was innocent of any wrongdoing, but that Peter had used magic to establish the worship of Christ's name for three hundred and sixty-five years, after which it would utterly cease. What learned minds! What remarkable inventions! They are willing to believe such things about Christ while refusing to believe in Christ: namely, that Peter learned magic from Christ, yet Christ remained innocent; that His disciple was a sorcerer, and yet preferred to honor his Master's name rather than his own, working toward that end through magic, through hardship, through danger, and finally through the shedding of his own blood! If Peter's witchcraft made the world love Christ so deeply, what had Christ's innocence accomplished that Peter should love Him so deeply in return? Let them answer, and if they can, let them grasp that it was the grace from above that fixed Christ in the hearts of the nations for the attainment of eternal life: the same grace that made Peter willing to die a temporal death for Christ, so that Christ might receive him into that same eternity. And what fine gods these are, who can foresee events yet cannot prevent them! They are forced by a single sorcerer and (as these people claim) by a single child-slaughtering sacrifice to allow a movement so hostile to them to prevail against them for so long, bearing down every persecution simply by enduring it patiently, and destroying their temples, their images, and their sacrifices! Which of their gods (certainly none of ours) is compelled to produce these effects through so wicked an offering? For the verses say that Peter dealt not with a devil but with a god in his magical work. Such is the god they have, who do not have Christ as their God.

I could gather many more examples like this, if the year those liars predicted had not already passed. But seeing that it is now more than 365 years since Christ came in the flesh and the apostles began preaching His name, what clearer refutation could we need? To set aside Christ's infancy and childhood, when He had no disciples, consider this: after His baptism in the Jordan by John, as soon as He called His first disciples to Him, His name began to spread abroad. Of Him the prophet had said, "He shall rule from sea to sea, and from the river to the land's end." But because the faith was not fully established until after His passion, specifically in His resurrection, we should take that moment as our starting point. As Paul said to the Athenians: "Now He commands all people everywhere to repent, because He has appointed a day on which He will judge the world in righteousness, by that Man whom He has appointed, giving proof to all by raising Him from the dead." We will do better to begin our reckoning from that point, chiefly because that is when the Holy Spirit descended on the community in which the second law, the New Testament, was to be professed, just as Christ had promised. The first law, the Old Testament, was given at Sinai through Moses; but the latter, which Christ was to give, was foretold in these words: "The law shall go forth out of Zion, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem." Christ Himself said that repentance should be preached in His name throughout all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. There the belief in Christ crucified and risen again took root. There this faith set fire to the hearts of many thousands who sold their possessions to give to the poor, came gladly to Christ and to voluntary poverty, and withstood the attacks of bloodthirsty Jews with a patience stronger than any armed force.

If this were not accomplished through magic, why couldn't the same explanation account for everything else across the world? But if Peter's magic had caused those men to honor Christ, the very men who had crucified Him and mocked Him on the cross, then I ask: when must those three hundred and sixty-five years come to an end? Christ died in the consulship of the two Gemini, on the eighth of the calends of April, and rose again on the third day, as the apostles witnessed with their own eyes and confirmed with their own hands. Forty days later He ascended into heaven, and ten days after that (fifty days after the resurrection) the Holy Spirit came, and three thousand men believed through the apostles' preaching about Him. So it was then that His name began to spread, as we believe, through the working of the Holy Spirit, though unbelievers would have it that it spread through Peter's magic. Soon after, five thousand more believed through the preaching of Paul and through Peter's miraculous healing of a man who had been born lame and lay begging at the porch of the Temple. Peter set him sound on his feet with a single phrase: "In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ." And so the Church grew, step by step. Now count the years by the consuls from the descent of the Holy Spirit, which fell on the ides of May, up to the consulship of Honorius and Eutychian, and you will find that the full three hundred and sixty-five years had expired. Then, in the following year, during the consulship of Theodorus Manlius, when Christianity was supposed to have vanished entirely according to that oracle of devils or fiction of fools: we need not inquire what happened in other places, but as for the famous city of Carthage, we know that Junius and Gaudentius, two of Honorius' officers, arrived there on the tenth of the calends of April and smashed all the idols and demolished their temples.

It was nearly thirty years ago, and the growth of Christianity since then is plain enough to see. Part of that growth has come from people who had been held back from embracing the truth by their expectation that a certain prophecy would be fulfilled, but who have since come into the Church and recognized how foolish that expectation was. But we who are Christians in both deed and name do not believe in Peter; we believe in the One Peter believed in. We are built up by Peter's preaching about Christ, but we are not caught in his spells or misled by his magic. We are helped by his faith. Christ, who taught Peter the doctrine of eternity, teaches us as well. But now it is time to bring this book to a close. In it, we have traced as far as necessary the intertwined progress of the two Cities: one of them, the earthly Babylon, has made false gods out of mortal men, worshiping and sacrificing to them as she saw fit; the other, the heavenly Jerusalem, has held fast to the one true God and is herself His pure and genuine sacrifice. Both cities experience the same mixture of good and bad fortune, but they do not share the same faith, the same hope, or the same law. In the end, at the final judgment, they will be separated forever, and each will receive the eternal reward its works have earned. It is to these two ends that we now turn.