Theologoumena Pantodapa (Book I: De Theologia in Genere)

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Book I. On Theology in General

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Chapter 1.

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The use of foreign terms — The danger of introducing foreign words into religion; its twofold occasion — The terms "theology" (theologia) and "theologian" (theologos), and the term "unwritten" (agrapha) — The names for theology among the Jews — The origin and use of this word among the Greeks — Who was the first among them to write on theology — The first theology: a fabulous description of theogony — The introduction of the names "theology" and "theologians" among Christians — John thus first so called — The title "The Theologian" (Theologos) — The absurdity of the Ethiopic version of the New Testament — How evangelical doctrine is called in the gospel itself — The term "theology" is accepted.

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I. Those who undertake descriptions of things begin their web from the very names, lest they be ambiguous about the subjects they treat, and lest the vice of equivocation — which often breeds confusion in matters — be avoided. That great man spoke truly who said: "With respect to correct teaching, one must first examine the names" — "In all matters that are inquired into, one must occupy oneself chiefly with the name" — and so on; as he writes in On the Method of Medicine, ch. 5 (footnote: Our author refers to the work of Galen, the most celebrated physician, On the Method of Healing.): for words are the primary expressions of things, and their mark. Now in sacred matters, account must be taken of the naming, since the name has been given by the Holy Spirit. The apostle taught us to turn away from profane and empty chatter and contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge. We also know at how great a cost in truth, men have fought contentiously and repeatedly over the terms that the arbitrary will of certain persons introduced into our religion. Nor does that confusion which is seen in the Christian religion owe the least part of itself to the introduction of foreign words into ecclesiastical use, and to the twisting of those words which the Holy Spirit's dictation has made proper to it, into a common and vulgar sense. Hence the ancient complaint that the native simplicity and purity of evangelical doctrine — flowing from the perennial fountain of all purity — has been adulterated from the very beginnings of the churches, whether painted over with extraneous pigments or mixed with dross. That the succeeding ages stumbled on the same rock — especially after it came to pass in the manner of men that whatever pleased the majority was accounted right, until error grew to such an immense degree that within the Christian religion itself one would search almost in vain for the Christian religion — this is better known than to require proof. Indeed, it appears that that confusion and uncertainty, which can be seen to have flowed into virtually all branches of learning, arose either from ignorance of the words used by the ancients, or from the audacity of twisting them to alien usages and meanings.

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II. Furthermore: there are two kinds of terms whose use, emerging from the virtually inexhaustible mass of writers, has come to occupy some celebrated place in our religion, yet which are not read in the sacred Scripture itself. The first kind consists of those which necessity compelled in order to refute the importunate objections of heretics; the second, of those which men distinguished by some learning either invented themselves, or took up from others' inventions for their own use, relying on their own ingenuity, under the pretext of illuminating truth or of teaching it more precisely. Now, just as you would find very few indeed who would wish to banish these terms from the hearths and altars of the church — except those who are at war with truth itself — so to wrangle importunately about retaining them is nothing other than to sacrifice to inveterate prejudices and party spirit in endless litigation.

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III. Some stubbornly attack the naming of "theology" and "theologians"; and since both names are the product of pagan men, and no such word is found in the sacred Scripture, we have no desire to fight sharply over it. For just as every honorable — indeed magnificent — name will become a prejudice in favor of the thing that bears it, when it carries more weight than the thing itself: so likewise, when certain names can only be defended by bringing many arguments, the unlearned will judge that the things themselves are no less imperiled — especially where an atmosphere of self-authority is present. Moreover, since among those who once held, and still hold, the right and standard of speech, the custom has so far prevailed that by these terms a certain discipline is designated, as well as a certain class of men trained in it — from both of which the mystery of evangelical simplicity recoils — they seem insufficiently suited, whether in respect of their origin or their use, for expressing what is being inquired about. But since in every matter under dispute one must have some name: come then, with nails and hair scraped clean, let us be content with that term which usage, by the consent of very many, has introduced — while remaining entirely free in our investigation of the nature of the thing itself, which we have undertaken to expound. But concerning the designations by which it has been known among others, it is permitted to make a few preliminary remarks.

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IV. The Jews designate theology variously: as "divine wisdom" (Buxtorf, Lexicon Talmudicum, p. 752); as "legal knowledge" (idem, ibid., and p. 984); and as "study of the law." They call the theologian a "divine man." Moreover, they divide theology into two parts —

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— as the most learned among their theologians, Maimonides, explains in the preface to the second part of the More Nebuchim, and in the preface to the third part of the same work. For it is either the "work of creation" — that is, natural theology — or the "work of the chariot" — that is, mystical theology — a name taken from Ezech. 1; the former, he teaches, is to be expounded to the common people, the latter to few. But for the rest, there is no word in the Old Testament that can be rendered by "theology," nor any other term equivalent to it. Among Greek writers generally, a theologian is one who discourses about God; hence the "Delphic theologians" in Plutarch, concerning the salvation of those who consult the oracle. "Theologoumena" means "things disputed concerning God." Suetonius, in his Life of Augustus, mentions the books of "Theologoumena" by Asclepiades of Mendes — a monster of a man who brought to light and defended foul atheism, and the unspeakable intercourse which the Egyptians in the city of Mendes practiced with a goat. Nicomachus of Gerasa also wrote two books of arithmetical theological matters; a work, says Photius, Bibliotheca, Codex clxxxvii., far removed from its title — that is, inept. Now "theology," from the usage of the Greek language, signifies rather "discourse about God" than "the word of God"; and thus Augustine expounds that term, in The City of God, lib. viii. cap. 1: "It is," he says, "speech, or discourse, about God." But examples of another meaning are not lacking. A "theopropeion" ("oracle of God") is what God announces; and "theosemia" is "the sign that God exhibits." The most ancient writers of Greece, who treated of the gods and the worship of the gods, were first called theologians, and their knowledge was called theology. These were the poets, says Lactantius, On the Wrath of God, cap. ii., and accordingly they were commonly distinguished by that name. Aristotle (Metaphysics, bk. ii.), Clement of Alexandria (Stromateis), and Isidore (bk. v.) relate that Pherecydes the Syrian was the first among the nations to handle theological matters in prose. They affirm that the symbolic and cryptic or mystical doctrine — later used by the Pythagoreans — was derived from that man. Pythagoras's own primary teacher was himself called a "theologian." Diogenes and Hesychius Illustrius testify that Heraclitus wrote works of that theological kind; whence he is called "the obscure." This same Pherecydes lived in the age of Cyrus — so far behind in every branch of learning were the Greeks, when compared with the peoples of the East. This was reproached to Solon by a priest of the Saitic people who said: "O Solon, Solon, you Greeks are always children; there is no old man among the Greeks." And when Solon inquired why he said this, that old man himself is said to have replied: "You are all young in mind; for you have in yourselves no ancient opinion derived from old tradition, nor any learning made venerable by time" — Plato, in the Phaedrus. For indeed theology had obtained its splendor long before the times of Cyrus, and had even passed its peak. See Pliny, Natural History, lib. vii. cap. i., on "what each man discovered in life." "Theopompus asserts that he was the first of all the Greeks to write on nature and the gods" — Diogenes, in his Life. This also appears from the letter of Thales to Pherecydes, of which this is the opening: "Thales to Pherecydes: I learn that you were the first of the Ionians to venture to speak words about divine matters to the Greeks." Hesychius Illustrius believes that Pherecydes "the Syrian" was named from the island of Syra: "For," he says, "Syra is one of the Cyclades islands," in his Life of Pherecydes. Others hold that he was Syrian by nation, which is more probable. He himself, in the preface to his work, affirmed Musaeus, the son of Eumolpus, to have been the first to compose a theogony. The Platonists called Homer a theologian emphatically; and he was always considered the most excellent theologian. But concerning Homer, Philostratus in the Heroicus says: "He surpassed Orpheus himself in many things pertaining to theology" — and added his own discoveries. Their theology was an exposition of theogony; for they believed all the gods had been born. So Herodotus concerning the Persians in the Clio: "They did not consider the gods to have human form, as the Greeks do" — for the Persians worshipped natural gods. I speak of the Greeks after the introduction of Hellenism; for Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica, lib. i. cap. ix., proves that the ancient Greeks, after the manner of other nations, first worshipped the sky and the stars: "So then," he says, "there was among the Greeks no word of theogony such as existed among the most ancient barbarians, nor the ordinances of Orpheus, nor the current great folly of naming and pursuing the gods with male and female designations." And long before him, Plato in the Cratylus: "It seems to me that the first men of Greece supposed only these to be gods, as even now many of the barbarians do: the sun and the moon and the earth and the stars and the sky." But more on these matters later. At what time this word was admitted into the Christian community is uncertain. In the title of the Apocalypse, John is called "the Theologian." In the royal copy of Montanus it reads: "Revelation of the holy apostle and evangelist John the Theologian." In the remaining copies it is simply so stated. In the Ethiopic version there is added: "Who was John the bishop of the metropolitan city of Constantinople when he was about to suffer persecution" — foolish enough, and as befitted that translator. Moreover, since this title is of very uncertain origin, and rightly to be doubted, it can be seen as derived from the second verse of the book: "John testified to the word of God" — that is, the word of God, not discourse about God. But there is another more common meaning of the term, as we have shown. Not because he testified to the word of God, but because he most clearly expounded the Word of life, did the ancients call John par excellence the theologian. Origen was the first to do so. Dionysius the Areopagite, in On the Divine Names, ch. iii., makes such familiar mention of theology and theologians as if those technical terms had been at that time in very frequent use — but virtually everyone agrees that that writer is a forgery. And so those terms, as far as the sacred Scripture is concerned, are unwritten (agrapha). Indeed, evangelical doctrine is called "the word of life" (Phil. 2:16), "the word of the cross" (1 Cor. 1:18), "the word of faith" (1 Tim. 4:6), "the word of Christ" (Col. 3:16), "the word of God" (1 Thess. 2:13); and with reference to these and similar expressions, we do not reject the sober use of such terms — although we are well aware that their technical sense cannot be retained without prejudice to truth. Let us therefore call the matter of which we are to speak, with Eusebius in his letter to Marcellus, "Hellenistic theology" — that is, theology expressed in the Greek manner.

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Chapter 2.

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The abstract notion of theology — In what sense the scholastics contend it is a science — Their opinion rejected — The apostle proves that theology is alien from all human science, 1 Cor. 2 — The terms "to initiate" (myein), "mystery" (mysterion), "to perfect" (teleioun), "perfect" (teleios), and related words — Who the Pauline theologian is — The fruitless labor of the many who attempt to force theology into the rules of the human arts and sciences — The absurdities and foolishness of the scholastics.

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I. There is no reason for us to linger over the questions debated by many concerning the abstract, as they call it, and artificial notion of theology, since they do not appear to pertain to the exposition of its nature. For whether it is an art or a science; and if it is to be called a science, whether it is theoretical or practical, or indeed mixed from both; what its proper and immediate object is; what its genus, what its differentia, what its end — these and many other entirely futile questions have been debated variously and subtly by theologians of every kind, who mingle the philosophy of Aristotle's school with the simplicity of Christianity: by so much understanding they understand nothing. For since Aristotle had made mention of theology as a kind of knowledge, and had taught that it is the most excellent of the contemplative sciences, the scholastics — especially those for whom Thomas is next to God, and from whom to dissent was treated as a matter of religion — contended that Christian theology is a science, and indeed a speculative one. That the name of art ought to be banished from this business is at last the consensus of all. Whether the definitions of science — in which, of course, what it is according to one and what according to another is declared at each person's pleasure — have anything in common with theology, will be considered. Since, therefore, the things themselves, namely the arts and sciences, along with their descriptions and definitions, are uncertain and arbitrary — whether, for instance, art is the imitation of things, or whether something is a kind of science that exhibits the matter under discussion — all labor and ingenuity in reducing these so varied things to order will be in vain. Now, regarding what are called technical sciences, which look to conclusions drawn from better-known principles and receive their names from their proper objects — whether attention is given to the doctrine itself by which the things they treat are artificially arranged, or to the faculty or habit of the mind by which we comprehend that doctrine — it is evident that no common ground can exist between a doctrine that always rests upon certain foundations and theorems which are not only consonant with human reason but also kindred to it (as every science is), and a mystery that surpasses every purely natural or rational capacity. For it is the common conviction of all that God cannot be rightly known except through God. The so-called scientific habit is a conformity of the mind to such doctrine, arising from the disciplinary action of kindred principles flowing back upon it; so that it cannot express that divine power of the mind which is theology, and which rests upon the veracity of the One who reveals. Moreover, the object of theology, since in some sense it is God Himself, is infinitely more distant from the objects of all the sciences than those objects are from nothing itself; so far is it from being the case that, in any respect, theology could share anything in common with any of the arts or sciences.

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II. The apostle also, in the most explicit terms, in that passage where he treats these matters deliberately and expressly, shows that Christian theology is alien from all human wisdom and science: "My word," he says, "and my preaching" — that is, both the knowledge and the doctrine — "not in persuasive words of human wisdom" (in which all human art and science so-called ordinarily consists), "but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power" (for just as the mathematicians have their demonstrations, and the dialecticians theirs, so also our doctrine consists in demonstration — but a spiritual and powerful demonstration, which is as far removed from human wisdom as heaven is from earth). Then he adds the reason and end of this distinction: "That your faith" (that is, the assent rendered to our doctrine) "might not be in the wisdom of men" (as it would be if theology rested on the same or similar principles, form, and end as the arts and sciences of the philosophers), "but in the power of God" (who efficaciously works this wisdom through His Spirit). "But we speak wisdom among the perfect" — "wisdom not of this age" (not the wisdom that proceeds from human learning): "but we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, hidden" (and what agreement can the wisdom of God in mystery have with any human disciplines? Indeed), "God has revealed it to us through His Spirit" (human wisdom teaches these things in a wholly different manner). — 1 Cor. 2:4, 5, 6, 10. Whether, therefore, you consider the origin of theology, or its subject, or its end, or its manner of learning and teaching, or finally its whole nature and use, it is evident that it can in no way be numbered among the human sciences — whether speculative or practical — such that it ought to be bound by their rules or methods. Indeed, the very terms "method," "methodology," and "art," which are proper to the sciences, have no place here according to Scripture. Moreover, the word myein, and from it mysterion — of which the apostle treats in the most holy sense — consistently denotes, even among the pagans themselves, something sufficiently alien from all other sciences: it is a mystery. Myein means to initiate, or to instruct in sacred things; and mysterion is derived from this passively. The author of the Etymologicum Magnum says something slightly different but to the same effect: "Mystes," he says, "comes from myein, meaning to withdraw; for closing the senses and becoming free from the attendant cares, they thus receive the divine illuminations." And Iamblichus, as cited by Photius (codex 94), says that the mysteries are derived from myein — but this is incorrectly, as the logic of the etymology he offers itself demonstrates.

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III. Concerning Pythagoras, who was instructed in the wisdom of nearly all nations, Laertius affirms that he "participated in all the sacred rites, both of the Greeks and of the barbarians" — "He was initiated into the sacred ceremonies of both the barbarians and the Greeks." For that wisdom which those ancient philosophers went abroad to seek in their travels was nothing other than the practice of religious worship, as Lactantius testifies; for he says: "I am accustomed to wonder that, when Pythagoras —"

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— to the Magi and even as far as the Persians, in order to learn the rites and sacred customs of those nations (for they suspected that wisdom resided in religion), yet they did not approach the Jews," book 4, De Vera Sapientia. — that he would initiate a man as a sorcerer, and would not reveal the Eleusinian mysteries to one who was not pure from demons. Mystodas therefore means to be instructed in sacred things; which is also more clearly evident from the response of Apollonius. "Concerning the sacred rites," he said, "I know more than you." And among the Fathers, as Budaeus testifies, the word memyemenos, by itself and without any addition, signifies one who is learned in the sacred Scriptures. Concerning the word mysterion in Paul, Chrysostom says it means "what is secret, wonderful, and unknown" — that is, naturally speaking; others say it means things hidden and known to few, and not to be communicated except to the initiated — that is, "we speak wisdom among those" who are mature. IV. This is not as though, among us, sacred things were mysteries that it would be lawful to expound only after some sacrament of silence had been administered beforehand, since Christ took care that all the mysteries which He Himself taught privately, in accordance with the manner of His ministry, should be proclaimed openly in the light of men and upon the housetops, Matt. 10:27.

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V. Among the ancient pagans it was indeed unlawful to divulge mysteries to the common people: "They do not consider it lawful to commit to writing what they teach concerning sacred things," says Caesar of the Druids, book 6 of the Gallic War. For this reason, those being initiated were everywhere bound by an oath lest they let anything slip. Hence Herodotus, writing of himself after he had learned the Egyptian sacred rites from the people of Heliopolis, says (book 2): "Now, the sacred things that they related to me concerning the gods, I am not eager to set forth in writing, since I consider that all men" (namely, the initiated) "know the same things about them as I do." The gospel doctrine has not been designated by the name of mystery for this kind of reason, but because the things themselves revealed in it exceed every purely natural human capacity, 1 Cor. 2:7, 14. VI. In order, therefore, for anyone to receive and understand "wisdom hidden in a mystery," it is necessary that he himself be initiated — that is, instructed in the secret things of the divine will by the Holy Spirit. Nor are any called "perfect" (teleioi) by Paul other than the initiated — that is, those instructed by the Holy Spirit, of whom he there treats.

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— instructed. For teleioun means to consecrate and to initiate; hence among the ancients, baptism also is called teleiosis (consecration). The Septuagint employs the word for consecration or dedication, Exod. 29, "to fill the hands of them" (verses 33 and 35); nor does the term appear to be expounded any differently in the Epistle to the Hebrews 2:10, "to perfect the author of salvation through sufferings." Moreover, the rites are mysteries, as Budaeus proves from Plato; and the sacred rites of every kind, and the initiated who have been purified by sacrifices, are so designated by Philostratus in the Life of Apollonius, book 4, chapter 6. He, therefore, who is perfect (teleios), that is, instructed by the Spirit by which we are initiated into the Christian sacred rites, and who is initiated (memyemenos) by Him who alone reveals "the mystery of His will," and that through "the Spirit of wisdom and revelation," Eph. 1:9, 17 — he is the Pauline theologian. Concerning the use of the arts and sciences in learning divine truth, something will be said afterwards. In the meantime, it was not hidden even from the pagans themselves that theology is a certain mysterious and divine wisdom, and cannot be circumscribed by those terms or transmitted by those rules whose limits all the arts and sciences endure. And it has perhaps happened for no other reason that those who have expended much labor on this matter — wishing to describe theology precisely according to the rules and methods of the other sciences, concerning its definition, genus, differentiae, proper object, subject, immediate end, and many other such things (about which sacred Scripture does not breathe a word) — are divided by opinions that are as far apart as possible, and fight against one another in a remarkable fashion. For while they strive to reduce the mystery of divine truth revealed from the bosom of God to the flexible and arbitrary rules of the human arts and sciences, shaping it with philosophical terms of some kind (which all truth, both natural and supernatural, could very willingly have done without, had Aristotle not thought otherwise), and while they impede the mystery by those very things with which it refuses to share any community, they accomplish nothing other than to render what is in itself and by its own nature most certain, most evident, and most accessible to the rational mind, into something most uncertain, ambiguous, manifold, and obscure. Learned men indeed, resting on divine revelation in sacred Scripture in the place of innate principles — in a process not unlike the advancement of the other sciences, in which some discover something and others, with easier labor, add to their discoveries — have built up a certain doctrine, comprehending principles, theorems, theses, and conclusions after the pattern of the other sciences, which they call theology. But that doctrine, since it has neither self-evident credibility as such, nor need of supernatural faith by which to be received, nor does it attain any end of theology whether theoretical or practical, is not theology properly so called. From the investigation of that doctrine, a certain habit of mind is acquired, consonant with the impression received from it, which the scholastics contend is neither faith nor natural knowledge. And this is the theology of the schools, concerning whose nature and use something will be said below. Let us therefore, if the truth may be told, permit the innumerable disputes of this kind — and let us gladly allow theology to enjoy the freedom with which sacred Scripture has with so liberal a hand declared it free.

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VII. Whatever words the Holy Spirit has seen fit to use in setting forth this matter, the scholastics have vexed every one of them, more than enough, with their disputes. It is universally acknowledged that Scripture calls by the names of knowledge, prudence, wisdom, and doctrine that understanding by which God directs men in the contemplation of God and His works, and in rendering obedience to Him — that knowledge with which God desires us to be imbued. Seized, as has been said, by an itch for disputation, they therefore contend pertinaciously whether theology is a science, and that either speculative or practical, or a prudence, or a wisdom. But whatever term one has thought fit to place in the subject-position, they all immediately weigh its philosophical definitions to inquire subtly whether it can be adapted to theology. Those who would have theology be wisdom (that one may estimate from this single head all the labor of these men) think it their assigned task to trace out everything attributed to human wisdom in the writings of the philosophers and show that it aptly squares with theology. Yet whatever this work may amount to, when they imagine they have accomplished it — through long digressions, subtle fictions, and conclusions of the most audacious absurdity — as though the business were well done and the opinions of all others refuted, they conclude, at the top of their voice on behalf of whichever school they lead or follow, that theology is wisdom. And so, being utterly ignorant of the mind of the Holy Spirit in these terms — knowledge, prudence, wisdom, doctrine, and the rest of that kind — they strain all the sinews and eyes of their ingenuity (as many of them are brilliant in the most idiotic way) to change the wisdom of God hidden in mystery into the wretched, imperfect, and indeed foolish wisdom of this world, and to circumscribe it within limits of some kind; than which fiction nothing more dangerous or more diametrically opposed to the apostolic doctrine could ever have been devised. The students of sacred wisdom ought therefore to despise these thorny contests of the scholastics and others, which they set before their theological treatises, nailing the cross to wretched readers who would not wish to waste their time unprofitably — or rather, to go astray — since the truth itself, which is to be sought from them by infinite labor, is not really there, on account of the incongruity of the proposed subject.

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Chapter 3.

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The closest union between the intellect and truth — Theology denotes both a habit of the mind and truth itself — God's knowledge of us cannot be called archetypal — Theology, as doctrine, is from God alone and immediately — In what sense the word of God is our theology — The distributions of theologians: angels, men — Men either theanthropic or ectypal — Mere men either wayfarers or possessors — The theology of the latter to be investigated

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I. Having set aside those things which, though among some writers they fill both pages in the inquiry into the nature of theology, in truth cast an impediment before those sincerely seeking the truth, let us look directly at the matter itself in general — that is, its own nature — to which we devote this labor. Now since between any known thing and that faculty and power of our mind by which we apprehend it — namely, the intellect itself considered in its relation to the thing — there is, by virtue of the intervening conformity of truth, a close union and bond, so that each communicates its own name to the other in turn, and thus the properties proper to one are often attributed to the other: for a thing or doctrine is often called certain, from that certainty which is a property of the mind; and our apprehension is called true, from the truth of the thing we apprehend. Hence arises no small confusion in definitions, since it can hardly be perceived whether it is the doctrine, or the faculty of the mind (by whose own proper light we apprehend the doctrine itself and its proper end), that is being defined. Since, therefore, it is acknowledged that by theology is denoted both the doctrine concerning God, the worship and obedience due to Him, and the power and faculty of our mind by which we perceive it — that is, the habit conformed to it — to avoid confusion arising from equivocation, these must be treated distinctly.

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II. It belongs to the infinite self-sufficiency of God that He alone knows Himself perfectly: Ps. 147:5 — “His understanding has no number.” Therefore that knowledge by which God most perfectly knows Himself and all His attributes, since it is infinite and necessary, belongs to none other than God Himself, who is infinitely knowing and wise. This knowledge, therefore, of the primal truth perfectly comprehending and loving itself, is called archetypal theology by some, though improperly. Indeed, I greatly doubt whether they themselves understand what they would mean by archetypal theology. For our knowledge of God is not the express image of that infinite divine knowledge (which is proper to the Son alone as a partaker of the divine nature, Heb. 1:3), so that it could be called ectypal in relation to it; nor can we know anything of God by its power or virtue, except with the free counsel of the divine will intervening. Our mirror is not God Himself immediately, but His word — that is, the gospel — in which, with unveiled face, we behold the glory of the Lord through Christ, 2 Cor. 3:18. God has in His own mind an eternal idea, or concept, of that truth which He wills to be known by us. And upon this all our theology depends — not immediately, to be sure, but upon that act of the divine will by which it pleased Him to reveal that truth to us: “For no one has ever seen God; the only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him,” Joh. 1:18. The revelation of the divine mind and will, that is, the word of God, is therefore the doctrine of which we speak, to which all the concepts of our mind concerning God, His worship, and the obedience due to Him ought to be conformed. And here again theology differs greatly from every science that is a shoot of human wisdom. For that system of principles and conclusions by which any science is transmitted is not the norm of the mind's concepts, or of the acts of the intellect, regarding the proper object of that science; but since it comes after them and is their effect, it must be regulated by them. Thus the most eminent philosopher: “The sciences that are in the rational soul, which pertain to sensible things — if indeed the knowledge of these things is to be called science by us, since it would be more fitting to call them opinions — these, I say, since they are posterior to things, are images of those things” (Plotinus, Enneads V, book ix.). But the doctrine of which we speak precedes every concept of our mind regarding its own peculiar and proper object, and is the infallible, immutable rule and norm of all our knowledge and cognition, Ps. 19.

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III. Theology, therefore, is the very divine truth as it is revealed by God — namely, the word, the doctrine, or the light that is self-ordained and self-authenticating. No one can think or speak worthily of God and divine things except through God. No one rightly knows God except from His own exposition through the Son; nor does He will to be worshiped except in the manner He Himself has prescribed. All our obedience also depends purely on His will. And all theology is concerned with God and His worship, and the obedience due to Him. Therefore that doctrine can come from none other than God Himself. Since theology is the principle and norm of all divine worship, faith, and obedience, it is accordingly necessary that it also be of heavenly origin and infallible certainty — from heaven, not from men, Matt. 21:25. For divine faith is willing to rest upon no principle that is not in every way self-sufficient and without human lordship. Moreover, the worship of God is so called no less from the divine command than from the divine object. Lest, therefore, the whole human race should perpetually waver in all its obedience and fall into difficulties, God willed that the doctrine which is the norm of all His worship and of our obedience should come from Himself. In this sense, therefore, theology is the doctrine of God concerning Himself, His works, His will and worship, and our obedience in every state, together with the reward and the punishment of the disobedient, revealed and declared to the glory of His name — that is, the very word of God itself. Now since the word of God is either unwritten or written in a record, and the latter again is either unwritten or written, we shall next set forth in order how each of these stands in this matter. But what is to be thought of the so-called theological theses, catechisms, confessions, commonplaces, and miscellaneous collections of credible propositions of this kind, and in what esteem they are to be held — in the learning or even the teaching of which many suppose (unless I am mistaken) that theology consists — will be seen below.

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IV. After, therefore (to add this here in its proper place), all the word of God whatsoever has been committed to writing, that Scripture is so our theology that we ascribe authority to the whole of it, to every part of it, and to each individual truth contained in it — not because one proposition is established from another by adducing evident reasons, or because the conclusions to which we assent are rightly derived from whatever principles, but because we embrace each individual truth or truth-proposition, considered separately, with certain faith, on account of its immediate divine revelation, upon which all theology rests. But that habit which the scholastics call discursive — by which from propositions, of which one belongs to Scripture and is therefore divinely revealed, and the other is illuminated by its own natural evidence, we draw conclusions (concerning whose nature, whether they are, as they say, “de fide” or not, sharp debates are waged) — insofar as it is something else (if it be something else), is foreign to our purposes, distinct from the gift of interpreting the Scriptures.

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V. This having been premised, therefore — namely, that theology considered objectively, as they say, and in the abstract, is the pure and unmixed word of God, the light of the rational creature's mind, which is also called by that name — it remains to be carefully weighed further. But so that what we are aiming at may be reached more easily, some distribution of the subjects capable of receiving this light must first be premised, and then the relation of that light to the doctrine of which we are speaking, and the union with it, must be examined. Now first, with respect to the subject (as they say), theology can generally be divided into that which belongs to angels and that which belongs to men. For it is incumbent upon both angels and men — because they are endowed with intellectual light — to know God and to obey Him freely; and their ultimate end consists in the enjoyment of God, to which one proceeds through obedience. This heavenly doctrine, moreover, requires such a nature, state, and condition in all those who would receive it or make use of it toward its proper end. But what innate knowledge of God and of His will those angels who kept their own principality and habitation possessed, and with what light they were furnished — so that this light, with respect to degrees of increase, was capable of receiving those mysteries hidden from the ages in God, at length made known to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places through the church, Eph. 3:10 — and what knowledge they also possess through the continuous vision of God, especially those now enjoying their reward in Christ, is not the place here to inquire.

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VI. The God-man, Jesus Christ, and mere man express the whole human race. The things to be said concerning the theology of Jesus Christ — “in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge,” Col. 2:3 — and concerning that knowledge which He had and has through the personal union, and through the revelations given to Him by the Father, Apoc. 1:1, and because in Him dwells all the fullness of the Spirit, Joh. 3:34, whom He received not by measure — since these cannot be contained within the scope of the dissertation upon which we are now engaged, we have judged it best to omit them entirely here. But those who are mere men either still live a mortal life, or at least can be considered as such, and are commonly called wayfarers (“For in all this life there is hope,” Eccles. 9:4), or else, loosed from the bonds of the body, they are called possessors. The theology of those among them who, having run their course aright and having pursued faith and obedience according to the will of God, have mercifully obtained their end and rest in the enjoyment of God — this theology (to dispatch the matter in a word) is that light of glory by which, beholding divine things face to face and God Himself as He is, filled with ineffable joy, they are eternally occupied with the praises of God and the Lamb. These things had necessarily to be premised in order that we might arrive at what we are aiming at.

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VII. According to the various state of those who are called wayfarers, their theology is also various; and this is generally twofold: namely, that of integral nature, or of creation; and that of fallen nature, or of sin. But other considerations and distributions of men who have fallen into sin must be applied below. We must deal first with the first man, in the first place.

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Part One: On Natural Theology, or the Theology of the First Man

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The theology of the first man — its description — in what sense it is natural — the degrees, force, and efficacy of innate light — the idle speculation of the Scholastics, the error of the Socinians, and of others — the origin and necessity of natural theology — the obedience of the first man — an exposition of the promised reward, of sin, and of punishment — the corruption of original theology — the manner of that corruption — the first covenant abolished, together with the theology resting upon it.

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I. All theology of all men either looks to the innate word (verbum innatum) and is called natural — at least for the most part, since it is never called simply that — or it looks to the revealed word. We must deal first with the former. It can and must be considered as pure, as corrupt, and as apostate.

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II. The state of integral nature — that is, of men placed under the law of creation alone — presents itself to us in the first place. In that state, theology was innate and natural, yet not throughout purely natural. For from the beginning it was enlarged by revelation, and was moreover to be further enlarged. In that state it is called pure. Now the light consisted in a saving knowledge of God as Creator, Lawgiver, Ruler, and Rewarder. We call it light, since that term is appropriate to all theology according to the usage of Scripture. This light was implanted in man by God in the very act of creation; and it was immediately enlarged by an outward revelation of the divine will in the sacramental precept, and was to be further enlarged day by day through the contemplation of God's works. And this was able to make him wise in the obedience rightly to be rendered to God according to the covenant of works, for his own happiness and for the glory of the power, wisdom, goodness, grace, and justice of God — this is the theology of the first man.

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III. Now this light (or spiritual wisdom) God implanted in the mind of man in the very act of his creation. It was suited to the condition in which he was made and to the end for which he was made — indeed absolutely necessary, Eccles. 7:29. Although, therefore, with respect to its nature, use, and end, it was entirely supernatural (for that man should obey God in accordance with a covenant promising an eternal reward was of God's most free appointment); yet, because it was innate and natural to him, we say that it was natural to him. Strictly speaking, that is called natural which necessarily accompanies nature itself, or derives its origin from the principles of nature. In that sense it is evident that this light was not natural to man. For it does not necessarily follow from human nature such that it cannot be separated from it; nor can it be drawn out from the natural faculties of the soul by their own proper and native power. Yet because it pertained to the rectitude of his nature with respect to his original state, and was implanted in him at his creation — man being placed under law, with regard to his ultimate end — it cannot be denied that it was natural. But concerning these things in opposition to the papists, the dispute has been carried on sufficiently and more than sufficiently elsewhere.

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IV. Concerning this light — or the knowledge of man in the state of uncorrupt nature — with respect to its degrees and efficacy, there is no small clash of opinions. The Scholastics extol it magnificently enough, while meanwhile, as everywhere, they are full of idle speculations and of presumption in their curious determinations. The Socinians pretend that the first man was a fungus and a block of wood, scarcely possessed of reason — they set him up as an object of ridicule, as though he were ignorant of God, of himself, of his wife, and of other creatures. They maintain that only the single precept of not eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was given to him by God. Whether he had a mind or conscience, whether he acknowledged any dependence upon God — they do not know, or at least they pretend not to know; for the pretense of ignorance is very often the cover for the most insolent boasting of knowledge. They have found it fitting thus to lend support to the most foul errors concerning the fall of the first man, which they cherish, and concerning the state of sin: “Adam, like an infant or a child, did not know that he was naked” (footnote: Smale, De Veritate Deitatis Filii, cap. vii, p. 2), as though he had truly been blind before he ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; and, “Concerning his own wife, he knew only what was obvious to the senses,” as the very leader of the flock himself says (footnote: De Statu Primi Hominis, cap. iv, p. 119); “Nor,” he says, “had he any clear understanding of the power of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (footnote: p. 147), as though the entire effect of the first sin arose from the power of that tree; and again, “Although he was mortal, yet he did not know that he was mortal” (footnote: cap. iv, p. 118): plainly, one lie must be covered with more lies, lest it leak through. To prove that Adam lost almost nothing through sin, they assert that he never had anything — since he could not lose what he never possessed. A lid worthy of the dish! We, with as even a balance as possible, shall weigh briefly the theology of the first man — neither inclining toward their arrogant presumption in asserting, nor toward the bold impudence of those others in denying.

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V. That God, by right of creation, is the supreme Lord of all things, is acknowledged by all creatures. Hence a dependence upon God necessarily accompanies the existence of all things, and is suited to the principles of nature which He has communicated to each one. All creatures therefore, as such, and each according to the capacity and disposition with which they are endowed, celebrate the Creator and serve Him: Ps. 145:10, “All Your works shall praise You, O Lord;” and therefore, by personification (kata prosopopoiian), the Psalmist many times exhorts all of them, each and every one, to duly perform that duty

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the Psalmist. The holy choir of the church, whether militant or triumphant, confirms this eternal and unchangeable principle of divine worship with unanimous consent, Rev. 4:11, “Worthy are You, O Lord, to receive glory and honor and power, for You created all things, and by Your will they existed and were created”

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and were created.” To which the universal assembly of all creatures responds in chorus, chap. 5

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13: “And every creature that is in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them, I heard saying, ‘To Him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and dominion forever and ever.’” For since God has worked all things for Himself — that is, for His own glory, Prov. 16:4 — it was right that all those things should render glory and honor to Him. Moreover, just as it belongs to that supreme right of God and dominion over all things to designate for each creature its own proper and ultimate end, so it belongs to that dependence to have a law and rule governing operations that tend toward that end. All creatures, by virtue of being creatures, enjoy a fixed end and a law of operation. That law, therefore, was innate to all of them. But the rational creature, since it sustains a twofold relation — namely, as a creature, and as a being capable of reason and consecrated to eternity — receives from God a twofold dependence: one common or natural (of which we have spoken), and another proper or moral. The latter is the obedience owed to God befitting the creature's condition. To require this obedience from creatures, it is sufficient that God be set before them as the supreme and best Lord — nothing more is required. He therefore demands fear and worship, because He is Adon (that is, the Lord of all): Mal. 1:6, “If I am the Lord, where is My fear?” That this should not be known from the very act of creation was impossible. That innate law ought to have been sufficient for duly rendering that obedience. Thus at length both the ultimate end and the creature's dependence upon God are established. Now concerning that innate law, two things may be considered: the law itself, that is, the obedience required

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the standard and knowledge of the law. That this supreme and greatest Benefactor, this highest Ruler and Rewarder, is to be loved, worshipped, and feared — so that the moral order of this dependence, which, because God the Creator is supremely just and holy, embraces all justice and holiness, and that it may be continued until its ultimate end is reached — this is the sum of this law. And this law is that word which is innate and immutable, and altogether infallible, which, as it were, as a doctrine

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was in the theology of the first man. Now the knowledge of this law did not really differ from the law itself. It is evident that it consisted in a saving light of such a kind that, by its force and guidance, man could rightly render to God the obedience owed according to the law, so that he might attain his proper end. And this was the theology of the first man. Established in the state of moral dependence on God, and subjected to the authority of God, and thereby capable of blessedness in the enjoyment of the eternal Creator, he had as inborn and connatural (σύμφυτον) the law of those actions that were necessary for attaining that end; and moreover he was furnished with the wisdom by which he had knowledge of God and of all the means of His worship, and by whose force he was able rightly to render the obedience prescribed in the law, according to the will and mind of God shining in it. But since this law which is connatural (σύμφυτος), which in this theology supplies the place of doctrine — or rather the word dwelling within (λόγος ἐνδιάθετος) — was innate to the mind of man, it did not, as regards the thing itself, or speaking materially as they say, differ from that light, or habit of mind, by which the doctrine concerning God and His worship is savingly perceived; nor was it anything more than the source and origin of that order of dependence of the rational creature upon God; but with respect to exercise, and actual obedience, and speaking formally, it was distinct from it.

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VI. Since therefore God made man upright (Eccles. 7:29), in His own image (Gen. 1:26, 27), which consists in wisdom, justice, and holiness (Col. 1:10, Eph. 4:23, 24), and commanded him to rule over the other creatures by his authority for His own glory — for which dominion he would have been altogether unfit unless their natures had been thoroughly known to him — and since He required obedience from him under penalty of eternal death, together with the promise of a blessed life as a reward, it is established that he was furnished with the wisdom and moral light by which he was able to know God, and to understand perfectly the innate law (σύμφυτος νόμος) and the revelation of the attributes of God in the creation of all things, and the sacramental legislation (νομοθεσία). And for one furnished with this theology, nothing at all was lacking either for worshipping God rightly or for living well and blessedly.

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VII. And from this an assessment can be made of the obedience of the first man and of the reward set before him, together with the nature of his sin and also of the threatened punishment. For the obedience to be rendered by the force of the covenant had to be conformable to his innate light, or to the theology delineated above; and the covenant itself was known to Adam as something innate to him; for it is established that by the force of this theology he knew both his duty and his reward; but the additionally superadded sacramental precept did not reveal the covenant, but opened the way for its being sealed. The proposed reward consisted in nothing other than the eternal enjoyment of God. The same voice of the law still sounds: “Do this, and you shall live;” for God never ordained any other reward for obedience to be rendered by the force of the covenant. But what interval of time must have elapsed before it would have befallen Adam to enjoy God in the capacity of a reward — since God Himself never foreknew it as something future — is a subtle and dangerous dispute. That the first man, had he continued in his original state, would have obtained the reward, and that that reward itself would have been God, is established from the very nature of the covenant —

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— is established. The time and manner in which it would have befallen him to enjoy God in this way, neither the nature of the thing nor the sacred page indicates. The obedience of the first man would therefore have been a universal and express exemplar of the image of God in all things; the reward would have been God Himself. But that his first sin, since it was committed against the directing force of this theology, consisted in the total subversion of the order of the moral dependence of the creature upon God, is plain; hence the punishment of that sin is eternal separation from God, with the additional sense of torment beyond that, which avenging justice could not but require. After therefore the body and soul of the sinner had experienced the first death in their mutual separation from one another, they had to be reunited — by divine power serving justice to that extent — in order to undergo the second death, which consists in eternal separation from God under the most grievous punishments; from this condition, of course, we have been liberated through Christ. Therefore, as regards the substance — if I may speak thus — of the reward and punishment annexed to the first covenant, and those things that follow upon the new covenant, there was no difference. God Himself, and separation from

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God contain the nature of both on either side. Nor can any other reward or any other punishment be assigned; although perhaps it can be said that both have been increased by the addition of certain degrees by the force of the new covenant. Hence the reward is now called, “an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison” (καθʼ ὑπερβολὴν εἰς ὑπερβολὴν αἰώνιον βάρος δόξης), 2 Cor. 4:17; and the punishment is “death unto death” (θάνατον εἰς θάνατον), ch. 2:16. Scripture is indeed silent concerning the resurrection of Adam apart from the word of the incarnation (ἐκτὸς τοῦ λόγου ἐνανθρωπήσεως); for it does not pursue vain speculations, nor does it curiously discourse from the supposition of a state that was never to come about. But concerning the state of those who are altogether strangers to the mediation of Christ — since they never believed in Him, nor sinned against His grace, of which they never heard anything — Scripture speaks plainly enough. But to hold that Christ merited the resurrection from the dead of those persons unto condemnation on account of sins committed without law and without any knowledge of Christ — this

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is impious. Since therefore the immortality of Adam in his original state depended in no way on internal principles of nature, but solely on the most free good pleasure of God — that external preserving cause being removed by sin — it was necessary that Adam should die at some certain point in time, and that by the force of the covenant he should be raised from the state of natural death to judgment.

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VIII. And let this suffice to have discoursed concerning natural theology considered in its original and native purity; it remains that we briefly survey its weakening (ἀμαύρωσιν) through the entrance of sin.

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IX. Now the entrance of sin, and the abolition of the divine covenant through that entrance, are known from elsewhere and are here presupposed; therefore we must deal here only with the removal of this theology through those events.

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X. It will be granted that every theology must be sufficient to attain its proper end. This end consists in the glory of God and the eternal happiness of the theologians themselves. Therefore, since the image of God in man was abolished by the entrance of sin, that law — the type of divine knowledge of which we have spoken (the Greek term here being OCR-damaged, likely denoting a congenital or innate form of the knowledge of God) — is entirely stripped of its theological nature and use, so that the whole human race must rightly be judged to have been disinherited from all true theology through sin; and these things must be taught. So close was the union between that original doctrine and the habit of the mind that, once torn apart, they could not each maintain their place. Moreover, that salvific light, by which we have shown that the proper form, as it were, of this primeval theology was constituted, was extinguished through sin; and so theology itself suffered destruction (the Greek term here being OCR-damaged, likely ἀφανισμόν, meaning obliteration or disappearance). Furthermore, no doctrine can properly be called theology unless it rests upon some divine covenant, by the force of which the theologians themselves can please God and at last enjoy Him. For all theology of wayfarers directs men in the knowledge of God, and urges them to render the obedience due according to the norm of the covenant that it has pleased God to enter into with them. But that covenant, which was the foundation of this primeval theology, has been abolished, as I said. For what would it now accomplish? Seeing that, although it commands all things rightly, there is nevertheless no one who can obey. The doctrine of that covenant is indeed still most true: “for he who does the things of the law shall live in them.” But the covenant itself, after the entrance of sin, retained no power to bring men to God. Nor, because men are compelled to bear the authority of its commandments, are they to be called parties to the covenant, since they are held by its bond only from the right and supreme dominion of God, which He cannot abdicate. Indeed, misery through sin has gone so far that even the doctrine set forth in the law of nature, however much accompanied by the primeval light, was nevertheless not sufficient to direct sinners in the way of life; nor, even if it most greatly desired to, could it altogether save sinners. For to know God and to obey Him as Creator, Governor, and Rewarder is not sufficient for anyone’s salvation after the entrance of sin, unless one is also furnished with knowledge of His grace and mercy through Jesus Christ. Therefore the innate and congenital light (the Greek term here being OCR-damaged, likely ἐνδίδακτον, meaning inborn or implanted knowledge) truly lost through sin the ends of theology — its salvific use and its power to direct theologians effectively in the way of life.

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XI. And this is the reason why, from the apostasy of the theologians, theology itself was also entirely abolished — a thing we shall not find to have occurred afterward. For since all theology, as we have said, is founded upon a covenant, when the covenant was destroyed, it was necessary that theology itself should also fall. Now that covenant entered into with Adam rested upon an absolute and universal moral dependence upon God. It was therefore in no way possible that it should not be rendered void by the first sin. The matter stands in the same way with the new covenant. The theology of those in covenant rests upon the covenant. Whether any of those in covenant can fall away or be cast out of that covenant, we do not now dispute. The covenant itself cannot be abolished, because it was established in and with Christ the Mediator; nor consequently can the theology resting upon it be shaken. However often, therefore, theologians may defect from its doctrine — as we shall see frequently — yet theology itself remained altogether stable and unchangeable, this being demanded by the nature of the covenant. Such is the account of this theology; and it is sufficient to have treated it briefly, since it lasted only for a short time, and the doctrine concerning it is drawn from only very few passages of Scripture.

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Part Two: On the Corruption and Loss of Natural Theology

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Chapter 5.

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Natural theology, how far it survives after the entrance of sin — its remnants, what they are and of what kind, are proved — from the law of nature, what it is; its force, Rom. 2:14, 15 — the force of conscience — atheists — that God can be known from His works is shown.

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I. That primordial and native light of which we have treated up to this point has, as we have said, been extinguished by sin. Hence all men are called blind, indeed are called darkness itself; for that innate doctrine, together with the aids by which it needed to be enlarged with respect to its object, was not able to attain its proper end. Whether it yet survives, though corrupted and

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laboring under its own corruption — whether, I say, this original theology yet survives — we shall now see.

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II. That there is still implanted in the hearts of men a sense of God as Creator, ruler, and judge, together with some indelible knowledge of good and evil in relation to God's government, and of the distinction between the honorable and the base — this nearly all men confess, and we shall prove it. The apostle expounds it at Rom. 2:14, 15. Moreover, sinners who are possessed of reason still enjoy the benefit of contemplating the works of God. For it is not credible that sin has so overwhelmed human nature as to seem to have wholly shaken off the law of dependence and subjection inscribed on the heart by the Creator. We do not say that men are born equipped with some knowledge of God; they have none at all. But we speak of the power of knowing: neither do they know and perceive naturally in that way. There is no reason why we should suppose — since we ourselves experience it — that the innate capacity for knowing God, which stimulates men to render Him worship in some manner, will not of its own accord assert itself in adults who are possessed of reason, no less certainly and necessarily than reasoning itself.

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III. Yet these things must be proved, since it is now long since theologians taught us to distrust what we see and feel. First, therefore, we shall show that very many vestiges of natural theology survive in the minds of sinners; then, whatever those vestiges may be, we shall see that they do not constitute true theology.

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IV. We say, therefore, that human nature, though laid waste by sin to so great a degree, and reduced almost to its own ash, is still equipped with the remains of this theology. That God exists, and that He is such as the very reason of truth requires Him to be — namely, best by virtue and greatest by His benefits — does not escape it. This knowledge, under God as Creator, it attributes to itself. That law and reason which teaches and proclaims this truth is still vigorous in our nature. That there is a law of nature is the voice of nature itself — that is, it bears witness concerning itself. But wherever there is a law, a lawgiver must be acknowledged there; and the giver of the law of nature can be none other than the Author of nature. For that law differs from nature itself only by its relation to a certain object. This law, therefore, teaches that God exists and is to be worshipped, and that right and justice are to be observed among men — as Scripture also testifies: Ps. 145:15; 141:7–9; Job 12:7–10; 37–39; Isa. 40:12; Matt. 6:26; Acts 17:26–28. The first dictate of this law concerning God is Rom. 1:19: τὸ γνωστὸν τοῦ Θεοῦ φανερόν ἐστιν ἐν αὐτοῖς — that is, among the Gentiles, who are given over to nature alone as their teacher. And this τὸ γνωστόν of God is manifest not only among them — that is, among some of them, namely the philosophers — but in them, that is, in all of them, through an innate knowledge of God (ἔμφυτον θεογνωσίαν). The same apostle also convicts all men of holding back what they know (τὸ εἰδέναι) — concerning, that is, the nature and attributes of God — in unrighteousness (ἐν ἀδικίᾳ), v. 18. But those who hold back some divine truth do indeed retain it. Furthermore: this law, inscribed in the hearts of all, is said to overcome all vices and prejudices to such a degree that even the most wicked and profligate of all bipeds are not unaware of God's judgment that sinners are to be punished, v. 32. But those who acknowledge God's right to punish sins cannot be ignorant of that same right of His which demands obedience, nor indeed of God Himself. Secondly: the same law demands moral obedience due to God from all. After it has shown that God exists, it teaches that He is to be worshipped: Rom. 2:14, 15 — “When the Gentiles, who do not have the law (written, that is, in the manner in which it was given to the Jews), do (yet, by the force of the law inscribed on their hearts) the things of the law (which, namely, the written moral law commands), these, not having the law (that is, as written, or in any other way immediately revealed by divine agency), are a law to themselves (because they have that law innate in them); who show the work of the law written in their hearts.” “The work of the law” — that is, what the law produces; an effect like itself — they show that they have this written or engraved in their hearts; that is, they have a law implanted in them, a transcript (ἐκτύπωμα) of the written law. It is necessary that this correspond exactly to the written law. But what the written law teaches, and in whose name and authority, we know. And that law which serves for those who lack the written law is its counterpart (ἀντίστροφος). Since, therefore, all men without exception have this law, inasmuch as it belongs to nature and is equally common to all by nature; and since this law expresses that divinely revealed law which commands and forbids in the name of God — it is evident that all those who can in no way live a life free from the rule of this law cannot but have some knowledge of God, and cannot but acknowledge the moral obedience due to Him.

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V. Conscience also, as they say, is a thousand witnesses to this truth. Hence the apostle proceeds to complete his remaining argument: συμμαρτυρούσης αὐτῶν τῆς συνειδήσεως, καὶ μεταξὺ ἀλλήλων τῶν λογισμῶν κατηγορούντων ἢ καὶ ἀπολογουμένων — “their conscience bearing witness, and their thoughts among themselves accusing or even defending them.” The very nature of the case proclaims that conscience is a man's judgment concerning himself with respect to a superior's judgment; hence, in Menander: βροτοῖς ἅπασι συνείδησις θεός — “for all mortals, conscience is God.” But he who is of such

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(footnote: CAP. V. ON THE CORRUPTION AND LOSS.) a pre-eminence such as to have dominion and to be able to exercise judgment over the hearts of men — that is God. Therefore that natural accusation or defense of conscience which is carried out in every individual man looks to none other than God. And it is wholly impossible for anyone to wrest all authority away from this judge, who in the sight of all performs His office in the name of God. How dearly would a Cain, a Judas, a Nero, a Caligula — even lesser monsters of wickedness — have purchased freedom from his scourges? We must acknowledge that this condition of human nature is placed entirely beyond all the paths and reasonings of our counsel and will. None of the wise reckons conscience among those things that are within our power (ἐφ᾽ ἡμῖν). Those who would too eagerly make man the supreme lord of his whole self were wont to transform conscience into Furies, Alastors, and Eumenides — torturers of self-jurisdiction. Let sinners be secure in their condition, untroubled by the judgment of men; or let them, through the fierceness of soul characteristic of the present, despise even the extreme hazards of life and the sum of temporal goods, to the point of voluntarily taking upon themselves the extreme penalty — even so, they cannot flee this tribunal while they stand convicted of their crime. But we have treated this argument elsewhere.

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VI. But let the matter speak for itself: do we not all experience that the human mind is so ready to give assent to this truth — namely, that God exists — so prone to rush into its embrace, without which it would not merely be cast down from its dignity and honor and thrust into the lowest rank, but would also be ignorant of itself? So much so that, once the terms of which the proposition consists are made clear, it is not lawful to withhold assent from it? Whether this happens by a certain impulse of nature and instinct — in which case reason is itself alone sufficient as an argument — or whether the mind employs a very swift process of reasoning and does not perceive that it has reasoned before it has with its whole soul assented to the proposition set before it — experience testifies that the human mind rests immovably in this truth. Plotinus speaks admirably on this in Enneads III, book vii., treating of eternity, which he does not distinguish from God Himself. “When we say,” he writes, “that eternity and time are different from each other, and that the former is around the eternal nature, while the latter is around what comes into being; and when we hold that all this turns on these matters — we suppose, as it were spontaneously and by a natural impulse, and by a certain sudden intuition of the intellect, that we have a certain clear instinct regarding these things, deeply implanted in our souls, always saying and everywhere naming the same things about them.” So much for that. Let there be godless men who would too earnestly wish that God did not exist — indeed, who have dared openly to profess that they believe God does not exist; yet since this supreme impiety and wickedness never fails to be accompanied by every other kind of crime, who will persuade me that those impure scoundrels who boldly slander human nature — against the protest of everything that partakes of it — do not also lie shamelessly about themselves? Whatever that may be, what madness would it be to give credence to three or four disgraces of human nature, not merely against the constant and unanimous voice of all good men, but against the voice of nature itself? “For he alone saw, first, that the gods exist, because nature itself had impressed the notion of them on the minds of all. For what nation is there, or what race of men, that does not have, without instruction, a certain anticipation of the gods? Epicurus calls this a πρόληψις — that is, a certain preconceived impression in the mind of something, without which nothing can be understood, sought, or discussed” — so says Velleius in Cicero, De Natura Deorum, book i, chapter xvi. And Seneca, Epistle 117: “Among other things, we gather that the gods exist from this: that the opinion of the gods is implanted in all, and there is no nation anywhere so abandoned against laws and customs as not to believe in some god.” That some God exists, Dion of Prusa says in his Orations, is “a conviction and common notion of the whole human race, alike among Greeks and equally among barbarians, one that is necessary and innate, arising by nature in all rational beings.” And hence Aristotle forbids one to enter into debate with those who doubt whether the gods are to be worshipped, since this ought to be placed beyond controversy by the dictate of right reason. “Those who question whether one ought to honor the gods and love one's parents,” he says, “need punishment, not rational persuasion” — Topics I, chapter ix. The entire choir of the wise, all of them, are of one and the same mind in this matter. The philosopher joins the worship of God with love of parents, which is established to be from nature. Justin, in Apology I, calls these notions “seeds of truth in all.” “No soul is without sin, because no soul is without a seed of good,” says Tertullian, De Anima. That they generally name the gods in the plural, assenting to polytheism, is to be ascribed to corrupted traditions and to prejudices adverse to human nature that prevail over its native genius — so Lactantius: “What pardon for their impiety can they hope for, who do not acknowledge the worship of Him whom it is not right for any man to be altogether ignorant of? For when they swear, and when they make wishes, and when they give thanks, they do not name Jupiter or many gods, but God; so greatly does truth itself burst forth from unwilling hearts, compelled by nature.” And it is most true that, in the midst of idolatries, this native and primordial light of reason asserted itself so effectively as to compel very many, who were most extravagant in their idol-worship, to confess one God, the highest and greatest — as in Tiberius Caesar in Dio, History, book lvi: “For this reason also that first and greatest God, He who fashioned us,” etc. Aristotle, in De Mundo, adds the reason for polytheism: “He is one, but with many names, being named according to the varied experiences through which He is invoked.” To this natural tendency of human nature toward God and His worship (πρόληψιν), Julian bears illustrious testimony: “All of us,” he says, “are persuaded before instruction that there is a divine power, and we look to it and hasten toward it; and our souls are disposed toward it as eyes endowed with sight are toward the light.” Hence that ancient formula, used by those in peril and danger, of appealing to the gods against the injustices of others. It was the voice of nature crying out to the God of nature: “While each one cries out that the gods exist and do not neglect human affairs” — book iv, lib. ii. And, “There is a heavenly power; there is a great Jupiter” — the same, ib. viii. So also as recorded in Sallust, in The Jugurthine War, concerning Sulla when Volux, the son of Bocchus, feared his ambush; and in Plautus, Captivi: “There is indeed a God, who hears and sees what we do.” Cyprian speaks admirably in De Vanitate Idolorum: “The sum of the crime is to be unwilling to acknowledge Him whom you cannot be ignorant of.” Eusebius also expounds this opinion admirably in Praeparatio Evangelica, book ii, chapter ix.: “It is pre-eminent and supremely useful that which signifies the name and essence of God, led by His own nature and by notions impressed on the soul through itself, or rather divinely inspired — no one fails to understand this: for all peoples have perceived this by a certain common sense of reason, since the same universal Artificer has sown this in every mind endowed with reason and intelligence by means of certain natural thoughts” — so he. And Tertullian, Against Marcion: “We define God as to be known first by nature, then to be recognized more fully by doctrine.” And in the Apology: “Do you wish us to prove it” (that God exists and is one) “from the testimony of the soul itself — which, though pressed in the prison of the body, though hemmed in by evil institutions, though weakened by lusts and desires, though enslaved to false gods, yet, when it comes to itself, as from a debauch, as from sleep, as from some illness, and enjoys its own health, names God — this alone, because the one true God is properly good and great, and that ‘what God has given’ is the voice of all. It also calls Him to witness as judge: ‘God sees,’ and ‘I commit it to God,’ and ‘God will repay me.’ O testimony of the soul that is by nature Christian! And finally, when it pronounces these things, it looks not to the Capitol, but to heaven. For it knows the seat of the living God; from Him and from thence it descended.”

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VII. Now, just as most of the wise had taken note of these common notions (κοιναὶ ἔννοιαι), or anticipations (προλήψεις), so also they had come to know that power of conscience which we have set forth. Menander: “For all mortals: conscience is God.” Cornelius Tacitus, speaking of Tiberius, Annal. vi. cap. vi.: “His crimes and shameful deeds had turned even upon himself as a punishment. Nor was it without cause that the foremost teacher of wisdom was accustomed to assert that if the minds of tyrants were laid open, lacerations and wounds would be visible; since, just as bodies are torn by stripes, so the mind is torn by cruelty, lust, and evil counsels; for neither fortune nor solitude protected Tiberius from confessing the torments of his breast and his own punishments.” The fear arising from a conscience of sins Cicero calls “the cruelest master”; and “the wicked,” he says, “are driven and pursued by the Furies — not with blazing torches, as in the stories, but with the anguish of conscience and the torment of fraud,” De Legib. lib. i. Tiberius, continually vexed by that anguish, who had rejected every remedy — both the commission of new crimes, and retreat from the company of men, and the fear of punishment — could not contain himself, but, worn out with himself, publicly confessed in a letter to the senate the torments he had endured in his breast. “What,” he said, “shall I write to you, conscript fathers, or how shall I write, or what shall I leave entirely unwritten at this time? May the gods and goddesses destroy me more thoroughly than I daily feel myself perishing, if I know,” Sueton. Tiber. cap. lxi. Otho also, after Galba had been slain by his wicked crime, was so terrified that he attempted to appease the shade of Galba by every kind of expiatory rite; as the same author witnesses. Excellently the Satirist:—

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“Whose mind is cold … for crimes, the inward parts sweat with silent guilt.” Juven. Sat. xi.

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And again:— “Why, nevertheless, do you think these men have escaped — those whom a mind conscious of a dread deed holds thunderstruck, and smites with a dull blow, while a hidden torturer shakes his scourge within the soul? But the punishment is fierce, and far more cruel than those which stern Caeditius devised, or Rhadamanthus — to carry one’s own witness in one’s breast night and day.” Sat. xiii.

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The historian sets before us a notable example in Jugurtha after innumerable crimes had been committed. “Nor,” he says, “after that time did any day or night pass quietly for Jugurtha; he trusted sufficiently neither in any place, nor in any mortal, nor in any season. He feared citizens and enemies alike; he looked anxiously at everything and was terrified at every noise; he often rested at night in one place and then another, contrary to the dignity of a king; sometimes, roused from sleep, he seized weapons and stirred up a tumult — so greatly was he agitated by a kind of dread and madness.” And this is the first foundation, or first part, of natural theology in the corrupt state of sin; from which it follows that whoever has not ceased to be a man cannot entirely cease to be a theologian.

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VIII. Furthermore: from the contemplation of the works of God — both those of creation and those of providence — this residual knowledge of God can be nourished and increased day by day; for this theology, such as it is, rests not only upon human nature but upon the whole world as well.

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IX. First, nothing can be said more plainly on this matter than what the Psalmist has: Ps. xix. 1–7, “The heavens declare the glory of the mighty God; and the expanse of them shows forth the work of His hands. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night displays knowledge,” etc. This Psalm celebrates a twofold principle — or rather, medium — of God’s revelation,

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namely, His works and His word. In comparing these two with one another, the Psalm prefers the latter over the former with respect to its saving effects (all of which, indeed, it ascribes to the word alone). The former, however, it proves to declare the glory of God throughout the whole world. The thing revealed, of which mention is here made, is the glory of God, and likewise the power which He put forth in the creation of all things — that is, as the apostle expresses it, His eternal power and divinity (ἀΐδιος αὐτοῦ δύναμις καὶ θειότης), Rom. i. 20. The media of revelation are heaven and the sun, and the days and nights that succeed one another in their revolving course. The manner of this revelation is expressed in various ways: they are said to declare, to show forth, to pour out speech, to display, to speak. All of these are metaphorical, yet sufficiently indicate an efficacy suited to the proposed end. It is further noted that this revelation is catholic — that is, extending to all the ends of the habitable world. The Psalmist does add, indeed, that this doctrine of the works of creation and of God’s providence is not sufficient for anyone to know God rightly and to worship Him holily — since the Psalm wholly attributes those saving effects to His word, or to the doctrine contained in Holy Scripture; yet in the meantime he expressly affirms that the essence, glory, and power of God are so revealed through it that all the inhabitants of the earth may learn from it both that God exists and that He is infinitely separated from all the idols of the nations.

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X. No less clearly does the apostle confirm the same truth; Rom. i. 18–20: “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness; because that which can be known of God is manifest in them; for God has made it manifest to them. For His invisible attributes have been clearly perceived from the creation of the world onward, by means of the things that He made, being understood by the mind — namely, His eternal power and divinity — so that they are without excuse.” I do not wish to entangle myself greatly in those controversies that lie outside our present purpose in these words. The putrid invention of the Socinians, who twist the words of the twentieth verse toward the doctrine of the gospel, has long since been refuted. As for the rest: the thing revealed is in general terms called τὸ γνωστὸν τοῦ θεοῦ — that which can be known of God — and specifically, His eternal power, divinity, and wrath, or vindicatory justice. The media of revelation are the works of God: the things He has made, namely, the works of creation that have existed from the foundation of the world, and the works of providence which He still carries on from heaven. The manner is through a certain disclosure of these things, innate in them, together with the contemplation which they indelibly impress upon the mind. Through these media, this revelation attains such a degree that in those to whom it is made it is called a manifestation of the things revealed. The end is inexcusability (ἀναπολογησία) — not absolute inexcusability, but inexcusability as concerns the use of this benefit of revelation. Whether τὸ γνωστὸν τοῦ θεοῦ is rendered as “that which can be known of God” or “that which ought to be known of God,” the matter comes to the same thing; for it is not said absolutely, but with respect to that kind of manifestation which comes through the works of creation and providence; for from these it can be known that God exists, that He is eternal, omnipotent, and just; and this ought to be known from them — nor does the apostle in this place extend that τὸ γνωστὸν τοῦ θεοῦ any further. Certainly, those things that are natural to God, and that — once an object is posited with respect to their exercise — are necessary, whatever they may be, fall no less exactly under this manifestation than those of which explicit mention (κατὰ λέξιν) is made. But those things whose exercise, even when all objects are posited, depends upon the most free will of God — such as grace and mercy toward sinners — stand on a different footing; for of these there is no revelation except in Christ, as we have demonstrated more fully elsewhere.

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XI. Nor less illustrious are those passages in which the Holy Spirit Himself uses this very argument, and proves from His works that God exists, and that He ought to be known and worshipped. And who will hinder us from thinking according to the dictates of the Holy Spirit? See Ps. viii., also cxlv. 8–15, cxlvii. 4–6; Job xii. 7–10, xxxvii—xxxix.; Isa. xl. 12; Matt. vi. 26. This argument is pressed by either God Himself or His prophets in His name in many passages. To dwell upon all of them would be too lengthy and foreign to our present purpose. Let us briefly run through two arguments of the same apostle to this end; one of them is found at Act. xiv. 15–17, the other at cap. xvii. 24–28. The first runs thus: “Men, why do you do these things? We also are men, subject to the same passions as you, proclaiming to you that you should turn from these vain things to that living God who made heaven and earth and the sea and all things that are in them. Although He did not leave Himself without witness, doing good, giving us rains from heaven and appointed seasons for bearing fruit, filling our hearts with food and gladness.” These are the words of Paul and Barnabas, defending themselves against the impious worship of the Lystrans. First, they teach that the worship itself and its object, which they had invented for themselves, are vain — that is, foolish and empty; then they point to the true God, both by the attribute of life and by the effect of His works. For God is the living God, because He made heaven and earth. And they prove that He has given such testimony of Himself through the works of His providence that all men could from them know Him and easily distinguish Him from vain, dead, worthless idols — what could be said more plainly? “He did not leave Himself without witness” (Οὐκ ἀμάρτυρον ἑαυτὸν ἀφῆκεν) — that is, He testified both that He exists and that He governs this world by His providence; and how so? Through the works of His providence, namely. He did not, to be sure, give this testimony of Himself to the end that men might savingly know Him and be converted — for how could He have seriously intended that, when in the meantime He willingly permitted them to persist in their own ways? — but only to this end, that those who in defiance of it attached themselves to vain idols might be without excuse (ἀναπολόγητοι).

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XII. The apostle proceeds by arguing in the same manner, Act. xvii, 24–29. But this pericope of the apostolic oration, since we must treat at greater length the question of the sufficiency of this revelation for salvation, we have not thought fit to expound further for the present. And these teachers have acknowledged, namely, the works of God, even

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Among the nations celebrated for wisdom. “Heaven never ceases to teach men,” says Plato, Epinomis, appended to the book On the Laws. “And who is so blind that, when he has looked up to the heavens, he does not perceive that gods exist?” as Cicero says in Responses to Auruspices. And Zaleucus set it down in his laws: that those who inhabit the city and the land ought first of all to be persuaded and to believe that gods exist, and, looking up to heaven and to the cosmos and to the order established within them, to understand that these things were made not by chance nor by human hands, etc. In agreement with these men, Tatian says: This is to be understood through His creation, and to be apprehended through nature from His works. See Max. Tyr. Dissertation i.; Maimonid. More Nebuch. part. i. cap. xxxiv. It cannot indeed be denied that all those things which by their own nature lead the mind to some sense of the knowledge of God and of His attributes are drawn aside by many and interpreted otherwise than they ought to be. We have observed that none are more often inclined toward atheism than those who profess to trace out with every footstep the knowledge of all things, especially those things which are hidden and concealed by nature; namely, by the contemplation of all things they use it only to gratify the innate curiosity of the mind, abusing it in the consideration of the connections and knots of secondary causes, heedless and negligent toward their God. So also those to whom, through a long series of years, the vicissitudes of things have been carefully weighed — so far are they from understanding and fearing the manifold providence of God therefrom, that by a native vice, namely the blindness of the mind and the wickedness of the heart, they sink even into atheism. From this has arisen the proverb: “No old man fears Jupiter.” But these vices of certain men are not to be attributed to human nature itself. Noble indeed are the words of Aristotle as quoted by Cicero in On the Nature of the Gods, lib. ii., though it is uncertain from which work they are taken, for they nowhere appear in his own writings. “If there were,” he says, “people who had always dwelt beneath the earth, in fine and well-lit habitations adorned with statues and paintings and furnished with all the things that those who are counted blessed possess in abundance, yet had never gone above ground; but had received by report and hearsay that there is a certain divine power and force of the gods; and if then at some time the jaws of the earth opened and they were able to escape from those hidden dwellings into the regions we inhabit and to come forth; when they suddenly saw the earth and the seas and the sky; when they perceived the greatness of the clouds and the force of the winds; when they looked upon the sun and came to know both its greatness and its beauty and also its power, that it causes the day by flooding the whole sky with light; and when night had darkened the lands and they saw the whole sky adorned and distinguished with stars, and the varying phases of the moon, now waxing now waning, and the risings and settings of all these, and their courses fixed and unchangeable throughout all eternity — when they saw these things, they would surely judge both that the gods exist and that these great works are the works of the gods.” To which many things may be added from what Cicero himself argues in that same place. The sum is this: that there exists some preeminent and eternal nature which the human race is compelled to look up to and admire — the beauty of the world and the order of celestial things compel us to confess it; which are the words of the same Cicero in the second book On Divination.

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Chapter 6.

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The sufficiency of natural theology for salvation is examined; it is proved by various arguments to be insufficient — The doctrine of this theology is imperfect, and its disposition likewise — A digression on universal grace and the will of God to save those who lack the word.

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I. Such being the knowledge of God, and resting upon those means by which it flourished and still flourishes among sinful men destitute of supernatural revelation, let us examine further whether those who were or are imbued with it could thereby attain their ultimate end, so that it might still seem to deserve the name of true theology. A doctrine's sufficiency, with respect to God and His supreme judgment upon men, can be twofold: the one leading to inexcusability, the other to salvation. The apostle ascribes the former to this knowledge, Rom. i. 20, while we assert it to be unequal to the latter. For: — 1. All those ages in which the greater part of mortals lived without heavenly revelation are called “times of ignorance,” Act. xvii. 30. God, as it were, winked at these, permitting the nations to walk in their own ways, Act. xiv. 16, not proclaiming to them that they should repent. Through that ignorance they were all without exception alienated from the life of God, Eph. iv. 18, so that, as regards special grace and love, there was no communion between them and God. 2. Furthermore, all the knowledge of which men in that condition could become partakers pertained to the law; but the law itself does not suffice for this, nor can a knowledge of the law suffice — especially one that is imperfect. An imperfect knowledge of a most absolute and perfect law profits not a whit with respect to its end. But the apostle shows at length that the law itself is unequal to this task — namely, that anyone should please God — in Rom. iii. and iv. 3. Also, “without faith it is impossible to please Him,” Heb. xi. 6; but “faith is from hearing, and hearing through the word of God,” Rom. x. 17. 4. “This is eternal life, that they (men) may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent,” Joh. xvii. 3. “And there is salvation in no one else,” Act. iv. 12. But since the promise of Christ was made only after the fall — in which God’s mercy toward the human race first appeared — and all knowledge of God among men apart from special revelation is but that fragment which the first parents possessed in the state of integrity, it is utterly impossible that any knowledge of Christ, whose entire knowledge is from hearing, should flow from it. 5. This entire body of knowledge, however great it may have been, served only the covenant of works; and so, when that covenant was rendered void through sin, it could direct men to no obedience except out of fear of punishment. But, as Augustine aptly says, “whoever keeps a commandment from fear of punishment, not from love of righteousness, does not in his heart do what he does in deed, and is therefore inwardly guilty of sin, however innocent he may appear to himself.”

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II. There are therefore two elements in the theology of fallen man: 1. The internal light still remaining, which is as it were the faculty of theology, or its power; and 2. The revelation of God through the works of creation and providence, which, considered objectively, is as it were the theology itself, or its doctrine. We do not venture to ascribe to either of these, with respect to the ultimate end, the efficacy of theology unto salvation. For we are obliged to convict the first of imperfection both with respect to the doctrine it reveals — which, not exceeding the scope of the law, as we have said, contains nothing akin to the knowledge of Christ — and also with respect to the manner of perceiving divine things, by which its efficacy is circumscribed; since, as the minds of men are thoroughly overshadowed by darkness and blindness, that manner cannot be spiritual. To the other also we ascribe the same defects, since it neither presents the impression of all absolutely necessary doctrine, nor puts forth the efficacy by which saving light can be poured into a blind understanding; for Jesus Christ alone brought life and immortality to light, and that through the gospel, 2 Tim. i. 10.

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III. Those who maintain that the revelation of the divine mind — and therefore of our obedience — through the works of creation and providence is grounded in a general will to save all men are compelled, beyond being forced to ascribe to God useless desires, imperfect purposes, and an inefficacious intention which He either will not or cannot make efficacious — a mercy that never, nowhere manifests itself — also to employ such distinctions, and to confine their assertion within such limits, that they are obliged to acknowledge that this revelation has never been, and never could be, of any saving use to any mortal. For just as the separation of this revelation from the delusions by which the prince of darkness has in wondrous ways mocked the wretched little men bound to himself — a separation which they themselves contend is necessary — cannot take place without the light of the word, so also that removal of darkness, blindness, and prejudices from the minds of men — without which all revelation must necessarily fall to no effect — cannot be secured without the special operation of the Holy Spirit.

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ON UNIVERSAL GRACE, or a Dissertation on the Sufficiency of Natural Theology in the State of Sin for Salvation.

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I. Since there is not the same opinion among all on these matters, it pleases me to take them up somewhat more fully, and to submit the opinion of certain very learned men to examination, as it were in passing. That this manifestation of God not only suffices for salvation to sinful men, but also that

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the sinners themselves are endowed with a power by which they can so use that manifestation as at length to attain salvation in fact — this the Pelagians formerly maintained, and nearly the entire nation of the Arminians has gone over to their opinion. It is not my present purpose to engage with them. They have enough in the writings of ancient and more recent authors to exercise themselves with for a long time. But a certain part of this controversy has lately begun to be agitated among brethren. The projectile has been pleased to be called “universal grace.” It seems, moreover, that the hinge of this dispute turns not on truth alone, but among some also on fraternal charity. Such is the manner of living among Christians unmindful of gentleness — indeed, of human frailty. Neither the nature of evangelical grace, which demands the duty required, nor mercy toward the weak human condition, that we should bear with equanimity those who differ with us in minor points of opinion, advances matters at all. We acknowledge that the best of men know only in part; but we are unwilling to admit that any of the saints have been so perfectly transformed into the light of God through the renewing of the mind as to be overshadowed by no remnants of darkness, subject to no errors. Yet everyone judges that this ought to be said of all others, but not of himself. For when it comes to the matter itself and examination, there is no man who does not conduct himself as if he were so thoroughly a possessor of the best faith and all truth that it would scarcely be fair for anyone who dares to differ from him to enjoy this common light. The difference, however, between the boldness of truth and its power is this: the former only illumines the mind with knowledge of the truth and, as it were, compels it to give assent to evangelical doctrine; the latter, over and above this, also imprints its pattern upon the whole soul and renders the mind itself in all things conformable to it.

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II. That no small time ago certain learned men in Belgium had contentions and quarrels with some of better reputation in France on this matter is known to no learned man who takes care to know the affairs of religion and of the churches of Christ. To narrate the occasions, the origin, and the progress of that controversy as it has been agitated among them for some years now, since through published exercises, observations, apologies, and vindications it has been more than sufficiently spread abroad, would be nothing other than to waste one’s labor. For no one can spend his effort more unprofitably than in bringing to light things that are already too well known of themselves, and which it would have been better had they never become known at all. Certainly, weariness of peace or of fraternal charity has not so seized me that I would wish to thrust myself rashly and importunately into the midst of a conflict agitated by various movements of the passions arising from things that are truly of the burden of debt; I have other things to attend to. But if I candidly set forth what I myself think on that part of this controversy which is not other than our present undertaking — indeed so bound up with it that unless the doubt regarding it is resolved, I can scarcely safely proceed on the path I have set — I hope it will be burdensome or troublesome to no one.

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III. I could indeed have wished that those most learned men, with greater mildness, and

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with a zeal for Christian meekness, and with less arrogance (pardon the expression) and less self-assertion, to have entered upon this arena. For I fear that before fair

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and impartial judges, free from partisan zeal, those excuses which they perhaps intend to offer — as if they could have dispensed with these things without the slightest loss to the opinion they hold to be true, or to their reputation — will suffice. For what? Does it make no difference with what design, or in what disposition of mind, we approach sacred matters

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to be handled? Or can we believe that the Holy Spirit — without whose special help and guidance we can begin nothing at all in a godly manner, nor bring anything to a happy conclusion (for that something which we seem to accomplish by our own powers is in reality nothing) — is willing to involve Himself when our souls’ affections are inflamed, or our minds are hindered by anger, hatred, revenge, or the desire for fame, by which He is most heavily burdened? Must we not strive with all our might, lest, while we have proclaimed the truth to others, we ourselves become, so far as its heralds are concerned, reprobate? Since it is most certain that no one has ever been able truly to perceive the divine truth as it is in Jesus

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except the one who has denied himself from the very depths of his heart, and has set aside, to the best of his ability, all arrogance and all prejudices — how can we expect others to be taught by us that truth whose power we ourselves do not so experience as to be given over to its use? For such is the nature of all gospel doctrine, flooding our minds with its native light, that it makes us meek and humble, and most like its own Author; namely, the wisdom that is from above: “First indeed it is pure, then peaceable, equitable, compliant, full of mercy and good fruits, without disputing, and without hypocrisy,” Jacob. iii. 17.

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IV. But those on the other side who would wish to bring their dissenting brethren into danger of peace or of reputation before their churches — let them do so without me as a rival. To deprive learned and godly men, ministers of churches, and rectors of schools, of the liberty of their own judgment in controversies of this kind, and in the whole exercise of their office to put them under the yoke of prescribed opinions, would be nothing other than to introduce intolerable tyranny into the church of Christ. Nor indeed would I expect from that quarter either any notable progress of truth, or the building up in love of those who profess the truth, where the dispensers of the divine word are compelled, like abject slaves, to be of another’s will in all their work. Neither the principle of the institution of the gospel ministry, nor the nature of the gospel itself or of faith, nor the distinctions of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, nor brotherly charity, nor the edification of the church, nor the condition of the light of which we have been made partakers in this life, nor the innumerable divine precepts, nor the guidance of grace which we experience, would bear the imposition of such a burden. But how greatly that opinion of those who seek domination over their brethren — that no divergence of views in matters which do not immediately pertain to the foundation of faith ought to be tolerated — has afflicted the Christian cause almost everywhere for a long time now, is better known than to require our narration.

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V. With these premises laid down, let us subject to consideration that thesis which some oppose to our position on the total insufficiency of corrupted natural theology for salvation. It is this: that God wills that adults who lack His word should be saved. Whether those who ponder seriously within themselves what it means to be saved, and what it means to lack the word of God, will readily give assent to that proposition, I very earnestly doubt. Let partisan zeal be set aside for a moment; let consideration of the connection this thesis has with other opinions be set aside; the matter will be plain. Let the disputants take care lest they clash with syllogisms against that communion which they themselves have graciously obtained with God through Jesus Christ in matters of eternal salvation, and perhaps these controversies will be stilled.

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VI. Now the will of God concerning the salvation of those to be saved either regards the end and outcome, and is called intention, purpose, or decree; or it regards the means which those must use who would be saved, and is called a precept. But in what sense God wills to be saved those who in fact will never be saved, whom He willingly permits to walk in their own ways — in which it is altogether impossible that they should be saved — whom He does not call to repentance by that means, nor wishes to call, by which alone it is possible for anyone to be called to true repentance: that, I confess, is my dullness, that I cannot understand. For He who grants only those means of salvation which are able to reveal neither who the author of salvation is, nor through whom it is to be obtained, nor what that salvation is, seems rather to be said to be unwilling for the salvation of those to whom He grants those means, than willing. If to those who, instructed with spiritual perception and relying on the help and assistance of all salvific means — even of the Holy Spirit Himself, poured out abundantly through Jesus Christ — know what it is to serve God in the midst of temptations, so that they at last obtain salvation by His ineffable benefit of grace, being placed outside the ropes of contention, this dispute were to be referred for decision, its estimation would prove easy.

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VII. Whoever would survey in his mind those parts of the world that are still without the word, and would behold the condition, with respect to eternal salvation, of the miserable people living out their lives in them, will without doubt hang in suspense of mind at that will of God which certain learned men proclaim. They will contend, I know, that the most dreadful condition of those people is to be ascribed solely to their own wickedness; nor do I absolutely deny that this must be so. But I do deny that their wickedness exceeds that of all those with whom, because He wills them to be saved, God has graciously shared His word. In what sense, then, God is to be said to will the salvation of those who will never be saved and to whom He is unwilling to supply the means necessary for salvation, is a matter too entangled and one that resists easy explanation.

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VIII. Some assert: “The word can be preached to them, but this does not happen because of our negligence and sloth.” That the gospel can indeed be preached even to those to whom it is not preached, no one doubts. For what contradiction would seem to arise from the thing itself? But that it can happen, with respect to the outcome, that which God from eternity willed not to happen — that has not yet been proved. That it is not actually preached to many, nor ever was preached in former times, Scripture ascribes to the will of God, Ps. cxlvii. 19, 20; Matt. xi. 26; Act. xvi. 6, 7. It does not appear that this comes to pass from our negligence and sloth. And yet, even if it were so, the difficulty would not be removed. For no one doubts that God could, if He wished, take away that sloth from us. But negligence and sloth have no place except where there is duty; and all our duty depends on the will of God calling us to duty. But how will they teach that we are called by God to the duty of preaching the gospel to those who have hitherto lacked it in various parts of the world? Let us grant to learned men that no ecclesiastical mission is needed to discharge that office. For who is furnished with that universal authority to send others in such a way? But I should like to know what that providence of God is which makes us so certain of His will that we could undertake that work in faith; or who are those equipped with the gifts needed to perform it rightly. I confess that we are all of us far too negligent and slothful in administering that province in the work of the gospel which God has graciously committed to us — and we are all of us guilty of this charge; but that our guilt of sloth extends so far that it must also be imputed to it that the gospel has not been preached to the inhabitants of America, I, at least, who am immune from all the heat of disputes, cannot believe. IX. But it is worth looking more deeply into the opinion of those most learned men. For first they concede that no “Pagan, apart from the preaching of the word, either did or could have made such use of the testimonies of God set before him from nature or from the works of providence, as to repent and obtain salvation.” Thus speak certain most celebrated men; and in this matter they show themselves to differ most widely from all Pelagians, from most Arminians, and also from certain insolent revilers here among us. And why indeed could not the whole estimation of this entire dispute be made here? Have we nothing else of greater importance in ourselves than to spend time disputing whether that can happen which never has happened, which will never happen, indeed, which God has purposed within Himself never to happen? But this is another matter, as we shall see.

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X. They add, therefore, that “such aids have been given to the Pagans which, in themselves and from themselves, lead to some degree of saving knowledge.” So speaks a most learned man of great renown in theology. But every degree of saving knowledge is itself saving. And all saving knowledge consists in the knowledge of the covenant of grace. Unless, therefore, that degree of saving knowledge which can be obtained through those aids is more plainly set forth, I may be permitted to declare that I can neither grasp nor understand that degree. Even the least degree of saving knowledge requires a saving renewal of the mind. That there should be any degree of saving knowledge in a blind mind is impossible. For saving knowledge consists in the renewal of that mind. But where there is renewal of the mind, there is the Spirit

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of Holiness, who alone works and produces it. Those aids, therefore, which lead to some degree of saving knowledge also lead to the obtaining of the Holy Spirit, the renewal of the mind, and true faith. But Scripture everywhere teaches that this work is peculiar to the gospel. If, however, by “saving knowledge” only saving doctrine is intended, and not the renewal of the mind, then the meaning of that assertion is that these aids lead sinful men to the doctrine of the gospel, or at least to some degree of it. Whether this is true, we shall examine later.

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XI. We are indeed now in such a state that unless we know Jesus Christ, whom God sent, and God in Him reconciling the world to Himself, we are unable to attain eternal life. But all that knowledge of God which sinful men can acquire without the word from the works of creation and providence is only a knowledge of God as creator and governor of all things; concerning redemption there is the deepest silence. But they object: “If these things are correct, they result in this — that even if a man be supposed, by way of an impossible hypothesis, to be well and dutifully occupied in the school of nature, and to bring all his power of understanding to bear on examining and learning what he hears or sees there, he can nevertheless draw from these documents nothing other than this one thing: that God is supremely holy, supremely just, supremely powerful, and supremely wise, who founded and governs this universe; that he himself is a sinner guilty of violating the divine law, and therefore subject to heavenly wrath, most certainly to be afflicted with death and the curse without any hope of pardon; and thus God must set all these things before men with the intent that they learn that they are certainly and infallibly condemned, and that no place is left to them either for salvation or for repentance that might help them.” But this argument errs in many ways, and this is what happens when the matter is handled out of partisan zeal rather than with fairness and equity. For if learned men are permitted to assume whatever they please, whether it be possible or impossible, so as to infer from it whatever they wish, no one can prevent them. And if I am unwilling to grant what plainly ought not to be granted, because it tacitly includes a begging of the question, the entire argument immediately collapses. Besides, who ever said that this one thing alone is taught through the works of God? More things can be taught, yet in such a way that Christ is not taught; His works teach that this God is to be supremely loved and worshipped, namely because they teach that He is God. There are also other heads of a corrupt natural theology, as we shall show. Furthermore, those who affirm that God reveals Himself through His works so that men might know Him as creator, ruler, and governor of all things, most powerful, most holy, and most just, do not say — nor, if they wish to be consistent, can they say — that He sets before men all the documents in the works of nature and providence with the intent that they learn that they are certainly condemned. But you will say that, according to their view, sinful men can learn nothing else as regards their eternal salvation — so be it! You will not quickly show that anything harmful arises from this position. For what? Will someone bring suit against God

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because He is just, and cannot but be just? Or is an accusation to be brought against Him because men are sinners and cannot be ignorant of His justice — namely, that those who have committed sins are worthy of death? Or because they have wickedly departed from that state in which they could have received saving things from His revelation? But does He not set forth His sparing mercy — which is in the covenant of grace — through the works of creation and providence? What then? Does the very law of God, which contains a far clearer manifestation of God than those other aids and documents of which we are speaking, declare that mercy? Or will any mortal dare to lay this charge against the law of God? Does not the apostle everywhere argue that through the law comes the knowledge of sin, but not of a remedy? Granted, therefore, that a man were rightly and diligently performing his duty in the school of the law, yet he can learn nothing there other than that he is a sinner and is certainly to be condemned. Is the law therefore sin? Or is God unjust who gave it? May it not be so! And yet as many as are of the works of the law are under a curse. XII. But they will say: “God grants this manifestation of Himself to men with the mind and will not that they should despise it, but that they might rightly use it for the knowledge of sin, repentance, and worship of God, in accordance with the nature of these things.” That it should ever have entered any mortal’s mind, even in a dream, that God sets His documents before men with the mind and will that they should be despised, I very much doubt. But that He sets forth the works of His providence to those who lack the word with the mind and will that they might rightly use them for repentance — which He well knows they will never do, as the learned men with whom we have to do also know — will scarcely gain credence among those who, by the grace of God, do not lack the word. Nor would those very learned men so foolishly arrange their own rules. Furthermore, they do not teach with sufficient accuracy what they understand by the mind and will of God in this matter; but of that later. XIII. Some have asserted that the hinge of this controversy lies in the question of “whether in the works of nature and providence any gentleness and placability of God toward sinful men has been made manifest.” But, with their leave, I would say that this matter stands very differently. We acknowledge that some gentleness of God toward sinful men is manifested through the works of providence. “For with much gentleness He bears vessels of wrath fitted for destruction.” But that gentleness is not the one which consists in a sparing mercy, the effect of which is the remission of sins. Yet without the knowledge of this mercy it is impossible for anyone to arrive at saving repentance. Furthermore, there is no mention here of the will of God, and it is solely about that will that the question is asked — not about the nature of things themselves, nor about whether any degree of saving knowledge can be obtained from this manifestation; though I am not disinclined to address those matters as well. But I almost marvel that godly and learned men, translated from darkness into the wonderful light of Christ, who have purified their souls by obeying the truth through the Spirit, should be able to speak so meagerly and languidly about saving knowledge of the sparing divine mercy.

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But in examining the words of learned men, it is not necessary for me to trouble them further. I know that I have been carried away by no partisan zeal in this cause, and that I am sworn to the words of no master or synod; I will therefore set forth the state of the controversy as faithfully as I can. First, however, I will present those things in which the parties agree; then the disputed points. I will perhaps speak of the whole matter more briefly than so great a subject deserves, but, for our purpose, I hope, clearly enough; for I take no pleasure in speaking copiously and grandly on a matter in which I can think only humbly and modestly.

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XIV. It is conceded, therefore:—

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1. That there is some natural knowledge of God, or theognōsian, which we have explained above.

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2. That through the works of creation and providence a revelation of the eternal power and deity of God as creator and ruler of all things has been made.

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3. Whatever men know about God, or are able to know by virtue of the revelation granted to them, they ought to use all of it to this end: that they worship and love Him, that they glorify God, and that they show themselves obedient to Him in all things.

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4. That no one among the pagans, on account of their native blindness and malice, and the cunning of the devil ensnaring them on every side with corrupt superstitions and wicked idolatries, has submitted himself to the authority of God, or has complied with it according to the measure of the knowledge of Him which he had or could have had — and that therefore all of them are utterly without excuse.

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5. That Christ the Mediator is not revealed through these means — not, at least, to such a degree that He could be savingly apprehended by those who have obtained only these means.

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6. That the revelation of Christ the Mediator through the gospel is absolutely necessary for obtaining salvation.

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7. That beyond every external revelation of God and His will, of whatever kind and by whatever means it may have been given, there is need of the efficacious power of the Holy Spirit flooding the mind with saving light, so that one may understand spiritual things spiritually, to the glory of God and one's own eternal salvation.

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8. That God has not purposed within Himself from eternity that any of those to whom He grants no means of salvation other than the works of nature and providence should be saved. Concerning all these things there is scarcely any question among the orthodox.

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XV. The hinge of the entire controversy therefore appears to turn on these two questions; for it is asked,—

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First, "Whether that manifestation of God which He grants through the works of nature and providence to sinners destitute of the word contains within itself any degree of truly saving knowledge, under whose guidance they might arrive at true and God-pleasing repentance and attain eternal salvation."

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Second, "Whether God grants this manifestation of Himself with such mind and will" (that is, with such purpose and intention) "that those to whom it is

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granted" (as it is granted to absolutely all men) "may come to true repentance and such as is pleasing to God, and may thus attain eternal salvation, even though they lack the word." That is: both the sufficiency of the means and the intention of God with respect to the salvation of those who lack the word fall under controversy.

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XVI. It seemed fitting to subject briefly to examination certain arguments drawn from the Scriptures that appear in the writings of some in this controversy. The first is derived from the Pauline words we cited earlier, from Acts 17:24-26, to which they add certain passages from ch. 14:16. From these passages, they say, it is established that “God performs all His works in nature and in the governance of nature with the design that sinful men might seek and find Him” — and they affirm that Paul testifies this most explicitly. But this affirmation scarcely touches the state of the controversy, let alone resolves it. It remains for us to see what it is by which they attempt to establish the credibility of their position from these passages, and then how they weave together their proofs.

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XVII. First, therefore, after they have established that God administered the aforesaid aids to men destitute of the word with the design that they might seek and find Him, they conclude that all things necessary to be known in order that God might be sought and found are contained in those aids. “To seek God,” they say, “is not to investigate whether He exists, but to take refuge in faith in Him, and to seek the aid of His grace. And to find God is to obtain and secure the aid thus sought, and to experience His most holy majesty as propitious and benevolent.” In reply: to take refuge in the faith of God is to trust in God; those who do this are blessed, Ps. 2:12; to seek the aid of God’s grace includes self-denial and resignation to God’s grace, which always produces justification, Luke 18:13, 14. And this is to experience God’s most holy majesty as propitious and benevolent — which has never befallen anyone except in the remission of sins. And so by these interpretations of Paul’s words they appear to intend saving faith in God, living and efficacious faith unto salvation. XVIII. But how enormously they expand the proposed thesis at this point! Perhaps those who argue thus feel that they have advanced beyond their hopes in the argument, so that they cannot restrain themselves enough to remain within the limits of the question as they themselves have commonly stated it. For what follows? Is it to be judged, on the opinion of the most eminent men, that the manifestation of God through the works of providence contains all things necessary to be known, so that sinful men might flee to God with the full trust of their soul, experience Him as propitious, worship Him, and believe in Him? Why, then, do these same learned men deny that those works of providence reveal Christ? Or why do they assert that the knowledge of Christ is necessary for attaining living faith and salvation? Indeed, if the matter stands thus, what need is there of the word? Or in what sense shall we say that Christ brought life and immortality to light through the gospel?

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XIX. Since the matter has come to this point, let us see how they attempt to establish this position from this passage. The entire force of the argument used by the learned men depends on the construction of the apostolic period and on the sense of the words “seeking and finding” God. They prove the mind and counsel of God from the structure of those words; namely, that Paul used “to seek the Lord” in the sense of “for the purpose of seeking” — in order, that is, to declare the mind of God as He sets forth His works to sinful men — this being, as they affirm, an idiom familiar to the Greeks. And they prove that “to seek God” must be taken in no other sense than the one they have expounded, adducing all the passages of the Old Testament in which seeking and finding God is mentioned.

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XX. And so the most learned men conduct their case. But whether they have attained the mind of the Holy Spirit or the force of Paul’s argument, a brief exposition of the occasion and sense of the apostle’s words will make plain. Paul, being in Athens and provoked in spirit because he saw that city full of idols (Acts 17:16), could not restrain himself from at once — contrary to what he seems at first to have resolved — publicly setting forth and declaring the living God in opposition to all those vain idols, under the religion of which that most superstitious city was held captive. And when this had been proposed to him, he employs an argument most ready and most powerful, drawn from the creation and governance of all things. Moreover, that which would bind the idolaters themselves most closely he teaches: that they are utterly destitute of every excuse for the worship of idols, since those very works of God which were set before them daily clearly pointed to their Author — that God exists, and that He is supreme, good, wise, powerful, and everywhere present — so that it would be nothing less than the height of madness to wish to be ignorant of Him whom they could not be thoroughly ignorant of. Indeed, he says, this living God, the Creator and Ruler of all, sets forth His works of nature and providence before the consideration of all, with the design that they might seek their Author through those aids, if perhaps by groping they might find Him; and so those who, abandoning Him — or casting Him aside into the last place as unknown — who alone both is and can be known, turn themselves in religious devotion to things that either do not exist and never have existed anywhere, or are vain and foolish, cannot but be without excuse and self-condemned.

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XXI. The apostle therefore proves that the gods of the Gentiles are vain idols, and that He, the true and living God, the one and only Creator and Ruler of this world, had so exposed Himself to them that they could most easily and without difficulty have come to know Him through a careful consideration of His works, which He set before them daily. If, therefore, they had given their minds to this, and had sought — through the aids of knowledge of Him which He supplied to them in abundance — that God whom they could not deny to be what He ought to be recognized as, they would certainly have found Him, since He was not far from them, and they would not have turned to dumb idols and vanities. For the apostle’s words are not to be extended beyond the subject matter and the occasion of the discourse.

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XXII. Let us further consider what those apostolic words mean, as

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“they should seek the Lord, if perhaps by groping they might find Him,” insofar as

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they appear to regard the counsel and will of God. But since the Athenians with whom the apostle had to deal were most superstitious idolaters, it is apparent that the actual outcome is not intended by those words, nor any particular purpose of the divine will with respect to them — since God is not lacking either in power or in wisdom to execute His purposes. It is certain that those words denote the very nature and character of the things themselves; and accordingly, that counsel of the divine mind by which He willed to set those things before all men so that they might be external sufficient means — that is, in their own kind — for attaining that proposed end, namely, that they might seek and find the Creator and Ruler of all. That God therefore, with this mind and will, sets forth the works of nature and providence before men destitute of the word, so that following their guidance they might seek and find their Author and the Ruler of all, having forsaken the false gods and the entire filth of idolatry which the blindness of the human mind and the cunning of the devil had brought into the world — and beyond this, nothing more seems able to be gathered from those passages. Indeed, the apostle in reality says nothing about the will and counsel of God in creating and governing the world. He proves that the Gentiles were able to arrive at that knowledge of Him which we set out above, through the bare consideration of the works set before them. But concerning the placability of God, the remission of sins, the bosom of mercy, invocation and prayers, saving repentance, the pursuit of holy and upright living — which no one can have without faith — and many other things of that kind which certain learned men strive to extract from these passages, there is a profound silence. XXIII. But let us see how the learned men strive to prove their thesis from these words of the apostle. First, therefore, they affirm that Paul said “to seek the Lord” in the sense of “for the purpose of seeking”; but since no necessity or reason compels that interpretation of the apostolic speech, it must be judged to have been said gratuitously. But there is no need at all to raise a dispute about that phrase. Let us therefore concede to the learned men, that they may use their right, in detaching these words from their proper place which they occupy in the apostolic discourse, Acts 17:27, and applying them to other words of the same apostle found in ch. 14:16 — if only they have the right to proceed in this way. Let us also grant that “the seeking” must be taken in the same sense as “to dwell” is used in the preceding verse; and that up to this point it denotes the counsel of God in creating and governing the world, insofar, namely, as this world by its nature is fitted to manifest Him. What then would follow? Namely, that “if perhaps they might grope for Him and find Him” must be expounded in the same manner; and so would denote the same intention or will of God. But what of this, I ask? Namely, “if perhaps” and “thus” are taken in the place of “in order that” and “that.” But whether this is always the case, or only sometimes — I do not think the learned men will say it is always so, since they are able to produce but a single example where “thus” seems capable of being taken in that way; concerning “if perhaps” they are silent. “If perhaps” perhaps occurs in this one place alone in the New Testament; “if” and “if perhaps” more frequently, as in Acts 7:1, 8:30, 2 Cor. 5:3, Gal. 1:4, Eph. 3:2, 4:21, Col. 1:28, which may serve as examples. Let the reader try whether from any one of those passages he can extract that sense and use of these particles. Concerning “thus” there is no need for us to be anxious, nor need we inquire carefully what Eustathius has set forth about its use, since it is not found in our text. But it is difficult to believe that the apostle, by words that denote the utmost uncertainty, expounded the mind, counsel, and will of God. The meaning of this passage is that God, in creating and governing the world, gave such proofs of His power and divinity that through them men were able to be stirred to seek the Creator of all, as well as to try their strength in finding Him and distinguishing Him from all idols. For God, who is incorporeal and invisible, so left, as it were, His footprints in these works that by cleaving to them He can be found.

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XXIV. But some think they have found firmer support for their cause in the sense of the words “seeking and finding.” It cannot be denied that those media of the knowledge of God of which we are treating are at least in some respect sufficient for seeking and perhaps finding God in the manner of which the apostle speaks; for otherwise the apostle must be judged unjust in having demanded this from those who had no other media. But they affirm that “to seek God and to find Him is not simply to investigate so that men may know that He exists and what He is” (although those words seem to express nothing else), “but to take refuge in faith in Him, to rest in Him, to worship Him in invocation and prayers, to embrace Him with the full trust of the soul, and to experience Him as propitious; and accordingly that those media supplied to all are sufficient for these ends and were destined by God to be so sufficient” — namely, for men destitute of the word. But since those words, if they are used in no other sense than that in which they are employed in Holy Scripture (nor indeed is it fitting for a theologian to use any words in a sense that departs from the one rule and norm of our thinking and speaking about sacred things), complete the whole work of saving faith, and thus would equal those media with the very word of God, which He “has magnified above all His name,” as regards the thing itself — they will no doubt concede that they need the most powerful arguments and proofs to establish that paradox. To confirm their interpretation of these words, therefore, some bring forward all the passages of the Old Testament in which seeking and finding God is mentioned; and they affirm that those words in those passages cannot be taken in any other sense than the one they have expounded. And they assert that the sense of those words in this passage is not to be doubted. That it is not to be doubted is easy to say; but I not only doubt it, I judge it to be plainly most false; nor can I sufficiently marvel how it can come into anyone’s mind to assert it.

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XXV. For in all those passages holy Scripture speaks of

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the covenanted people of God; but this passage speaks only of those who were strangers to the promises of the covenants. In those passages it speaks of those who were actually, or at least by profession, believers; in this one, of idolaters. In those passages it speaks of those who knew God and had rejected idols; in this one, of those to whom He was entirely unknown. In those passages the subject is seeking and finding the favor of a known God through Christ; in this one, it is seeking God through the works of nature and providence so that He might be known. In those passages the subject is a known God who, on account of sin, had for a moment turned away in His outward dispensations, and the promise of finding Him propitious in Christ; in this one, it is seeking an unknown God and distinguishing Him from idols. Are we then to suppose that these words, and others in the same sense, are spoken of the same persons — namely, of those who, being the covenanted people of God, believers, justified in Christ, instructed by the word, resting on the promises of the gospel, had need to seek the face and favor of God — and of those who, destitute of the word and of all revelation of Christ, exiles from the divine covenant, wanderers in the world, had only the works of nature and providence set before them so that they might know that God exists and that their own vain idols were not God? Nay, far be from every pious mind even the slightest suspicion of this kind.

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XXVI. Nor is it said absolutely of those whom the apostle convicts of negligence and sloth for not considering the works of God, that they should seek God, but that they should seek Him in a particular manner — namely, “if haply they might feel after Him and find Him.” Whether this can be said of those saints mentioned in the Old Testament who, resting on the most certain promises of God in Christ, were accustomed to draw near to Him, I leave to the reader to judge. It is therefore one thing to seek the favor and grace of God revealed through His word, by virtue of His promises in Christ; it is quite another thing to seek an unknown God in the works of nature and providence, “if haply He might be found by groping.”

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XXVII. Now since all theologians who follow what they call the new method think that the strongest support of their cause lies in a certain placability of God which they assert is manifest in the works of providence, it will perhaps not be unprofitable if, returning to this matter at somewhat greater depth, I set forth briefly what is to be thought of that placability which in this dispute practically fills every page, and what the nations themselves, destitute of the word, understood concerning it. Moreover, since that placability meets us everywhere in the arguments of these most distinguished men, whatever I say to remove it from its position, doing so concisely, can be counted as gain.

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XXVIII. We have already described above the state and condition, with respect to the knowledge of God, of sinful men destitute of the word. We have also shown what natural faculty of knowing God, spontaneously exercising itself in adults, and what common notions they retained in that state. And we have likewise demonstrated at length that those innate notions concerning God can be nurtured, increased, and drawn out through the contemplation of the works of providence. Indeed, this mode of knowing God would have sufficed abundantly for men in the state of integrity to render all due obedience and to obtain the reward of obedience. But by the entrance of sin it was so disturbed that sinners hang suspended in uncertain minds and cannot derive from it any clear rational basis for worshipping God. On the one hand, they could not but apprehend God as good, bountiful, patient, and gentle — a quality also connatural to man. On the other hand, held tightly by the consciousness of sin and by the sense of divine wrath and indignation, that is, of punitive justice, they were distracted by anxious care and various thoughts, and necessarily wavered to and fro in the greatest uncertainty. For if on the one hand some hope ever shone upon them, so that they seemed to themselves to know what they might expect from the goodness and bounty of God, on the other hand a despair mingled with terror immediately rendered all the plans previously undertaken forever uncertain, so that they were utterly consumed by the loss of all hope — convicted by their own hearts — Heb. i. 15.

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XXIX. Now the works of providence set before them served, as it were, as hostile aid to both these opposing presumptions that warred diametrically in the minds of sinners. For when they weighed the rains and the appointed seasons given from heaven for bringing forth fruits, and other benefits on account of which they solemnly called the divine power most good, they were accustomed to be of confident spirit, to call all things good, to celebrate the author of those benefits, and to adorn Him with wonderful words. But when they also observed the wrath of God against the impiety and unrighteousness of men manifesting itself from heaven, they could not but feel that all the hope with which they had falsely flattered themselves was immediately done away.

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XXX. Nor do I speak merely of what is wont to happen in such a state, since it could not have happened otherwise. For that knowledge of God of which we are speaking has regard to His natural attributes, as the apostle everywhere teaches us. The free acts of the divine will do not belong to it, as we shall see. For those attributes are known partly from innate notions and partly from their effects. Of any free act of the divine will there is no natural notion or presumption. Goodness on the one hand, and the punitive justice which goodness necessarily posits on the other, are natural to God. Of these two, there is in all things a certain blending or intermingling. Yet their outward effects are distinct and contrary. All the works of providence seem to be referred respectively to these two sources. There is no one destitute of special revelation who can refer them to any other source. Of those things whose exit is not necessary once their objects are posited, the case is different. But it depends on the most free determination of God that goodness and justice, with respect to their effects, should meet each other and mutually embrace. Unless one should hold that God punishes sin by a necessity of nature, and also remits it by the same necessity. Now it is evident that the placability of which we speak pertains to this; which in God is entirely arbitrary — that is to say, an act of His will

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of the most free kind, if indeed anything of this sort can be assigned to God — for it properly expresses neither any attribute of the divine nature nor any act of His will. Tossed about, therefore, by these contrary forces like blasts of wind, they were driven to contrary extremes according as the one or the other notion prevailed in their minds.

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XXXI. For some, converting the goodness of God into a certain perpetual leniency — which is either a vice or at least situated on the border of vices, and unworthy of the supreme Ruler — utterly cast aside all thoughts of the wrath and severity of God, charging with the most foul crime of superstition those who were touched by any concern or zeal for such thoughts. That very many of the ungodly are of this mind, Scripture testifies, Ps. l. 21, and most of the philosophers pressed along this path, as will be shown later. Meanwhile, others, worn down continually by fear and a certain foreboding of the wrath and vengeance of God, are keenly mocked by Plutarch in his little book on superstition. The sacred page also depicts them, Mic. vi. 6, 7. There were also those who, resting on ancient traditions, suspected that the idols they worshipped were placable and could be propitiated by sacrifices — though the company of philosophers laughed at them. But that the works of providence suggested to them any such placability of the divine power, there is no ground for even the slightest suspicion to arise. If anyone wishes to suspect this, we cannot prevent him, since suspicion lies within each person’s own power; but in this matter it lacks all proof. It is certain that the practice of sacrifice among the nations is to be traced partly to deep-rooted traditions emanating from the ordinances of God, and partly to the pride and cunning of the old serpent, wickedly drawing to himself the worship due to God. For not otherwise did the wisest of the Gentiles account for its origin. We have already taught that the origins of sacrifices are to be assigned solely to the will and most free determination of God; that their knowledge and observance could have flowed to nations destitute of supernatural revelation from any other source than those we have indicated is impossible.

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XXXII. There were those who, in order to free themselves from the snares in which they felt themselves entangled by those contradictory notions they had conceived about God and His nature — notions drawn from the various effects enumerated above — invented for themselves two first principles of all things, two gods: one good, the author of all goodness; the other wicked, the ruler of evils and punishments. Even now this inherited persuasion endures among a large part of the common people of the Americas. For this reason the Tlaxcalans sent ambassadors to inquire of Cortés the Spaniard, who was terrifying them with the horror of his weapons of war, which of the two was God — whether He was the good one, who gives fruits, or the evil one, who delights in human blood — so that they might know how he was to be received. Nor is this persuasion of recent origin; on the contrary, it is very ancient. “Labeo, whom they proclaim most learned in matters of this kind, distinguishes good divine powers from evil divine powers by the difference of worship; he asserts that evil gods are propitiated by slaughters and gloomy supplications, but good gods by glad and joyful services,” as Augustine has it in De Civitate Dei, book 2, chapter 11.

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XXXIII. Nor does it seem unworthy of note that those among the ancient idolaters who appeared to worship the divine power with some greater devotion of soul than other mortals, relying on the deepest persuasion of His wrath and vengeance, always resorted to the horrible method of propitiating the gods — namely, human sacrifice. Let the Carthaginians serve as an example: that they were led among the pagans by the greatest reverence for the divine, Plautus more than sufficiently implies, since he assigns to the character he brings on stage no other speech than one that appears to savor of an unusual sense of religion. Moreover, Punic faith is a proverb of the Romans; and had Hannibal known not only how to conquer but also how to use his victory, the proverb would have had no place — or, on the other side, he would have defiled the very name of Rome with no less disgrace. The abominable sacrifices of these same people are most well known.

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XXXIV. And indeed, among the nations, the matter stood thus. For since from the works of nature nothing at all of God’s placability toward sinners could be made apparent — inasmuch as those works, completed prior to any consideration of sin, were plainly appointed for a different end altogether — and since the works of providence, whatever goodness or patience they made manifest, counterbalanced with the revelation of wrath and indignation; and since the practice of sacrifices was introduced only from a detestable tradition, because most foully corrupted, or by the cunning of Satan; whatever may be said about that placability, it is evident that the nations, destitute of the word of God, were condemned in the darkness of ignorance of all mercy that spares and leads to saving repentance.

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XXXV. Furthermore: every revelation of God pertains to some covenant. Now there are two covenants between God and men — one of works, the other of grace. The means of revelation of which we speak must necessarily belong to one of these. But if they belong to the former, namely that of works, how can they manifest any placability in God? For according to the terms of that covenant, God is not placable. If they are to be referred to the latter, and the works of providence are to be regarded as means of administering the covenant of grace, then they ought to declare not a placable God but a God already appeased, reconciled, and reconciling the world to Himself — if, that is, they are to be considered as proclaiming the truth itself. Therefore the revelation of placability in God belongs neither to the covenant of works nor to the covenant of grace. That is, there is no such revelation at all. The works of providence can indeed reveal the goodness of God, and His patience and longsuffering — which God exercises toward the vessels of wrath — but His placability, not at all. Let the distinguished men therefore consider in what sense they have so repeatedly attributed this placability to God, which, since it can be said to exist in God under no respect whatsoever, can certainly be revealed by no means. If once the heat of disputation has cooled, and a pious soul seriously reflects within itself what it is to deal with God in Christ concerning the forgiveness of sins, reasonings of this kind will be found to vanish more quickly than words.

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XXXVI. Let us proceed to the consideration of the other passage in the same book, namely Acts 14:16, 17, though we have already transferred all the force it might appear to have in this cause to the preceding argument. The words of the apostles to the Lystrans are as follows: “Men, why do you do these things? We also are men, subject to the same passions as you, announcing that you should turn from these vain things to that living God, who made heaven and earth and the sea and all things that are in them; who in past ages permitted all nations to walk in their own ways. Yet He did not leave Himself without witness, bestowing good things, giving us rain and appointed seasons for the bearing of fruits, filling our hearts with food and gladness.” XXXVII. After they had proclaimed the living and true God, the apostles show what His disposition was toward the nations destitute of the word in ages past — that is, throughout all that time in which He left them without His special revelation, before the preaching of the gospel — namely, that “He permitted them to walk in their own ways.” Then they set forth the manner and purpose of the divine dispensations toward those nations thus left behind; for He did not leave Himself without witness. From both parts of this apostolic speech the learned men strive to fortify their position, especially from the latter part. For first they contend that God permitted the nations to walk in their own ways only insofar as no preaching of any prophet or apostle intervened to check their corruption; and then they argue that the testimony which the apostles affirm the true and living God bore to Himself in the works of providence testifies not only that He exists, nor only that He is powerful and wise, but also that He is most good, and indeed good toward sinners, by that kind of goodness and benevolence which is called mercy — Luc. 6:35, 36. From this it follows, they say, that by that testimony God bore to Himself, His placability and goodness toward sinful men was also to some extent made known — without which a sinful man cannot be brought to true repentance and true worship of God.

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XXXVIII. From what we have on the one hand conceded and on the other hand proved above, a fair reader would easily perceive that unless the opponents were to introduce, by legitimate consequence, some mention of the worship of the true God, of repentance, and of placability, they could extract nothing at all from this passage that might appear to favor their cause. But this manner of arguing from the testimonies of Scripture does not commend itself to us — the drawing of strong arguments from the words considered precisely in themselves, while the occasion of the whole speech and the scope of the passage are left aside. We will consider both briefly. XXXIX. When, therefore, the crowd of the Lystrans was astonished at the miracle of the healing of the man who had been lame from birth and had come to suspect that Paul and Barnabas were gods — namely, Jupiter and Mercury — and had induced the priests to offer sacrifice to them, the apostles, disturbed almost as much by their idolatrous madness as that crowd had been struck by the divine power that accompanied them, “tore their garments and rushed into the crowd, crying out and saying, Men, why do you do these things?”

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XL. Now since the crowd was entangled and ensnared in a twofold error, each most pernicious — one being that Jupiter and Mercury were gods with power to work miraculous healings, the other that Paul and Barnabas were that Mercury and Jupiter in disguise — the apostles address both errors. First, to clear their conscience at once, they cry out that they are men, subject to the same passions as the crowd themselves; then they teach that Jupiter and Mercury, and all the worship which the stupefied crowd wished to render them in their names, are vain, fictitious, and impious things; and that they themselves are proclaiming that living God who made heaven and earth. Now it would have been easy for the crowd to object: if such a God exists as you proclaim, and He alone, so that our divine powers have absolutely no place before Him, why is it that we have never heard anything of Him until now, and that He did not see to it that He was proclaimed to us or to our fathers in past ages? In order to meet this deep-rooted prejudice of the whole world of that time — from which the cause of truth, wherever unheard, had been condemned — the apostles teach that this living God, in accordance with the sovereign dominion He holds over all, had in past ages permitted the nations, of whom these Lystrans were a part, to walk in their own ways, that is, in the vanities of idolatry, and had not called them to the knowledge of Himself and to true worship; and they thus allude to the economy of the New Testament (which they knew they would immediately have to contend for even against the Jews), by which, the dividing wall being broken down and every distinction of nations, peoples, and families removed, God calls all without distinction to repentance. But lest they should appear by this speech to have provided the Lystrans with a pretext for excusing themselves — on the ground that they had at least worshiped those idols, since the true God had not been revealed to them, and they could not be obligated to worship one they were entirely ignorant of — the apostles add that correction by which they show that the Lystrans were altogether inexcusable in their idolatry, on account of some revelation of the true God that had been granted to them through His works. For although (they say) it pleased Him to permit the nations to walk in their own ways and not to be called to repentance through His word, yet He always revealed Himself to them through the works of His providence and bore testimony to Himself to this extent: that it was not without grave sin and remarkable folly that they and the other nations, turning away from Him thus revealed, had given themselves over to idols — especially since those very works by which He bore testimony to Himself were of such a kind that from them came all the good things in which the nations participated. XLI. Since, therefore, this is the scope and aim of the apostolic speech — namely, to show that God revealed Himself through the works of providence to this extent in those very times when He permitted the nations to walk in their own ways, so that they had returned to vain idols without any cause and not without the gravest sin — let us see what the learned men attempt to extract from this in support of their cause. They say first, therefore: “These evidences set before the nations testify of God not only that He is wise and powerful, but also that He is most good.” Let it be so; from whoever we receive any benefits, we consider him to be good and beneficent; from whom we receive all things, we consider him to be supremely good. Nor have we ever said that all nations were so utterly stupefied as not to acknowledge the supreme giver of benefits as most good. The contrary is attested by the orator: “You, O Capitoline,” he says, “whom the Roman people for your benefits named ‘Best’ …” — Pro Domo Sua, 57.

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XLII. But these evidences, they say, prove that God is most good toward sinners; and let this also be granted. How far the nations acknowledged God as adverse to themselves on account of sin is not the place to inquire here. But since the apostle himself would not have known sin “unless the law had said, You shall not covet,” Rom. 7:7, it is established that those who were destitute of that law labored under a sufficiently gross ignorance of the nature of sin. Yet let it be granted that the nations knew themselves to be sinners; let us grant that God was good toward those who were convicted of sin — what further seems to follow? Namely, that God is good and gentle and merciful toward sinners. For Christ affirms that this goodness toward sinners is mercy, Luc. 6:35, 36; for after saying “the Most High is gracious toward the ungrateful and the evil,” He immediately adds, “Be therefore merciful, even as your Father is merciful.” God is therefore merciful toward sinners — who denies it? Even toward the ungrateful — who will dispute it? But also toward the perishing — why not? Since we know that He “bears with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted for destruction,” Rom. 9:22. For though He is provoked by them daily, He does not immediately seize them away, but even heaps upon them many benefits, to be demanded back at the appointed time, Hos. 2:9. Moreover, this benignity of God is called mercy in a broad and improper sense, taken for any disposition to do good; so that He is said to be merciful not only toward men but toward all His works — toward sheep and oxen and the other beasts of the field, Ps. 145:9, 15, 16. But that this mercy or benignity, displaying itself in earthly things — that is, in worldly matters — which are for very many an occasion and enticement to sin, is the foundation of true and saving repentance, neither the apostles say, nor is it true, nor can it be proved from their words by the force of any legitimate consequence. Concerning the special mercy from which the forgiveness of sins flows, not a single word is ever spoken in all of Scripture when the condition of those who are destitute of the word of God is set forth; for that mercy is in Christ alone — but the opponents deny that Christ is revealed through the works of providence.

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XLIII. Since, therefore, only that mercy which Jesus Christ set forth from the bosom of the Father is the foundation of saving faith and repentance, we can concede without the slightest prejudice to our cause that the knowledge of the other mercy was set before men through the works of providence; indeed, since we have no cause other than truth alone, we concede it most willingly. Whatever can be added concerning that apostolic correction, “Although He did not leave Himself without witness,” can all be conceded in a sound sense; for God did not permit the nations to walk in their own ways in such a manner as to have cast aside all care and sovereign rule over them. On the contrary, the apostles say, He always bore testimony to Himself through His works to such a degree that it was by no means open to the nations to reject the knowledge of Him and give themselves over to idols.

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XLIV. From this point they proceed as follows: “What Paul said about God having previously allowed the nations to walk in their own ways signifies nothing other than this one thing: that God had up to that point not intervened in the corruption of the nations through the preaching of any prophet or apostle; that He had not deemed the nations worthy of any vocal testimony concerning Himself and His matters, with which honor He had deemed the one nation of the Jews worthy.” But that one thing is a great matter. All the salutary external means of repentance and salvation are contained exclusively in that one thing of which God did not deem the nations worthy, Ps. xix. 4, 9–11; cxlvii. 19, 20. It has not yet been proved that any saving knowledge of God, any calling to repentance, or any saving faith can be obtained from any other source than from that one means. But they proceed: “The following things,” they say, “altogether signify that God always testified among those same nations, by the daily evidences of His nature and providence, what men ought to think of Him, and by what method they ought both to worship His divine majesty and to order the rest of their lives. By the works of nature, the works of creation are meant.” What those works could teach sinners about God that would lead them to repentance — since they teach or can teach nothing other than what was fitted for teaching in the state of integrity — has not yet been established; let us therefore set that aside in this disputation. All hope lies in the works of providence. We acknowledge that these taught the nations what they ought to think of God, insofar namely as God through them disclosed Himself to them. By what reasoning it can be proved that the nations were able to learn from those same teachers the manner in which they should worship His divine majesty and order the rest of their lives — that remains to be shown. Six hundred things of this sort can be asserted without proof. Moreover, even these things are stated far too loosely. Whoever wishes to set forth that method of worshiping God and ordering one’s life by which the nations could have drawn near to God in a saving way will be doing something worth the effort. That God exists; that He is the Creator of all things, their Governor, powerful, wise, and a munificent bestower of temporal benefits; and therefore that idols are vain and the worship of all of them is foolish, absurd, and insane — all this the apostles prove by testimony drawn from the works of God; but concerning the true worship of God and the right ordering of life, there is deep silence among them. Some add: “Since the nations passed by all these warnings with deaf ears and with horrible ingratitude cast away all worship and care for their Creator and Governor, who is both supremely good and supremely great,” the apostle signifies “that God is now calling them back from their empty and pestilential practices by a sharper and clearer voice through the ministry of His apostles.” But in fact the apostles are so far from instituting any comparison between that calling which comes through the gospel and that other calling through the works of providence, that they are utterly silent about the gospel and all its doctrine. Nor indeed is the preaching of the gospel to be placed in the same rank as those evidences which God sets before men from the works of nature, as though it were merely a sharper calling, made with a clearer voice, of the same kind of calling. For that calling which comes through the revelation of that mystery which was hidden from ages and generations, and by which God has made known what are the riches of that glorious mystery, differs immeasurably from that testimony which God bore to Himself as the Governor and munificent Bestower of all things through the works of providence. That other calling, however, is to be called a sharper one made with a clearer voice, which indeed is of the same kind and nature as the former, yet differs from it in degree or in manner of presentation. But since the entire foundation of the evangelical calling is laid in the revelation of God the Father and the Son through the Holy Spirit, and since almost all its power consists in the declaration of forgiveness, reconciliation, and the remission of sins through the blood of the God-man Mediator, and in the efficacious dispensation of the Spirit — all of which things, and others of the same kind that accomplish that calling, were utterly hidden in the bosom of God through the ages and generations during which He allowed men to walk in their own ways, as those destitute of His word — these things in no sense can be equated with the works of providence, those evidences set before men; nor are they to be placed in the same series with them. And I am not a little amazed that those who do not know what it is to repent in a saving way, or what it is to believe in God, can speak in such a manner. XLV. They continue, and in their peroration they conclude this argument as follows: “Since, therefore, that testimony of God which resounds throughout the whole earth contains those things that pertain to recalling the nations from their ways, and to leading them from idolatry to the worship of the one true God, and from crimes and vices to justice and uprightness — it is altogether necessary that through that testimony of God there was also to some extent disclosed His willingness to be appeased and His gentleness toward sinful men; without which it cannot come about that a sinful man is brought to true repentance and true worship of God.” But this speech errs by a manifold recapitulation of the same points. For among the apostles there is no mention at all of the nations being recalled from their ways through that testimony of God resounding throughout the whole earth; on the contrary, they testify that God permitted them to walk in those ways. That the nations could not be recalled from those ways except through the gospel, the apostle clearly enough suggests in this passage and openly teaches elsewhere, Acts xvii. 18; Eph. i. 10; iii. 9–11. It is one thing for God not to have left Himself without witness among the nations; it is another for Him to have recalled them from idolatry to the true worship of Himself. Concerning the true worship of the true God, there is not a single word in that widely resounding testimony, because there is nothing about Christ, through whom alone we can draw near to God, Eph. ii. 12–15, 18. Furthermore, from where does it appear that God cannot bear such a testimony to Himself as renders idolaters without excuse, unless He also discloses His willingness to be appeased? XLVI. For what does this willingness to be appeased have to do with convicting idolaters of error, folly, and wickedness? “But from the fact that God bestows all good things on sinners, it appears that He is willing to be appeased, and that through those good things He is showing them that He is willing to be appeased.” Since by all those good things only one kind is meant, namely the things pertaining to life, or temporal things, we deny that proposition. God bestows those good things many times on those whom He hates, toward whom He is endowed with an immutable purpose of punishment, whom He has devoted to destruction, and whom He has declared to be destined for destruction and to be tormented with eternal punishments, Ps. lxxiii. 4–12, 18–20. But those things from which no one can discern either love or hatred cannot reveal that God is willing to be appeased, Eccles. ix. 1, 2. When God heaps His benefits upon ungodly men, so as to make them fat with His own fatness and fattened for the day of slaughter — is He to be regarded as bestowing these things with the purpose of showing that He is willing to be appeased? It is a matter of common acknowledgment that God certainly knew that the nations, destitute of His word, would make the very worst use of these temporal benefits, and that they could not rightly use them to His glory. He also appointed these as witnesses of His patience and wisdom, Job xxxviii. 25, 26. And He very frequently employs their accumulation to blind men in their sins. How then will those things show that He is willing to be appeased, especially since mingled together with the administration of those things there are innumerable marks of wrath and most certain tokens of God’s righteous judgment against sinners? But let us grant what the apostle does not affirm, and what cannot by any legitimate inference be drawn from his words, namely that the nations could have gathered from the works of God some degree of His willingness to be appeased toward sinners — are we on that account to suppose that they were called to true repentance? For since those same nations acknowledged His law, namely that those who sinned are worthy of death, and since they were unable to understand whether there was any possible way of actually appeasing and reconciling Him on account of that law of His — though they may have suspected Him to be to some limited degree willing to be appeased — how, I ask, are they to be regarded as having been called back to true repentance through that knowledge? Indeed, it is established that saving repentance cannot exist without faith, since repentance is pleasing to God, which cannot happen without faith, Heb. xi. 6. But faith toward God can exist only through Christ. I mean such faith as is the foundation and companion of saving repentance. The works of providence, however, do not reveal Christ. Nor is God revealed in Christ as willing to be appeased, but as already appeased, and reconciling the world to Himself, 2 Cor. v. 19. There is therefore no willingness to be appeased; nor, if there were, could it be revealed through the works of providence; nor, if it were revealed, would it be the foundation for any sinner’s faith or repentance.

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XLVII. The nations certainly imagined some of their idols as willing to be appeased. And why would they not imagine that divine power which they themselves had made as readily accommodating and accessible to them? For since man had of his own accord cast away that image of himself which the true God had created, and had thereby stripped himself of all communion with that true God his Creator, he attempted to fabricate and as it were create new, fictitious gods in that corrupted image in which he was constituted through apostasy from the true God. And being himself entangled in vices and given over to pleasures, he daily established in his own mind a divine power fashioned after his own likeness and more in agreement with himself. From this it followed that whatever he experienced in his own nature, he immediately supposed also had its place in those gods whom he had fashioned for himself according to his own fancy. Hence he devised them as wrathful, willing to be appeased, easy-tempered, or sullen — each one according to his own disposition and temperament. But what has this to do with our God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, “whom no one has seen; that only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has made Him known to us.”

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XLVIII. There remains yet another argument, which I have for that reason relegated to this last place, because — had I not discovered that it pleased some learned men who I fear were carried away by partisan zeal — I would have judged it a childish sophism, and unworthy of occupying any place in this cause. It is wrested from the first chapter of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, ver. 21, 22. “Because,” say some, “men did not use the knowledge of God as was fitting for them, they became without excuse” — that is, because they defiled themselves with the crime of idolatry, concerning which the apostle deals in that passage, even though God had revealed His eternal power and truth through the works of creation. What then? “If they had used it rightly, they would not have been without excuse; if they had not been without excuse, they would have been excusable; if they had been excusable, they would have been excused.” Reply: If indeed it had been equally easy for men destitute of the word both to use the knowledge of God well and to use it badly, this reasoning would have some plausibility. But this is assumed without proof, and it is a begging of the question. Yet upon this the entire argument depends. Because it is most certain that men could use the knowledge of God badly, and the apostle shows that they did so use it, it is therefore supposed — but most falsely — that they could have used it rightly.

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XLIX. Furthermore, if they had used it rightly — that is, that kind of use of which the apostle speaks — to what extent would they have been excused? Would it have been to the extent of being saved? But in the apostle there is nothing at all about their salvation; on the contrary, he demonstrates by deliberate argument that no one could ever have attained salvation through the use of those means which were granted to the nations, apart from the saving grace of God in Christ. They could indeed have abstained from the most foul crime of idolatry to such a degree that it could not have been justly charged against them in the manner in which the apostle has charged it here. Therefore if the inference of this enthymeme — “because they did not make right use of the knowledge of God, they became without excuse; therefore if they had made right use of it, they would have been excused” — is judged to be a legitimate inference (though it is most false, since the same reasoning does not hold for the wrong and the right use of the means of salvation or of saving knowledge of God), then its meaning is nothing other than “they would not have defiled themselves with the crime of idolatry.” For those terms, “excusable” and “excused,” must necessarily be restricted to the subject matter with which the apostle deals; which is universally true. But they continue to argue: “They would not have been excused,” they say, “unless they had fled to the mercy of God; and they would not have fled to Him, unless that manifestation under which they lived taught them that they must flee to it.” Reply: They would have been “excused” to the extent that the apostle deals with them in that passage, even had they not fled to the divine mercy. It remains to be proved that they could have made further use of that knowledge.

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L. And these may suffice by way of specimen, at least so that we may see of what kind are the arguments which learned men on every side employ in this cause. To one pressing further there stand in the way both the scope of the present work and the recently published studies of others on this very cause.

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Part Three: On Its Total Corruption, by Which It Became Apostate

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Chapter 7.

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Natural theology in the state of sin corrupted — The means of total corruption — The fatal superstition substituted in its place — What the knowledge of God among nations destitute of the word is — The corruption of theology through philosophy — The origin of philosophy — The two parts of natural theology — The first wholly corrupted through metaphysics and ethics — The origin, abuse, use, and restoration of ethics, and likewise of metaphysics — Then of astronomy and natural philosophy — Natural theology corrupted through these.

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I. Since the condition of natural theology corrupted by sin, considered in itself, was such that no spiritual good could ever be expected from it, let us proceed to see in what manner it was further corrupted through the cunning of the devil and the vanity of the human mind — intending to treat next of the new theology, and of those whom God has by that means enrolled as His peculiar people. And here we have resolved to deal only with the chief heads of these matters, referring the investigation of the origin and progress of idolatry to another place. All know that natural theology was corrupted, and among the greater part of mortals almost entirely lost, and that in its place a pernicious superstition was substituted from the earliest monuments of history and human memory. By what way and by what means that fatal and universal transformation was introduced into the world, we shall now briefly explain.

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II. We have shown and demonstrated that some knowledge of God flourished among nations destitute of the light of the divine word, flowing from that twofold source of which we spoke — namely, the internal natural light, and that revelation of Him which was made through the works of God. That the outcome corresponded to these principles has long been made manifest through testimonies gathered on all sides from the writings of learned men among them: Josephus, Justin Martyr, Athenagoras, Theophilus of Antioch, Origen, Clement of Alexandria, Athanasius, Theophilus of Alexandria, Chrysostom, Eusebius, Theodoret, Tertullian, Lactantius, Arnobius, Augustine, and others among the ancients. Thomas, Eugubinus, Raimundus Sebundus, Ludovicus Vives, Mornaeus, Baronius, Fotherby, Vossius, Stuckius, Giraldus Ferrariensis, Grotius, and writers of every kind in later ages have rendered the same service. The extant works of Orpheus, Homer, Plato, Xenophon, Aristotle, Hesiod, Plutarch, Epictetus, Arrian, Cicero, Seneca, Photinus, Iamblichus, Proclus, Philostratus, and others prove the same thing clearly. The monuments and histories of all ages, nations, and peoples agree. For even if we grant that the multitude were always so wrapped in the veil of ignorance and darkness that they never so much as thought of the supreme deity or of the obedience rightly owed to Him according to right reason; and even if the unlearned were so empty of divine things that they held wisdom in contempt; yet another account must be given of the wise and those devoted to contemplation, in whom some useful concern for investigating the natures of things and advancing common notions resided. It is well known that these men, while the first effort of struggling nature still endured, expounded many things excellently and ornately concerning God and His worship, the obedience owed to Him, and the final end and happiness of mankind. Let us therefore see in what manner and by what means this theology was wholly corrupted, until in a horrible and total apostasy from God it ended in the dreadful swamp of monstrous idolatry and the most impure vanities. Now this evil of human defection and misery appears to have flowed from a twofold source. For men left to themselves and their own ways either endeavored to promote the remnants of natural theology and in that attempt, out of their native blindness, corrupted them further, or else set about deliberately corrupting them still more. That both attempts succeeded pernicioulsy enough is evident from the outcome. The former, however, was the more noble, and more worthy of rational creatures. We shall therefore treat of it first. III. We have demonstrated that sinful men, destitute of all supernatural revelation, retain a natural power of knowing God that spontaneously exerts itself in adults. We have also previously attributed to them a general knowledge discriminating the honorable from the base in relation to God, His governance, and His final judgment — a knowledge of which the practical intellect could not be wholly deprived without ruin. But from the perpetual restlessness and fluctuation of conscience by which they were oppressed, and which those common notions produced, they easily perceived that this knowledge or theology was insufficient for attaining their ultimate end. Aided, therefore, by the benefit of that revelation of the eternal power and divinity of God through the works of creation and providence, which we have shown was likewise left to them, they strove with great effort to advance those innate principles. That they themselves were largely ignorant of why they did so is evident from the outcome. Equipped with the means of the operations of the intellect, they set about proving by a kind of groping what might be produced from them. And this is the origin of philosophy. Philosophy is indeed the result — the offshoot, so to speak — of the remnant of that theology which the first man possessed as innate in the state of integral nature, enlarged by the aforesaid revelation through the works of God. To seek God by groping, who is not far from every one of us; to scrutinize the testimonies of which He did not suffer Himself to be without witness in His works; and to weigh in the mind the natures of all things by which the invisible things of God are perceived — of all of which the first man was full with knowledge, as things necessary for the worship of God the Creator — this at length is to philosophize. It was in this manner that those called the sages of earlier ages endeavored to elucidate and advance those principles mentioned above, so that the minds of men might rise through them to the origin of those principles and their primeval state.

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IV. It is certain that philosophy had no other origin and no other end than this. The Greeks, as though they were the first to cultivate it, always boasted most magnificently of themselves — without doubt, foolishly. Diogenes Laërtius, in the preface to his work, reproaches those who dared to say that philosophy took its beginning from the barbarians; he says: they are ignorant of the achievements of the Greeks, to whom not only philosophy but the very human race itself owed its beginning, attributing these to the barbarians — that is, “These men truly, through want of understanding, apply the right deeds of the Greeks to the barbarians; for from them not only philosophy, but the very human race itself, took its origin.” And this is beyond doubt.

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V. Tatian, Clement, Theophilus, Eusebius, and others prove the contrary more clearly than light. Manifest traces of theft are also extant. For they borrowed everything from the Chaldeans, the Egyptians, the Indians, the Magi, the Syrians, and the Jews. Yet it cannot be denied that the ancient Greeks greatly advanced through earnest study the philosophy devised by others. What they had received by report, what they had stolen from the monuments of the Orientals, what they had learned from living teachers in the course of long journeys undertaken for that purpose, and what they had themselves observed under the guidance and companionship of nature concerning God and His works, concerning the base and the honorable as common notions — all this the greater part of them labored to peddle, first by word of mouth under the title of wisdom, and then in writings bearing the stamp of philosophy. But I know not what an Iliad of evils accompanied the endeavors of these men from their very cradle. For the philosophers themselves, as they wished to be called, were for the most part idle fellows of notorious licentiousness; and especially so greedy of vainglory in so servile and open a manner, and such ostentatious boasters, that they were themselves objects of ridicule and mockery to the common people.

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VI. “They ceased to be upright when they became learned,” says Seneca. And by Timon all philosophers without exception are called —

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“Bladders full of empty opinion” (that is, of arrogant self-conceit). And Euripides: “I hate the sophist who does not have wisdom for himself.” — Frag. inc. And indeed scarcely one in many ever gave any specimen of true wisdom in human life. To these agrees that passage of the comic poet Anaxippus in Athenaeus: “Do you philosophize? But I observe that philosophers are wise only in words; in deeds, however, I perceive them to be fools.”

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VII. Epictetus therefore boasts foolishly, proudly, and contemptuously toward God concerning these men — slaves of vanity — saying: “The condition and character of the philosopher is to expect all advantage and harm from himself.” That is, every philosopher would have himself be a god. Even the Brahmins among the Indians openly boasted that they were gods. For when Apollonius inquired what opinion they held of themselves, their chief Jarchas replied that “they believed themselves to be gods.” But in vain. For the place and esteem in which they ought to be and be held was more correctly assessed by Amithocrates, king of the Indians, who — as Athenaeus testifies, Deipnosophistae, bk. xiv. — requested by letter from King Antiochus that sweet wine, figs, and a sophist be sent to him, all purchased at his own expense.

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VIII. It is shameful to recount what Athenaeus, bk. xi., records concerning Plato himself. Let them expect everything they please from themselves, so long as others expect nothing from them. But whatever sort of men they were, it is evident from the outcome that they either lost or corrupted the true use and end of common notions concerning God, the true, and the honorable. That these notions should serve as the rule and guide of human life with respect to the obedience owed to God and the natural worship of Him; that they should serve as the means for obtaining the blessed condition in the enjoyment of God Himself — these things appear never to have entered their minds. Hence from that obscure and faint knowledge or report concerning the immortal state which they retained, there flowed little or no efficacy for ordering life according to right reason. These, therefore, were the men through whom all the remnants of natural wisdom were turned into empty sophistry. The attempt of certain Platonists, after the preaching of the Christian religion, to restore philosophy to its former place is, as we shall see later, a different matter.

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IX. Philosophy had from the beginning no other end than the restoration of that primordial theology which had collapsed and been lost through the entrance of sin. And it was by this path that the human race set about repairing theology.

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X. Now it was shown above that that primeval theology had two parts. Natural knowledge of God and of His will concerning the obedience and worship due to Him in that state of affairs, together with knowledge of the works of God directing and stimulating theologians toward the proper worship of God, the supreme Creator of all things — these constituted it.

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XI. Since, therefore, after the ruins of theology had been cast down, philosophy raised itself toward the same ends that this theology had set before itself, it strives to render a vicarious service to sinful men, or it accomplishes nothing at all. For men of a cultivating disposition, who first labored in building up and polishing philosophy, thought it their appointed task to cherish, draw out, and stimulate the common notions concerning God and His will — along with their innate moral sense discerning between good and evil — so that, guided by these, men might enjoy God, if it were possible.

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XII. That such was the first endeavor of those who philosophized among

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the nations destitute of divine revelations, and that it was directed toward that end of which we have spoken, appears not only from the nature of the matter itself but also from all the traces of their design and purpose that occur everywhere. That whole ancient wisdom which Pythagoras and others investigated through Egypt and the Eastern parts of the world consisted in the rationale of establishing religions and in the ceremonies of divine worship. From it those men were held to be the dispensers of priesthood. Thus, when Telesinus asked what his wisdom or philosophy was, Apollonius — a follower of ancient wisdom — replied, as recorded in Philostratus, lib. iv. cap. xiii: proceeding from divine inspiration, and teaching how one ought to pray to the gods and sacrifice to them. Greece first produced philosophers who were not priests, after the new corruption of philosophy, of which we shall speak presently. I confess that this whole philosophy savored of idolatrous superstition; yet it nonetheless retained certain dim images and vestiges of truth.

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XIII. The outcome, therefore, did not correspond to this splendid endeavor. By its power and auspices natural theology was not restored — indeed it was rather more corrupted. Whatever of philosophy exists anywhere, drawn from the monuments of the most ancient writers and still surviving, bears witness to this. For the innate vanity of the human mind led the natural light — or what remains of it — in various directions in its search for truth, until, plunged into the Syrtes and swamps of empty curiosities, endless quarrels, and useless speculations, it was nearly extinguished.

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XIV. For after it pleased certain sharp men of subtle genius — setting aside all consideration of the primary end of this philosophy — to bind the universal knowledge of things and the account of obedience due to God artificially to certain methods of teaching, and to compress it rather into the snares, fetters, and manacles of certain disciplines or arts, and to burden it with the chains of empty notions, subtle terms, and arbitrary meanings, so that art quickly twisted nature away from its original design, this knowledge gradually declined into a certain ethics — that is, a methodical doctrine of virtues and vices — and into metaphysics; of which matters something must be said briefly.

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XV. Now since both of these disciplines — both ethics, which Cicero calls that part of philosophy pertaining to morals, and metaphysics, which is called by some natural theology (although it presents a far lighter shadow of it than ethics does) — formed according to the standard of Aristotle's teaching, have everywhere obtained such dominion over the judgments of learned men that they have not only occupied a conspicuous place in Christian schools for several centuries now, but have also thoroughly mixed themselves into that theology which is publicly taught in them, they must be handled by me only gently and with a soft step, as it were. For I would not wish to stir up learned hornets, or to rouse against me fiery and inveterate disputants. It has been long since I grew utterly weary of all controversies; and I especially fear lest I might fall upon those men who have their wit so ready at hand that they can at any hour produce fifty or a hundred arguments (most of them futile) on any subject whatsoever, and who are almost entirely transformed into syllogisms. And it is an irritable breed of men.

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Nothing, however, that I know of prevents me from thinking myself free to set forth briefly what I myself think of those arts and of the place they hold in the schools. I will therefore first subject ethics, and then metaphysics, to examination.

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XVI. Ethics, moreover, is the science of morals. It was once a part of natural theology — that part, namely, which prescribed the rational rule for living to God according to the norm of the law of creation, and the manner and rule for performing duties toward oneself and toward others. It has been shown that remnants of this knowledge clung to the human mind after the entrance of sin. To arouse those remnants, to bring them forth, to elucidate them by reasoning, and to distribute them into various classes — this was the labor and work of the philosophers in ethics. Aristotle, that supreme and admirable artificer of compressing general notions into a systematic body, reduced them, once set forth and collected and (by the dexterity of his genius) enlarged by himself, into a disciplinary science. But since both he and the others who preceded him in that work were utterly ignorant of the true God and of the observance owed to Him, they displaced the whole rational principle that distinguishes the honorable from the base — which subsisted in the remnants of natural theology — and twisted it toward an entirely different end from that for which it was originally established by God. For which of the philosophers ever undertook to treat or teach the doctrine of virtue and vice, of the base and the honorable, with the end in view that it should be the rule for living to God, or the means by which men might at last enjoy Him in a blessed condition forever? Indeed, that the knowledge of virtue and moral duties should stand in the same place, esteem, and degree in theology as it held in the state of integral nature, so as to have the same end — this was both impossible, and God Himself denied it by the terms of the new covenant. Since, therefore, that teaching concerning morals, that is, ethics, which Aristotle cultivated, appears at length to have been received back into the church, as it were by right of postliminy, let us briefly consider in what place it should be held, or what use or end we can assign to it.

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XVII. 1. We have previously demonstrated that the end for which that teaching, which in the state of integral nature was innate, was appointed, was none other than to be the directing principle of human minds in the worship and obedience owed to God, so that, walking before Him according to the law of creation, they might at last live blessedly with Him. If anyone is willing to acknowledge that man was made for the glory of God and capable of moral dependence upon Him, he will not, I think, deny that this was the end of the knowledge of right and wrong. But which of the philosophers can we suppose ever had this in mind? Indeed, what Christian either ought to teach ethics toward this end, or has dared to do so? For would this not be to bring miserable sinners back again under the dominion of the covenant of nature, where they must perish forever? Therefore: XVIII. 2. Let us grant that those who learn or teach Aristotelian ethics do not intend that end — tell me, then, what is that other end toward which they direct their eyes? The end of moral science can only be practice. But the end of the practice of moral duties is nothing other than the glory of God and our own enjoyment of Him. Let this, then, be the end of ethics; but what follows? Nothing except that we miserable little men are brought back again, by its help and benefit, under the law of creation, as was said before. But we are far mistaken; another end will be offered — namely, that, instructed by this teaching, we may lead a political life rightly and usefully here in the midst of the human race. Is that really so? But who is endowed with the authority to pervert at will the teaching which God established for one end to another end? Moreover, this is not even a different end; for no one ought to lead a godly, sober, and useful life among men except in order to obey God and live to Him. As ethics has therefore departed from theology and is preparing its return to the church, it belongs to the covenant of works.

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XIX. 3. But in the end, what need is there here of either theology or philosophy? No Christian will deny that a true, solid, and sincere knowledge of virtue, of vices, of the base and the honorable, and of all moral duties is revealed and delivered more plainly and fully in the Holy Scriptures than is contained in all the writings of all the philosophers, or in their archetype, namely the remnants of innate theology. I mean the things themselves; for the precision of notions and the grasp of the harmony of terms by which knowledge of things is technically transmitted count for nothing with me — except insofar as I reckon them to be the greatest impediments to true wisdom. One may almost daily observe innumerable persons who, though they know all the definitions, divisions, distinctions, terms, and notions by which some science is taught, and indeed the entire system of a given doctrine, as familiarly as their own fingernails — so that they never triumph more earnestly than when they come to disputations — are nevertheless in reality unacquainted with the things themselves, and are most learnedly stupid. Learned, to be sure, in the manner in which Philostratus reports that Euxinus, the teacher of Apollonius, was versed in Pythagorean philosophy: “He knew,” he says, “the doctrines of Pythagoras as birds are sometimes taught by men to speak human words: for they utter ‘hail,’ and ‘may you fare well,’ and ‘Jupiter be propitious,’ and certain words of that kind, neither knowing what they say, nor speaking in a manner suited to men, but merely moving their tongue in measured rhythm.” And surely in no different way do most people seem to be wise from the discipline of the sciences. This vanity of the human mind nowhere appears more plainly than when it is occupied with this moral science. The unjust, the rapacious, the drunkards, the irascible, the cowardly — all are versed, or can be versed, in this science;

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for it is not virtue itself, but the shadow of virtue; not moral duties themselves, but the mask of moral duties, that fill both pages of it. I would dare to say that not one true virtue is truly and certainly taught in all of Aristotle's books addressed to Nicomachus; nor will anyone ever emerge from their teaching just, good, or truly virtuous — only a masked hypocrite.

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XX. 4. I will therefore state the matter as it is. God has placed the whole teaching concerning duties, virtue, and the observance of right reason in a different place and a different order under the covenant of grace than it was arranged under the law of nature. But those natural notions from which ethics was born and emerged look only to that first order which is now abolished (as was set forth above). There is now no virtue except what is graciously granted to the faithful by the power of the new covenant. No moral act is good and beneficial to the agent unless it proceeds from a new principle, that is, from a spiritual habit graciously infused into the heart. And the reason is that God has constituted all moral duties, of whatever kind they are, and all abstinence from vices, as part of the obedience He requires under the new covenant. Nor are virtues to be seriously taught in any other way — the school is mere play — if we wish to be Christians. I reckon it to be utterly impious for anyone to be instructed in the knowledge of the general nature of virtue without being at the same time instructed in the knowledge of supernatural grace and of the relation that virtue bears to Christ the Mediator; or for anyone to be urged to the performance of acts of virtue without being at the same time taught from where the strength for performing them is to be expected. Moral duties must be performed; acts of virtue must be practiced; it is necessary that we be just, sober, temperate, and courageous — but only under the principle of that obedience which God requires of us in the covenant of grace. The nature of virtue must be taught, all moral duties must be explained, the practice of them must be earnestly pressed, the knowledge of sin and hatred of vices must be seriously inculcated — but that all these things have regard to Christ the Mediator, to the Holy Spirit, to the covenant of grace, and constitute the obedience owed to God, must by no means be omitted. But it would be inept for anyone to introduce mention of these or similar things when expounding that teaching concerning morals which now prevails in the schools. What darkness, what fluctuation and uncertainty, what confusion of things and notions a doctrine so diverse on the same subject and the same matters can and does ordinarily produce in the minds of men, anyone may conjecture.

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XXI. 5. Furthermore: the teaching of this moral philosophy — especially that which, derived from the genius and method of its author, now everywhere most widely prevails — is false in many points, and corrupt, uncertain, wholly useless, indeed even pernicious. For (1.) it confines the end of virtue within the limits of this earthly life, which is nothing other than to destroy the whole nature of virtue, to eradicate virtue itself, and to bind all its students with the horror and despair of that great Brutus, who cried out, “O wretched virtue, you are nothing other than a name!”

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(2.) It teaches that all men possess a sufficiency of moral powers for every exercise of virtue that is necessary for obtaining its proper end — a position which contains an open denial of the entire gospel.

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(3.) It teaches man to trust in himself and to expect all blessedness from himself — which is also the sum of Epictetan wisdom, and the highest contempt of God.

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(4.) It asserts that virtue is a certain mean between extremes — than which nothing more inept can be imagined.

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(5.) It proposes or acknowledges no certain, stable, universal rule of virtue: that which pleases the majority, that which pleases the wise, that which is most agreeable to those who divine uncertainly — that is virtue.

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(6.) It discharges moral duties without any regard to grace, justice, or divine providence.

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(7.) It denies that friendship between God and men is possible.

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(8.) It is ignorant of eternal reward and punishment.

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XXII. But I do not wish to plunge myself into the midst of the controversies of learned men; I will only add this: if this moral philosophy still seems to learned and good men to deserve its place, though for my own part I cannot but desire it to be banished beyond the bounds of the church, I most earnestly wish that diligent care be taken against these two evils — the first, that the minds of the young not be occupied with prejudices against the purity, simplicity, and indeed every mystery of the gospel; how this can be avoided when they have been trained in the form of this doctrine, I plainly do not know; the second, that the principles on which it rests not creep gradually into the theology of the schools — unless these things are thought to have been said too late.

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XXIII. And indeed I favor the efforts of those who have endeavored to forge new hypotheses in this moral science. For it must be acknowledged that they have given those enslaved to Peripatetic philosophy occasion to inquire more deeply into the natures of these things. Whether they have actually attained the truth, let others judge. Nor indeed ought those who reject the meaning of one or two obscure little words in Aristotle to be said for that reason to embrace more readily a position that is thus laid open to the human intellect. A certain learned man, in a book he published on duties, contends that the end of moral philosophy is for a man to dwell in tranquility and joy of soul without the goading of conscience. But we know — and that learned man knows — that such a state of soul can by no means be obtained by any performance of duties whatsoever. For we are sinners, and we cannot become partakers of any true tranquility or joy except through the blood of Christ. Since the entrance of sin, no other way to peace or tranquility has been set forth. Furthermore, in order to obtain this end, the same learned man enjoins that each person diligently observe the laws and maxims of his own nature. But that this means is by no means sufficient to attain that end, all Christians know; that there is some law of nature, we contend along with the learned man. But since human nature itself is so far corrupted and vitiated by sin that it is not able either to understand or to correct its own vice, we must necessarily deny that the law which holds sway in that nature alone is suited to the use that is claimed for it. XXIV. There are very few things that I find it worthwhile to add separately regarding metaphysics. Whatever we have said about the rise and corruption of ethics applies equally to it as well; there is no need to repeat those things. But this science I plainly judge to be useless in human life — indeed, harmful. For once those things that properly and necessarily belong to logic on the one hand, and those things that belong to theology on the other, are removed, what remains will be nothing but a laborious and useless hodgepodge of terms, notions, words, and abstractions, which will never make any man better, more learned, wiser, or more fitted to his duty toward God or others. Let those who seem most practiced in it consult the innermost recesses of their own hearts and declare sincerely whether, through its benefit and aid, any degree of piety, uprightness, wisdom, prudence, or any true doctrine has ever accrued to them. Why then must we still afflict those wretched little men who daily cry out that life is short and art is long, with this thorny hodgepodge of useless and perplexing notions — which ought, if they have any wisdom, to be committed to oblivion as quickly as possible? XXV. Furthermore, the mixture of this science with supernatural theology — upon contemplating which Duns Scotus once exclaimed that “the theological doctors had mixed philosophy with theology with the greatest profit” — has nearly brought destruction to evangelical truth. Surely spiritual things would not bear the fetters and chains of metaphysical notions and terms; the freedom and breadth of that spiritual understanding which God freely gives us rightly to understand the mystery of the gospel also perishes, when it is entangled in the snares of this worldly wisdom (for such it is, if indeed it ought to be called wisdom). The noble, sublime, spiritual, heavenly, and divinely savored evangelical truth — bound by the rules of this science and delivered in the words it teaches — is rendered sterile, dry, thorny, lean, withered, and philosophical, and is cast down from its heavenly beauty and spiritual sweetness. The mystery of the gospel and that doctrine which is according to godliness has within itself something higher, greater, and more divine than that it should be confined within the barriers of human wisdom. If I therefore wished to perpetuate theological quarrels and to draw the souls of men away from the simplicity of the gospel, I would not hesitate to commend this source, material, and instrument of strife to students. What Prudentius once sang in his Apotheosis concerning certain ancient philosophers fits no less aptly the countless theologians puffed up with this empty wisdom:

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“They assail the majesty of almighty God with slanderous contentions. They dissect faith with petty quibbles, each one more wicked in tongue than the last. They loose and bind the knots of questions through pliant syllogisms.”

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XXVI. But we must return to our path. We have traced the origin, development, and abuse of ethics and metaphysics. Contemplative men undertook to use the remnants of innate theology toward its original end, and accordingly to arouse, cultivate, and advance them. From this source there flowed forth all the doctrine of the nations concerning vices and virtues, and their contemplations concerning the nature and perfections of God. Men sophistically learned and acute, having forgotten the origin, end, and scope of these contemplations, produced those arts which we cultivate under these names; and these, in themselves, are certain masks of wisdom, but when mixed with supernatural theology they are pernicious.

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XXVII. Furthermore: since the works of God make that which is known of Him manifest, sinners, diligently and carefully scrutinizing the natures of those works, sought to find by groping the Lord and Creator of all things. And this was the second part of natural theology. Human ingenuity, laboring under its innate corruption, also endeavored to cultivate this part. To seek God Himself from the works of God — both of creation and of providence — that was the inner impulse that perpetually urged them on. But the matter came to the same end. For as the vanity of mind from which they universally suffered grew stronger in natural philosophy and astronomy, that endeavor too gradually and learnedly vanished away.

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XXVIII. This, I say, was the origin of astronomy and of that vanity which is called astrology. The contemplation and knowledge of the beauty, order, and courses of the heavens, of the stars, and of all celestial bodies was a part of natural theology. From it all men ought to have learned the greatness, infinite power, wisdom, and goodness of the Creator, and thus to have been stirred up to His natural worship. After the entrance of sin and the universal apostasy of the human race from the true God, that contemplation gradually fell into disuse everywhere, and the knowledge born of it vanished. For the majority, being wise in earthly things only, had cast aside all care for the things that were above them. Others were drawn by Satan’s craft into the worship of the stars. Indeed, the dull and gross contemplation of the order, courses, and beauty of the heavens — things that strike the outward senses — became an incitement to idolatry for those who had cast off the knowledge and discipline of the living God, as we shall demonstrate at length hereafter. Thus at last, among many, the heaven itself became the first, if not the only, God. And the very name θεός appears to have been derived from no other source than ἀπὸ τοῦ θεῖν, that is, from the running of the stars. Between these two extremes, there arose at length certain theoretical men who devoted themselves to the contemplation of the celestial bodies for entirely different ends. For they had no intention either of pursuing them with religious worship or of seeking the living God through knowledge of them and obeying Him; rather, they appear to have taken this study upon themselves in order to satisfy the innate desire of learning the causes and natures of things. For observing that celestial bodies presented themselves to the eyes with an incredible variety and change of appearances, they investigated what order the bodies observed among themselves and what were the hidden causes and reasons of these phenomena. From the observations and conjectures of such men, with certain invented terms of arbitrary meaning applied to explain them (for most of the foundations on which it rests are invented), which they attempted to apply to the things themselves as best they could, arose the art we call astronomy — “gold,” as it were, “was cast into the fire, and out came this calf.” In the contemplation of the heavens, the stars, and all celestial bodies — the investigation of their nature, order, courses, influence, and the law implanted in them by the Creator of all — I judge that labor is very well employed. For even the bare and common sight of those things that immediately strike everyone’s eyes strikes the minds of men at once with a certain silent admiration of the infinite wisdom and power of God. Far more effective is that contemplation which is joined with serious meditation and careful inquiry. And it would be desirable that the knowledge of the celestial bodies and of the perpetual law by which they are moved — insofar as anything certain can be known from it — were communicated to more people than is now done. Some things, however, I must add — briefly, I will say — adhering to my proposed purpose, without giving offense to anyone, as I hope. As it is now taught, and as it has held its place of authority among the learned for some centuries, astronomy has almost entirely lost its proper place, order, and usefulness. With natural theology removed, with respect to the end of true theology, who, I ask, could astronomy maintain its proper place? What was its purpose, if we human beings are created for the glory of God? It must therefore either be restored through Christ (in whom all things are to be renewed) to a different place under the covenant, or it must be entirely cast aside. Indeed, that the whole encyclopaedia of the sciences, directed toward a new end by new means, ought to be subordinated to the glory of God in Christ — whoever would deny this does not deserve to be called a Christian. But what this restoration of knowledge or of the cognition of natural things, or of the works of creation, for the use of men who sincerely worship God in Christ, is and ought to be; and what place all knowledge holds in supernatural or revealed theology, and especially this expertise in the stars and their courses — that is a longer account than I have leisure to tell or perhaps ability to expound.

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XXIX. In this manner, therefore, with a truly futile effort, the human race endeavored as best it could to restore that primeval theology of which we have treated above, and in the attempt to restore it, destroyed it. This was the rational creature’s effort to free itself from the curse of ignorance and blindness that weighed upon it on account of sin — an effort by which it accomplished nothing other than to become more miserably entangled. For since we are renewed to the image of God only in Christ, and since that theology was a distinguished part of that image, it is evident that without such renewal every attempt to restore it is utterly in vain. Hence it came about that those who were without experience of that renewal, or who were ignorant of the place it ought to occupy in philosophy, and yet undertook to refine and teach it — twisting it away from its proper end and use — scarcely advanced any further than to fasten a cross upon themselves and others with a mass of thorny and useless questions and disputes. And so from this first attempt, natural theology, though already corrupted, appears to have been not so much further corrupted as simply lost. Its total corruption, therefore, and how it degenerated further into paganism, must be investigated. But here let us see what sinners have done by deliberate design.

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Chapter 8.

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On traditions: their origin, use, and corruption; the attempt and success of the poets in corrupting natural theology — The dreadful ruin of the human race through ignorance of the true God — Kronos, Chronos, and Noah — The origin of astrology — On lawgivers — Chthonic theology — Philosophers — Natural theology — On superstition — The contempt of all religions among the wise — The total destruction of the theology of the Gentiles.

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I. I have set forth how philosophy played its part in corrupting natural theology, or rather how philosophy itself was corrupted. There were also other causes of the total apostasy from all true knowledge of God. It seemed worthwhile to enumerate these briefly here, even though they properly belong to the corruption of religious worship — a subject to be treated afterward in the investigation of the origin of idolatry. And at this point the human race willfully defected from natural theology. For whatever aid God granted to sinners for obtaining knowledge of themselves, of the right, and of the true, all of it the blindness of the human heart twisted to its own destruction.

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II. It is established that the knowledge of God which the most ancient mortals possessed was enlarged and accumulated through the traditions of those revelations which some had received from God through their forebears. For when that age was brought to an end by the flood — the common parent and instructor of all having been present for half its duration — no one can doubt that no small measure of knowledge of divine things and of God flowed down from Noah and his sons to their grandchildren and to those born from them. How far the effectiveness of that knowledge extended, while the traditions flowed unmuddied from the source, is not the place here to inquire. III. It is certain that knowledge of many things pertaining to religion flowed down to the human race through traditions from ancient times. Yet the wise themselves confessed that the knowledge of ancient things pertaining to sacred matters was quite obscure and uncertain among the nations. Thus Virgil: —

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“Now open Helicon, O goddesses, and move your songs.

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For you, O goddesses, remember, and are able to recall; to us scarcely a thin breath of fame drifts down.”

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Aen. lib. vii. 641, 645, 646. IV. Yet we shall see that they possessed some. “As for whether all the things said so excellently about divine matters among the ancient philosophers were drawn from the writings of the Jews, I myself strongly doubt it.” Scaliger. Eusebius does indeed contend that all knowledge of divine matters among the Greeks emanated from the Hebrews. Julius Scaliger also writes, in Exercit. lxi., that Plato scraped together many things from the theology of the Phoenicians which he himself did not understand — whether rightly or wrongly I do not know. That they retained certain things by virtue of the universal tradition, whose fame had spread throughout the world from the very beginning of things, can be unknown to no one who has so much as greeted their writings at the threshold. Let us review a few matters by way of example. Most acknowledged a Creator of all things without bringing forward any arguments to establish belief in Him.

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“There was once a time when all things grew together” — ascribed to Linus, the most ancient compiler of songs among the Greeks. Not a single poet fails to celebrate the same origin of all things. Those things which at the beginning

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of his work Ovid wrote, boys know well. Horace agrees, Sat. iii. lib. i. 99-104: “When animals crept forth from the primal earth, a mute and brutish herd, for the sake of acorns and dens

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they fought with nails and fists, then with clubs, and so on

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They fought with weapons that practice had later fashioned; until they found words by which to mark sounds and meanings, and names.

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To these Diodorus Siculus (Hist. lib. 1) has genuine parallels, describing in his own manner the origin of the human race. And Juvenal, Sat. vi, 11–13:—

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“For then, in a new world and under a fresh sky, men lived differently — those who were born from a cleft oak, or fashioned from clay, had no parents.

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And of the same character is Papinius, Thebaid, lib. iv. 275–281:—

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“The ancient Arcadians, older than the stars and older than the moon,

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you give him your faithful bands; you, who are said to be born from the rigid stock of the forests,

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when the earth marveled at and bore the first footprints of feet,

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not yet were fields, or houses, or cities,

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nor yet any rule for marriages. The oaks and laurels bore

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She created raw births, and peoples from the shady

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ash-tree, and a green boy fell from the teeming mountain-ash.’ V. Concerning the Brahmins, Strabo, Geographica, lib. xv: “that they agree with the Greeks on many points — namely, that the world was generated and is corruptible, and that God, its creator and administrator, pervades the whole of it.” He is the authority that Greeks and barbarians alike agree that the world was created by God, from the most ancient tradition. Aristotle disputes this, Topics 19, De Caelo i. 10; but he stands almost alone. It would be easy to show that Hesiod, Orpheus, Apollonius, Aristophanes, Pliny, Diodorus Siculus, Numenius, Anaxagoras, and Megasthenes gave credence to the same tradition. Regarding Plato there is no question. That Thales, Anaximenes, Xenophanes, Parmenides, Democritus, Empedocles, and Metrodorus held that the world had some sort of origin, Eusebius shows in Praeparatio Evangelica, lib. i. cap. vii. The particular traditions — concerning Noah, the flood, and Abraham — of which Philo Byblius, Lucian, Strabo, and others make mention, I pass over. Along with the creation of the world, the belief that judgment would be executed upon men after this life obtained universal currency. Accompanying this persuasion was also the presumption of the immortality of souls, which, although it rests upon reason as well, yet because it has always prevailed chiefly among the common people rather than among the wise, is to be ascribed to tradition alone. Thales of Miletus defined the soul as “always, or self-moving.” And of him Diogenes says — that is, he was the first to discourse philosophically on the immortality of the soul. The general consensus attributes that honor to Pherecydes. “One thing,” it says in the Metamorphoses, lib., cap. ii., “which the Druids teach flows out to the common people, namely, that souls are eternal.” And concerning the same people, Caesar, De Bello Gallico, lib. vi. 14: “Above all they wish to persuade men that souls do not perish.” And Valerius, lib. ii. cap. vi. 10: “That ancient custom of the Gauls comes to mind, of whom it is reported by tradition that they were accustomed to lend money to be repaid to them in the world below, because they were persuaded that the souls of men are immortal.” As for Plato, no man’s house is better known than his own. The Phaedo is witness.

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VI. The same persuasion holds even among the most barbarous peoples. Throughout all of America there was scarcely anyone who doubted it before the arrival of Europeans on those shores. Some even received a report of the resurrection. Theopompus, according to the magi, says that men will live again and will be immortal — so Diogenes Laertius, Preface to his Lives. “Theopompus,” he says, “asserts, following the opinion of the magi, that men will live again and will be immortal.” The great Plato agrees in the Phaedo, cap. xvii.; for he says — that is, “that men do live again, and that the living come into being out of the dead, and that the souls of the dead survive, and that for the good it is better, but for the evil it is worse.”

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VII. And these peoples, as we have said, believed that some judgment was to come upon men, to be executed according to what they had done in this mortal life that was worthy or unworthy of right reason. Hence the same Plato, Epistle vii: credence must always be given to the ancient and sacred writings (that is, to the most ancient traditions), which declare to us that the soul is immortal, and that it has judges, by whose decrees rewards and the greatest punishments are assigned according to merit, as soon as a man departs from the body — that is, “Always must faith be given to the ancient and sacred discourses, which declare that we have an immortal soul, and that it has judges, by whose decrees rewards and the greatest punishments are assigned according to merit, as soon as one departs from the body.”

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VIII. This opinion, moreover, prevailed so widely among the majority, and was esteemed of such great moment for restraining the minds of the wicked, that Cato, the wisest of the pagans, did not hesitate, in that very speech in the Senate by which he sought to bring odium upon Caesar, to attribute to Caesar the contrary opinion. For thus he speaks in Sallust, Bellum Catilinae, lib. iii.: “Gaius Caesar argued these points, believing, I suppose, to be false what is reported of the underworld: that the wicked take a different path from the good, and dwell in places gloomy, waste, foul, and dreadful.” This opinion was depicted by the most learned of the poets in the Aeneid vi., imitating Homer, Odyssey xi., from which it is well known what the papists have drawn. The common people too were thoroughly imbued with this persuasion. Hence what takes place in the underworld, as is done even now in those places where men worship the Roman pontiff and elsewhere, was thought fit to be depicted by painters: “I myself have often seen many paintings of the torments that occur beneath Acheron.” They believed that men could be kept in duty and restrained from crimes by such things. “Above all they think men are stirred to virtue by contempt of the fear of death,” Caesar [ibid.] on the Gauls. And Lucan, lib. i. 469:

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“Happy in their error are those whom the greatest of fears — the dread of death — does not press; hence the mind of those men is prone to rush upon the sword, and souls are capable of death, and it is cowardice to spare a life that will return.” And Appian on the Germans, in his Celtica: “The Germans have the most ferocious customs, distinguished boldness in attacking, the greatest contempt of death, from hope of living again.” The Britons had the same mind, since Caesar testifies that the discipline of the Druids had its origin among them. The English report that all the inhabitants of New England, all the Americans, are persuaded that industrious and sober and temperate men, when they die, go to the southern regions of the world, which they believe the good God inhabits, since they feel in the spring the winds blowing from there, driving away the cold and therefore all want; but that all the idle and slothful go to the northern regions or to horrible and dreadful places. Admirably says Seneca: “Then our soul will have cause to congratulate itself, when, sent forth from the darkness in which it wallows, it has not glimpsed bright things with faint sight, but has admitted the full light of day and been restored to heaven; when it has received the place which it occupied by the lot of its birth.” These things he says in his own manner, splendidly, elegantly, and magnificently. IX. But since the paths to true happiness were thoroughly unknown, although they ranked the good far above the wicked, yet they assigned to the best an uncertain and almost wretched condition in the underworld, and so they were subject to bondage all their lives through fear of death, as the apostle says, Heb. ii. 15. Thus Achilles, though ruling widely over the dead, laments his lot before Ulysses:

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Do not speak smooth words to me of death, glorious Odysseus —

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I would rather be a serf working the land in service to another —

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Beside a landless man, one with little livelihood, than to rule over all the dead who have perished.

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“Do not, I pray, speak to me of death, glorious Ulysses; I would indeed rather be a laborer, and serve for hire under another man who is poor, with too little sustenance for himself, than to rule over all the dead who have departed this life.” Hom. Odyss. lib. A, 487-490. X. Now all these things, or some of them, or very many of them, are established to have spread throughout the entire human race from a most ancient tradition. I am aware indeed that among the great majority of the wise there are found those to whom all these things about future judgment and the various — that is, eternal — fates of men were a matter of mockery; nor does Lucretius the Epicurean alone cry out:

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“And that fear of Acheron must be driven headlong out of doors, which from its very foundation troubles human life.”—Lib. iii. 37, 38.

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XI. But Cicero himself also mocks these things: “Tell me,” he says, “I pray, do those things terrify you — the three-headed Cerberus in the underworld, the roaring of Cocytus, the crossing of Acheron, Tantalus touching the surface of the water with his chin and yet perishing of thirst? And what of that —

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“Sisyphus sweating rolls his stone and strains, yet gains not a whit?” and perhaps too the inexorable judges, Minos and Rhadamanthus, before whom neither L. Crassus nor M. Antonius would defend you; and since the case will be tried before Greek judges, you will not be able to employ Demosthenes: you yourself, on your own behalf, before the great assembly, will have to plead your cause. These things perhaps you fear, and for that reason you consider death to be an everlasting evil. A. Do you think me so deranged as to believe that? M. Do you not believe these things? A. Not at all. M. That is badly said, by Hercules. A. Why? I pray. M. I might be eloquent, if I were to speak against them.”—Tuscul. Quest. lib. i. cap. v. If indeed he had attacked only the utterly vain inventions of the poets, he would have acted according to the right rule of reason; but as is plain from the ensuing disputation, he set himself against the whole tradition, and therefore against the truth of the matter itself. And in the vein of the others, Seneca, Trag. Troades, Act 1:

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“After death there is nothing, and death itself is nothing, the final boundary of swift space. You ask where you lie after death: where the unborn lie. And greedy Time and Chaos devour us. Death is indivisible, harmful to the body and not sparing the soul.”

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XII. But let us grant that Cicero wished to argue on both sides in a probable manner, settling nothing; and that Seneca wrote whatever he pleased in the manner of a poet. But Pliny not only rejects that common persuasion of the people, but also attempts to refute it with arguments, lib. vii. cap. lvi.: “For all men,” he says, “after the last day, the condition is the same as it was before the first, nor is there any more sensation — whether of body or of soul — after death than before birth. For the same vanity extends itself into the future, and even into the times of death feigns life for itself: in one case giving immortality to the soul, in another transmigration, in another sensation to the shades below, and worshipping the departed spirits, and making a god of one who has already ceased even to be a man. But whether the manner of breathing differs in any way between man and the other animals; or whether many things are not found in life of longer duration, for which no one divines a similar immortality. Moreover, what body does the soul have in itself? What is its matter? Where is thought in it? How does it see, how does it hear, or what does it do? What is its use? Or what good is there without these things? Then what is its abode, and how great is the multitude of so many ages of souls, as it were of shadows? These are the fabrications of a childish delirium, and of a mortality that never ceases to deceive itself.” And whatever of this kind was received among men, Strabo most openly calls fables, lib. xv. — speaking of the Brahmans, where he says their text reads: “They also accept fables, just as Plato does, concerning the immortality of the soul and the judgments in the realm of the dead.” “They have woven,” he says, “fables too, after the manner of Plato, concerning the immortality of the soul and the judgments that stand in the underworld.” Without doubt the great majority of the wise thought along with Pliny and Strabo.

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XIII. Relying on this persuasion, they encouraged one another to commit every crime. Hence the saying passed into a proverb — “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die” — which the apostle records, Epist. ad Cor. i. cap. xv. 32. Nothing occurs more frequently in the poets. Catull. carm. v.:

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“Let us live, my Lesbia, and let us love, and all the rumors of rather stern old men

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let us value all at a single penny.

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"Suns can set and rise again: for us, when once the brief light has set, there is one perpetual night to be slept through." But Horace, Od. I. iv. 15:—

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"Life's brief span forbids us to begin any long-reaching hope. Already night presses upon you, and the fabled Shades, and the narrow house of Pluto: once you have gone there, you will neither cast lots for lordship of the wine by dice, nor gaze with wonder upon tender Lycidas."

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And Persius himself, though laughing, Sat. v. 151:— "Indulge your spirit; let us pluck life's sweets; what you have while alive is ours: you will become ashes, and shades, and a tale." The Greeks came close to the words recalled by the apostle. So Strato:—

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"And who among us is immortal? For no one has ever yet lived long enough to be fully satisfied with life."

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"Drink and be merry, for as for tomorrow, or what the future holds, no one knows." But from that opinion, which the common people had drawn from the most ancient tradition—

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—it was never permitted to be removed.

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XIV. It would be easy to enumerate the other traditions that also hinted at fragments of divine truth. The benefit of these traditions, I say, was to be used by all men for advancing the remnants of natural light. But it is apparent that those very traditions were corrupted almost from the very first; and so the remedy for the disease itself (and the antidote against eternal death) was turned into deadly poison. For we have shown that this doctrine, handed down by tradition, supplied aids not to be despised to the natural light in seeking God; but when it was at last itself corrupted, it gradually corrupted and overthrew even that remaining light and all the rational perceptions of the human mind concerning God. We will briefly set forth how this came about. XV. It is natural to traditions that they fly here and there through the mouths of men. In that state of affairs which we have described, each person used them according to the measure of which he had become a partaker. Those who first dared to collect the scattered and wandering traditions, to arrange and expound them, were the poets. They first undertook their task by composing melodies in hymns and little songs to capture the ears of men; then they adorned it by writing fables of every kind, crammed full beyond what can be said. The foundation of the whole structure was the traditions. But gradually they most thoroughly corrupted the entire knowledge of God which the mortal race had drawn from the ancient traditions. We speak chiefly of Hellenism; for that manner of apostasy finally reached even unto Catholicism. Since, therefore, they either twisted what they had heard into strange and fabulous meanings, or augmented it with clever fictions, or invented other things twinned with what they had heard, or employed ingeniously devised allegories for reading those things which they themselves had received from their ancestors in dim report and understood not at all — they left nothing sound, solid, or true, nothing but what was vain, fictitious, idolatrous, and deadly in the whole of natural religion.

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XVI. Indeed, they so thoroughly confounded everything that it is wholly impossible to determine by conjecture what they received, from where, from whom, and by what report, tradition, occasions, or reasons they were led to embrace so many, so very many things. It is apparent that they mingled traditions interpolated with fables, natural and moral theology, the worship of demons, and the worship of dead men. What each person drew from corrupted natural theology, from perverted traditions, from diabolical oracles, from popular usage, or from his own brain — this is utterly impossible to investigate accurately. Indeed, very frequently they presented in the same words, and with the same bundle of fictions, some obscure divine tradition, some outstanding element of natural theology, the most foolish fables, and Satanic worship all at once. The same figure was the Sun, Noah, Saturn, yes even Jupiter, a Planet, a Hero, Heaven, Aether, and Satan himself — as we shall see more fully hereafter.

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XVII. Now the human mind, laboring under innate blindness, is greedy for fables and errors, and tenacious of them. After it had been steeped in idolatry and polytheism, the natural light itself, unable to remove these prejudices, utterly succumbed; nor was it ever able to extricate itself from the swamp of fables. This confusion can be set before the eyes by one example. Bacchus is the same as Adonis, Evius, and Sabus — so Plutarch, Sympos. 4, qu. 5; where, having cast aside all concern for truth and candor, he most absurdly undertakes to investigate the origins of the Jewish ceremonies. That the names Iacchus and Bacchus derived from the Hebrew name, Sanfordius plausibly and learnedly conjectures, in book one of his work On the Descent of Christ to the Underworld. I know that many scholars of the origins of idolatry and of the investigation of Hellenism owe a great deal to that excellent and most learned man, and some owe him everything — yet you will rarely find him named by anyone, and never praised by anyone. Now that Adonis derives from the Hebrew Adon no one, I think, will deny; Sabus from the Hebrew Tzabaoth; and Evius seems to express the divine name Ehyeh — whence Plutarch dreams that the Levites among the Jews took their name. But these are names or epithets of the living God. The ancients therefore understood the divine power through those names, which had reached them, though in faint report. Having received them in this way, they assigned other attributes to them. Among these, some were true, but others were false and diabolical. First they referred to Bacchus what they had heard of Noah; and the name of Bacchus is thought by some to be derived from the Hebrew Noah. That Liber (Bacchus) stole Noah's vines and vineyard is not to be doubted. Hence Lactantius: “The lie of the poets is not in the fact, but in the name.” See Voss. de Idololatria, lib. 1. cap. xix. and xxv. Thus the true God and Noah (Gen. ix. 20) were confounded. Bacchus also is perhaps the Hebrew “son of Cush” — so it pleases Bochart, Geog. lib. i. cap. ii; this is Nimrod. Hence he was called Zagreus, that is, “the mighty hunter,” Gen. x. 9; and Nebrod, as all the Greeks call Nimrod. But Sanfordius shows by very many examples that nearly the entire history of Moses was ascribed to Bacchus, lib. 1. cap. i. sect. 18, 19; after him, and with the same instances, Vossius, lib. 1. cap. xxx.; nor does Bochart think otherwise, lib. i. cap. xviii. Moreover, whatever is said of Bacchus is said in its entirety of Osiris in Egypt, who, having been great among his own people, received after death all the honors of the sun. At length there emerged Bacchus of Thebes, that is, Dionysus, so named from Mount Nysa; and some learned men suspect that Nysa is none other than Sinai, by a transposition of letters. That Arabia was called India by the Greeks could easily be proved by many testimonies. But there is also a Mount Nysa in India beyond the Caucasus, not far from the river Cophen, as Philostratus shows in the Life of Apollonius, lib. ii. cap. iv., and he relates that men planted it with vines in honor of Bacchus, who had there, of course, wrought wondrous deeds. The inhabitants of that region maintained, moreover, that this Bacchus was Assyrian, and that the Theban Bacchus was derived from him. Others say that the city situated at the foot of the mountain is called Nysa, and the mountain itself Meron. So Curtius, lib. viii. cap. x. Now Meron is the Hebrew word for “thigh.” Hence the fable of Bacchus sewn into the thigh of Jupiter — unless one suspects a Hebraism, and that “born from the thigh of Jupiter” means nothing other than “to be the son of God,” as pleases Heinsius in his Aristarchus. And these things are not unworthy of the mockeries with which Lucian greets them, Dialog. ix.

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XVIII. Moreover, Eusebius reports the birth and deeds of Dionysius of Thebes from Diodorus, in the Praeparatio Evangelica, bk. xx, ch. xx. He, having perhaps been the first among Europeans to make certain excursions into the coasts of Asia, among the fabulists of the following century drained all the ancient traditions concerning the Bacchuses mentioned above; and he became, as one man, everything that in reality was no single person; for upon him the myth-makers heaped together virtually all the traditions that had been handed down. Nor did this remarkable confusion stop there. Those who attributed to Bacchus the discovery of the vine and of vineyards — the framers of natural theology contended that by Bacchus was signified only wine, or autumn, or that season of the year in which vines ripen. So Lucretius teaches us, bk. i, 654-658: “Here, if anyone shall decide to call the sea Neptune, and grain Ceres, and chooses to abuse the name of Bacchus rather than to bring forth the proper term for wine, let us grant that he declares this globe of lands to be the Mother of the Gods, so long as he himself is not in reality such.” And Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae, bk. i: the fable of Bacchus fleeing to the sea — that is, certain persons think that the preparation of wine, long since known, is signified thereby; because wine is more pleasant when mixed with sea-water. But it is altogether evident that the fable was derived from the history of Moses.

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XIX. That they fashioned these things absurdly and ignorantly, Philo Byblius is a witness, in his preface to the history of Sanchuniatho: “But,” he says, “the later theologians, having from the beginning rejected those things which truly happened, devised allegories and fables in their place, and, by fabricating an affinity between worldly things, established mysteries.” That is: “But the younger theologians, after they had rejected those things which in truth had come to pass from the beginning, devised allegories and fables, and, having contrived a kinship with cosmic things, established mysteries.” And indeed he, having determined that all things said about the gods were to be referred to true histories, rejects on one hand that entire natural theology, and on the other hand the fiction of the poets. Moreover, innumerable other examples of this confusion are encountered everywhere. The history of the origin of the world as found in Diodorus Siculus, and especially in Sanchuniatho and that Philo Byblius, demonstrates the same thing: the first chapter of Genesis is transferred into the history of many centuries, attributed to various kings of uncertain identity; Heaven, Earth, Sun, Moon, and he who is said to be Pluto, have their place therein. Even the serpent himself is introduced. When one has been tossed about in these rough passages, anyone can readily conjecture how easily the ancient serpent could impose wicked opinions about God upon the human race, and ungodly forms of his own worship.

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XX. Pausanias speaks admirably in his Arcadica: “In all the ancient ages and in the events now grown obsolete, credence in them has been forfeited among the common people through the fault of those who buried the foundations of truth, as it were, beneath fables.” That is: “In all ancient ages and in events now long past, the faith due to them has been taken away from the people through the fault of those who buried what was laid upon truth as a foundation beneath fables.” They so corrupted and burdened truth itself with lies that they made it incredible. He then shows a little later how this came about: those, he says, who have fabricated fables, upon hearing those who attend with pleasure to such things, themselves immediately add something more; so that it comes about that “those who lend their ears to the monstrous inventions of such fictions themselves soon add something further, with the result that truth, adulterated as if by a flood of lies, utterly loses its authority.” XXI. Therefore, by the just judgment of God — who gave over to a reprobate mind those who hold the truth in unrighteousness — it came about that those who did not see fit to retain God in their knowledge were vain in their reasonings; and forthwith a veritable deluge of spiritual abominations, accompanied by all injustice, violence, and impurity, settled upon the whole world. This arose from the cunning of the devil and from the evil disposition of very many. For as polytheism grew stronger, there was nothing so vain, or so worthless, that it was not numbered among the gods. No stone, no piece of wood, no virtue, no vice, no good thing, no evil thing, but was worshipped. All creatures alike were affected by this madness, from the grass of the field to the highest stars of heaven. The apostle teaches us this: “They exchanged,” he says, “the glory of the incorruptible God for the likeness of an image of corruptible man, and of birds, and of four-footed beasts, and of reptiles,” Rom. i. 23. It is plain that Paul by these words censures idolaters of every kind. Maddened by Hellenism, imagining gods guilty of the lewdness of men, they fashioned images of the divine after the likeness of corruptible man. The worship of birds, four-footed beasts, and reptiles had its origin among the Egyptians. Philo says they fashion and adore as gods “dogs, wolves, lions, crocodiles, and very many other water creatures, land creatures, and winged creatures.” And Theophilus of Antioch, in his work To Autolycus, bk. i, says that it is not possible for him to enumerate all the kinds of living creatures worshipped by the Egyptians: creeping things, and birds, and wild beasts, and river-dwelling swimming things. Indeed, among those who are considered to have been the first to apostatize from the true God, He willed that the greatest example of diabolical dominion and tyranny should be displayed. For this reason one may contemplate in passing, as Paul did at Athens, those abominations of theirs — especially since Egyptian superstition by no means confined itself within the borders of Egypt.

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“We Romans have received into our temples your Isis and your half-divine dogs,” says Lucan, bk. vii. 831.

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XXII. I do not know what mysteries Athanasius Kircher lately attempted to draw out of their sacred rites, laboring with great and costly — yet fruitless, not to say ridiculous — effort to teach that those Egyptians alone were wise, whom the rest of the world has until now believed to have been foolish beyond the folly of ordinary humanity. He saw in their hieroglyphics things which, beyond all doubt, they themselves never saw, and which no one who deemed Christian modesty, or the claims of truth, to be of greater account than worldly vanity, would ever see. But —

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What God does not allow, life does not overcome. XXIII. We have shown what Paul determined regarding the manner of worshipping those religions; we have also produced the agreement of Philo the Jew, who spent his life in the capital of Egypt. Josephus likewise dwells at length on reproaching them for the same wickedness, in bk. i against Apion. At Exod. xii. 12, God threatens “that He will execute judgments against all the gods of the Egyptians.” That He gave effect to that threat, whatever it consisted in, Moses records at Num. xxxiii. 4. Among the other cattle, there is no doubt that He slew Apis himself and the other animals that were sacred to the Egyptians. What those who seem to themselves to be wise among the pagans — and seem to us to have been no less insane than the Egyptians — thought of the religious worship of the Egyptians, is well known. The Satirist, Sat. xv. 1-6:

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“Who does not know, Volusius of Bithynia, what monstrous things mad Egypt worships? One part adores the crocodile; another trembles before the Ibis, gorged with serpents. The golden image of the sacred long-tailed ape gleams …

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…There they venerate the blue-painted gods, here the fish of the river, there whole cities venerate the dog.”

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Anaxandrides, in Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae, bk. vii, addresses the Egyptians thus: “I cannot join forces with you, nor are our customs in agreement, nor our laws; but they differ very greatly from one another. You prostrate yourself before the ox, but I sacrifice it to the gods; you think the eel the greatest divinity, but we regard it as by far the most excellent dish … You venerate the dog, I beat it.” That is: “I cannot make war alongside you, nor are our customs in agreement, nor our laws; but they differ very greatly from one another. You adore the ox, I sacrifice it to the gods; you think the eel to be the greatest divine power; but for us it is a most excellent dish by far … You venerate the dog, I beat it.”

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And Antiphanes in Lycon:—

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And they say the Egyptians are wise, in that they deem the eel equal to the gods; for it is worth far more than the gods.

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For the gods we propitiate with prayers and vows alone; but these creatures can scarcely be approached with no fewer than twelve drachmas, or more: so entirely sacred is this beast—

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“For the rest, they say the Egyptians are prudent and intelligent, in that they consider the eel equal to the gods; for it is to be honored far more than the gods. We propitiate the gods with prayers alone and vows; but eels can scarcely be worshipped with an expenditure of no fewer than twelve drachmas, or more; so entirely sacred is this beast.”

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XXIV. Apollonius reproaches Thespesion, chief of the Gymnosophists, with this disgrace in Philostratus, while treating of statues and images, in De Vita Apollonii, lib. vi. cap. xix. Concerning the gods, he says — first I will ask by what reasoning you have been moved to set before your people for worship such absurd and ridiculous images of the gods, besides a very few: for only very few forms of the gods are visible that bear any trace of wisdom and divinity; but in the remaining temples, the likenesses of irrational and infamous animals are worshipped rather than those of the gods. The reply of Thespesion will not be unwelcome to the reader, if he wishes to consult the cited passage of the author. It is evident, moreover, from Philostratus himself, that the Egyptians were wholly unable to give any account of their mad worship; however much Kircher, after so many centuries had passed, pretends to have discovered in those monstrous images of gods the mysteries of all Christianity. Cicero considered that they had in view one single utility: “The Egyptians,” he says, “who are ridiculed, consecrated no animal except for some usefulness they derived from it,” lib. i. De Natura Deorum. But to the Egyptians Gildas, in his customary manner of dramatizing, adds the Britons, in De Excidio Britanniae: “The abominations of Britain,” he says, “diabolical as they are, nearly surpassing in number the Egyptian ones, some of which, with their forms still misshapen, standing in the usual manner within or outside the abandoned city walls, we behold with grim countenances.” Freed by the grace of Christ, we all stand aghast and utterly detest these monstrous crimes, this tyranny of the ancient serpent; and so justly to be abominated is the impiety of those who, though they wish to be called Christians and to be judged alone worthy of that most holy name, we hold, convicted by their own confessions, to be driven by the same, if not greater, madness. “For more tolerable is the error of those who worship in place of God a golden statue, or a silver one, or an image of some other material, as the Gentiles venerated their own gods, or a red cloth raised on a spear, which is reported of the Lapps, or living animals, as the Egyptians once did, than that of those who worship a piece of bread.” These are the words of the Jesuit Coster, Enchiridion, cap. vii. Here, to be sure, if we are human beings at all, if we are endowed with sense and reason, if any credit is to be given to the words of Holy Scripture, we have self-confessed defendants: that such idolatry is found among the sons of the most holy father the pope, the like of which has never been seen or heard of even in the very darkness of paganism. XXV. Moreover, since the world was overwhelmed by the multitude of gods, and men did not know whom or what they should worship, it was customary in invocations to use that phrase, “Whoever you are.” “Now whoever is God, I worship,” Plautus, Rudens i. 3. And, “We follow you, holy one of the gods, whoever you are,” Virgil, Aen. iv. 576.

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And in the Capitol a shield was consecrated, upon which was written: “To the Genius of the city of Rome, whether male or female.” XXVI. Hence also that formula for calling the gods forth from places besieged in war, which Macrobius records from the fragments of Sammonicus: “If there is a god or goddess under whose protection this people and city stands, and you especially who have taken upon yourself the protection of this city and people, I pray and worship you, and beg pardon of you, that you would forsake this people and city, leave behind their places, temples, sacred rites, and city; depart from them, cast upon that people and city fear, dread, and forgetfulness; and, coming over to me and mine, let our city, our places, temples, and sacred rites be more acceptable to you; be set over me also, the Roman people, and my soldiers, that we may know and understand; if you do this, I vow that I will build you temples and games.”

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XXVII. Hence it was believed that before any city was overthrown, the gods had abandoned it. So Virgil, concerning the destruction of Troy:—

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“All the gods have departed, leaving their shrines and altars, the gods by whom this empire had stood,” — Aen. ii. 351.

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XXVIII. For the most ancient records have handed down that the gods were seen carrying their images out of the temples when destruction had already drawn near. And in general terms Aeschylus, Seven Against Thebes, 219:—

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XXIX. This is why the Romans wished it to be kept secret under which god's protection the city of Rome stood, lest the gods, addressed by their proper names, might be exorcised by an enemy. This was guarded by pontifical law. And the pontiffs themselves prayed in this manner: “Jupiter, best and greatest! or by whatever other name you may wish to be called.”

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XXX. I would wonder beyond measure that these empty fictions ever pleased wise men, and those who desired to live according to reason, were it not permitted by daily examples to see what tyranny vain superstition exercises over the minds of men. So, in a manner not unlike that which we related from Sammonicus, when, a battle having been joined at the shrine of Saint Quentin, the Spanish were compelled to throw down and destroy the temple dedicated to Saint Lawrence, into which the enemy had withdrawn, King Philip bound himself by a vow to the saint that he would compensate for the damage inflicted by erecting another and much larger temple. This was the occasion for the construction of the Escorial buildings dedicated to Lawrence, which an anonymous poet elegantly set forth as follows:

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“These richest temples he built for you, O Lawrence; after Philip, in the war at Quintini, had thrown down those that once stood there, because the enclosed enemy had hidden in fear beneath the altars and within the walls, and had in vain invoked your divine power — to which god the king said: ‘Here also let it be permitted me to exact punishment, and to bury the hostile nation beneath the sacred ruins, and to violate the altars with blood — to one who will give greater things.’”

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XXXI. And clearly in the form of ancient vows, which Papinius celebrates in his Tydeus, Thebaid, lib. ii. 726–734: “If, with the ancestral arms of Parthaon,

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I am borne into battle, and if martial Pleuron lies open to me upon my return: then in the midst of the city I will dedicate golden temples to you,

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upon the hills, from which it is sweet to look down upon the Ionian storms,

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and where the turbid Achelous, raising the sea upon its tawny headland, flows out past the Echinades islands that lie before it.

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Here I will depict the battles of the forefathers, and the dread countenances of great-souled kings, and affix their arms to the proud domes.”

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XXXII. The ignorance of the true God is the fountain and origin of all evils. From this source, those impious and villainous little men set forth for veneration gods who were themselves stupid, foolish, filthy, defiled with robberies, quarrels, wars, adulteries, and unspeakable sins — fit objects of derision and yet offered for imitation. And so the remnants of the natural light were extinguished; nor was any greater care taken of the works of God, which manifest His eternal power and deity. In this way Hellenism finally prevailed — that is, the theology of the Gentiles in its ethnic form. Hence all the gods, greater, middle, and least, came forth. XXXIII. How great a calamity those monstrous creations of the poets inflicted upon the human race — with respect to honorable morals, a tranquil life consonant with reason, civil order, and the threat of eternal punishments — is well known; it will suffice to set forth one or two detestable examples. Saturn, who is Kronos, was among them also Chronos, that is, Time. Thus in natural theology they were confounded together — and Noah also was drawn in from a most corrupted tradition. Time and space are connected through the motion of the heavens. Hence Saturn is called the son of Uranus, that is, of Heaven. So also Noah is reckoned, since all others were destroyed in the universal ruin of the flood. And they fabricated the story that Saturn devoured his own children and then vomited them up again — whether because time in its cycles begets all things, consumes them, reabsorbs them, and casts them forth; or because Noah, having enclosed his sons with him in the ark, restored them as it were to life again for the inhabited world — is uncertain. It is evident that the fable was formed from an exceedingly obscure tradition and an ingenious allegory. And from this source at length, by the aid of Satan, there emerged the horrible madness of idolatry. And to that unspeakable superstition was joined monstrous cruelty. For those foolish little men, having adopted — I know not what — ceremonies as a solace in their misery, were sacrificing their own children to Saturn. Hence arose what was called the Tomb of Children. XXXIV. But this wickedness seems also to be older than all the Greek monstrosities; that it received increase from them, no one doubts. From there it at last became universal. Nor is there any part of Satanic worship in which the human race is found to have conspired more unanimously. Whether the ancient serpent — who was himself one day to be triumphed over on the cross of Christ — intended here to exalt himself magnificently and to triumph over defeated sinners; or whether by this sacrifice he intended to implant prejudices and contempt against the sacrifice of Christ in the minds of men, it is established that he poured out all his venom far and wide in promoting this crime. Let us review some examples. Concerning the Africans the matter is well known: “Children in Africa were openly sacrificed to Saturn right up to the proconsulship of Tiberius,” Tertull. Apol. cap. viii. Arnobius records the same. When the Carthaginians had been defeated by Agathocles, king of the Sicilians, thinking that God was angry with them, in order that they might more diligently make expiation, they sacrificed two hundred sons of noblemen to Saturn; Pescennius Festus, cited by Lactantius, is the witness. Pressed by the Roman war, they performed the same rites, and Aspar, the very son of Hannibal himself, was slain. Hence Silius, in book iv of the Punica, introduces Amilce, his wife, lamenting this crime:—

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“What piety is this, moreover, to sprinkle the shrines with gore? Alas, the prime cause of crimes for wretched mortals is not to know the nature of God; go, offer your prayers rightly with pious incense, and turn aside these savage rites of slaughter.

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God is gentle and akin to man: I pray that this may suffice — to have seen slaughtered bullocks before the altars; or if so great a wickedness remains fixed and settled in the will,

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Me, me — I who bore them — consume with your vows; why do you delight to rob the Libyan lands of such character?”

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XXXV. Among the Romans it was customary for living men to devote themselves to the gods of the underworld; the history of the Decii is well known: the father devoted himself in like manner in the Gallic war, the son in the Samnite war; whom Juvenal celebrates in Sat. vi. 254:—

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“The souls of the Decii were plebeian, plebeian were their names; yet for the sake of whole legions, and for all the allied forces, and all the Latin youth, they sufficed as offerings to the gods of the underworld and to earth their parent; for the Decii were worth more than those who were saved by them.”

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XXXVI. Arnobius affirms that it was once customary to worship Jupiter Latiaris with homicide. Under the consulship of Cornelius Lentulus and Publius Licinius Crassus, a decree of the senate was passed that no human being should be sacrificed. And Pliny, Nat. Hist. lib. xxx. cap. i, relates that prodigious rites had openly been celebrated up to that time. And so, when the Gauls were attacking, “the elders, who had held the highest offices, gathered in the forum, and there, with the pontiff pronouncing the devotion, consecrated themselves to the gods of the dead,” as recorded in Florus, lib. i. 13. XXXVII. Cicero, in his oration Pro Fonteio, x., also relates that the Gauls were accustomed to appease the gods with these abominable victims: “Who does not know,” he says, “that they retain to this very day that monstrous and barbarous custom of sacrificing human beings?” Plutarch also notes that a Gaul and a Gallic woman were customarily sacrificed at Rome every year. The Roman emperor Hadrian sacrificed his favorite Antinous to the gods in Egypt. Dio, in Xiphilinus, lib. lxix, says: “Antinous died in Egypt, whether because he fell into the Nile, as Hadrian writes, or because he was sacrificed, which is the truth.” And Hadrian made him a god after his sacrifice. Procopius records that the inhabitants of the isle of Thule observed this custom of sacrificing human beings down to his own times. The same practice prevailed among the Britons. When the island of Mona was conquered by Paulinus, “a garrison was placed over the defeated, and the groves sacred to savage superstitions were cut down; for they held it lawful to shed the blood of captives upon the altars and to consult the gods by means of human entrails,” as Tacitus says, Annal. lib. xiv. cap. xxx. And Horace, in reference to that place:—

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“I shall see the Britons, savage to strangers.”

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Acron: “The Britons used to slaughter strangers as a sacrificial victim.” The gods to whom the Gauls made propitiation with human blood are mentioned by Lucan, i. 444:— “And those who are appeased with fierce blood, to whom cruel

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Teutates, and Hesus with his savage altars; and Taranis, no milder than the Scythian face of Diana.

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XXXVIII. That all of these were gods of the Britons, the most diligent Camden proves in his “Britannia”; and that the Gauls received the whole discipline of the Druids from the Britons, Caesar himself reports, in Bell. Gall. lib. vi. The madness of the Germans was the same. “They celebrate, with a man publicly sacrificed, the dreadful beginnings of their rites,” says Tacitus. And again: “Above all gods they worship Mercury, to whom on certain days they hold it lawful to offer human victims as well.” De Mor. German. ix. Camerarius reports that marble monuments of this impiety among the Etruscans still survive, and that he himself saw one of them at Perugia: Medit. Histor. lib. i. Concerning the Goths, Jordanes writes: “They always propitiated Mars with most savage worship, for the deaths of captives were his victims.” The Greeks, bound by the same crime, report that Erechthonius, the most ancient king of Attica, sacrificed his own two daughters. And Athenaeus, Deipnosoph. lib. xiii, shows that Neanthes of Cyzicus devoted himself; and Epimenides purified the whole land of Attica from certain ancient crimes with human blood — he who was the one who urged the Athenians to erect an altar to the Unknown God. Among the Thebans who were of Tyrian origin, from whom this superstition spread, Menoeceus is celebrated, who devoted himself for the city and killed himself, propitiating the gods of the underworld with his own blood; whose death Papinius Statius gloriously celebrates in Thebaid. lib. x. 756–769: “But pious Menoeceus, in a chosen part of the walls, now consecrated, more majestic in countenance than his accustomed face, as if suddenly sent down to earth from the heavenly vault, stood forth, plainly recognizable with his helmet removed, and looked down upon the battle-lines of men, and with a deep shout turned the field and commanded silence in the war. O gods of arms, and you, O Phoebus, who in so great a death indulge me to die, grant joys to Thebes — what I have covenanted, and what I have lavishly purchased with all my blood; and to the Tyrians restore temples, fields, homes, marriages, children by my death, if I have pleased you as a willing sacrifice.” With these words the poet wonderfully depicted the common understanding of the nations concerning expiatory sacrifices; as also afterward in the mother’s lament: “Was it to be a lustral offering to savage Thebes, O glorious boy, that I, a lowly mother, nurtured your devoted head?” — 798, 794.

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XXXIX. That the Tyrians sacrificed a freeborn boy to Saturn, Curtius shows in lib. iv. cap. iii. That the Egyptians sacrificed living men to their brutish gods is attested by Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus. That Menelaus sacrificed two boys in Egypt, the priests told Herodotus in

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Clio, pag. 158. “That the Thracians propitiated the gods with human blood,” says Florus, Histor. lib. ii. cap. iv. The Celts, when sacrificing a man, strike him with a sword over a crosswise hurdle, as Diodorus attests, lib. v. The Normans and Danes every year in the month of January sacrificed to their gods ninety-nine men, the same number of horses, along with dogs, as Ditmar attests, lib. x. Concerning the Massilians, Lucan writes in lib. iii. 803–305:

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The sacred rites of the gods; altars built for funereal sacrifices: and every tree purified with human blood.

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XL. (footnote: In Rhodes, on the sixteenth day before the Kalends of November, a certain man was sacrificed to Saturn.) “A certain man was sacrificed in Rhodes on the sixteenth of the Kalends of November to Saturn,” says Theodoret, lib. vii. Greecor. Affec. And (footnote: The Phoenicians, in great calamities of wars, or droughts, or pestilences, sacrificed to Saturn one of their dearest, chosen for this purpose by common vote.) says Porphyry, de Abstinent. Anim. lib. ii.: “The Phoenicians, in great calamities of wars, or droughts, or pestilences, sacrificed one of their dearest to Saturn, one bound to this by common vote.” The same pestilence invaded even the people of God themselves. “They sacrificed their sons and their daughters to demons, and poured out the blood of the innocent — their sons and daughters whom they sacrificed to the idols of Canaan,” Ps. cvi. 37, 38. Whoever desires more may add also what we noted in the little work On Divine Justice, cap. viii. I would show that certain Christians, at least in name, defiled themselves with this crime, were it not a matter of shame.

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XLI. Porphyry traces the origin of these sacrifices to Abraham, as Eusebius attests, Preepar. Evangel. lib. i. cap. ix. He says that Abraham was called Saturn; and that his daughter, born of Queen Anobreta, was sacrificed. The shameful distortion of this kind, in investigating the origins of things and nations, is well known to be exposed everywhere by profane writers. Varro is of the opinion that because the human race is the best of all seeds, the ancients devised this kind of sacrifice. The Druids held that the divine power of the immortal gods could not be appeased except by the life of a man given in exchange for the life of a man, as Caesar attests, de Bell. Gall. lib. vii. It is clear that the human race derived the practice of sacrifices for the expiation of sins from an ancient and universal tradition. That the just and supreme God could be appeased by the blood of cattle on account of the sins of men, anxious and doubting minds, agitated by dread and the sense of sin, could never fully persuade themselves: Satan, in his accustomed manner, assails those who are troubled and nearly in despair. He easily persuades men that they have nothing more precious than themselves. Hence the impulse to sacrifice themselves and others. That a conscience, tormented and terrified by the sense of sin and the fear of punishment, was the root of this evil, the prophet shows, Mic. vi. 7; and, with Satan serving as midwife, this monster was brought to light. They often received no other answer from the oracles — whether fearing some great thing or daring it — than that propitiation must be made with human blood: note

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(footnote: 1 See vol. x. of the author’s works, from this edition — there are accounts of Menoeceus and Iphigenia.) That the custom of the Lacedaemonians of scourging themselves in the worship of the gods had no other origin, Apollonius relates in Philostratus, lib. vi. cap. x., saying (footnote: The custom of the scourging in Scythia is maintained in honor of Diana, because, as they say, the oracles so commanded; but to resist the gods is a kind of madness, I think.) — that is: “The custom of scourging is preserved in Scythia in honor of Diana, because, as they say, the oracles commanded it; but to resist the gods is a kind of madness, I think.” And Pausanias, Boetica: (footnote: The Delphic oracle responded to the Megarians that a handsome boy was to be sacrificed to Bacchus.) “The Delphic oracle responded to the Megarians that a handsome boy was to be offered to Bacchus.” Things like these occur everywhere in the historians; Satanic malice, having progressed thus far, found no further height to which it might ascend.

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XLII. But there is no end to this impious heap. It is well known that the adulteries and debaucheries of the filthy gods were also an incitement and a justification to the great majority for perpetrating all manner of impure offenses; to which I will add that example in second place. For after they had fashioned these gods in their own image — that is, liars, perjurers, and defiled in every impurity — they straightway fashioned them likewise as such. “Remove the quarrels, the lies, the battles, the perjuries, the adulteries of the gods, and certain ancient writers who now stride with giant step will be dwarfs”; on these writers, alas, Christian youth is still polluted; and to that Moloch — as Johann Comenius, a learned and pious man, laments — it is sacrificed. I am unwilling, by repetition, to thrust upon chaste ears the most foul crimes that must be forever kept silent by the godly. In order to make plain to what end the devil suggested these things to the minds of wicked men, a few things may be noted: let that word of Mercury concerning Jupiter in Plautus, Prolog. ad Amphitr., suffice: “For I believe you know by now what my father is like; how free he is of these unavenged deeds, and what a great lover he is, whenever something once pleases him.” And: “As often as He who leads the clouds and the assembly assumes lesser forms.” — Senec. Hippol.

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XLII. Ah, how often does wet and soft clay drink in blasphemies of this kind, with the foolish molder applauding! Augustine puts it well: “All the worshipers of such gods, as soon as lust has driven them on, fervently — as Persius says — dipped in poison, look more to what they have done shamefully than to what Plato has taught or Cato has decreed,” de Civitat. Dei, lib. ii. cap. vii. The reader will find more concerning the most filthy worship of the mother of the gods in that place. What kinds of passions and affections the human race — already of itself too inclined to vices — conceived from the examples of these gods set before it, Terence displays in his Chaerea before the eyes of all, Eunuch., Act i. Sc. 5, 35:

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— ‘While preparations are being made, the maiden sits in the chamber, gazing up at a certain painted panel, on which there was this picture: how Jupiter once, they say, sent a shower of gold into the lap of Danae. I myself also began to look at this; and because he had long ago played a similar game, my heart rejoiced all the more; that a god had transformed himself into a man, and had come secretly through another’s roof tiles through the skylight, having deceived the woman.

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But what sort of God? One who shakes the highest temples of heaven with His thunder.

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Shall I, a little man, not do this? I indeed did that very thing, and gladly.’”

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XLIV. Would that the same ruin were no longer being carried into the minds of youth through indecent paintings and the reading of poets. But this impiety has advanced so far that they openly exhorted one another, by the example of the gods, to perpetrate the most filthy crimes. So Catullus, lxviii. 137–140:

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“Let us not be too troublesome in the manner of fools; often even Juno, greatest of heaven’s dwellers, burned with daily anger at her husband’s fault, learning of the many thefts of all-willing Jove.”

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XLV. Moreover, it was the custom of very many to worship the gods even by means of the most wicked crimes. That the Babylonians prostituted their own daughters in the temples is reported by Herodot., lib. 1, and Strab. Geog. lib. xvi.

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XLVI. Another plague no less deadly, taking its origin from this impiety, lay heavy upon the world. For after that wicked persuasion concerning the gods had prevailed among the common people, all manner of most wicked scoundrels — especially those who served those gods in sacred rites — feigning the names and characters of those gods, committed and practiced innumerable crimes: robberies, adulteries, thefts, acts of brigandage. In the mountains, caves, forests, temples, on the banks of rivers, on the seashores, everything was full of phantoms of this kind. Let the well-known story of the crime perpetrated in the temple of Isis at Rome serve as an example, which Josephus relates, Antiquit. lib. xviii. cap. iv. Mundus, a Roman knight, after he had long attempted in vain to overcome the chastity of Paulina, a most honorable matron, was secretly brought into the temple by the priests under the name of Anubis, and with the consent of the woman’s husband, he violated her. The bastard and illegitimate sons of robbers, thieves, tyrants, and priests were the greater part of the ancient heroes.

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XLVII. And the reason for this is given, not ineptly, by the eminent historian, why Romulus did not institute Vestal Virgins: he says — the Greek text at this point being damaged in the source — that is, “He did not institute virgins as priestesses, mindful” (as it seems to me at least) “of his mother’s disgrace, who had lost her virginity in the service of that goddess” (having been violated, namely, by a priest), “nor would he have been able, had he detected any sacred minister of the goddess having violated her chastity, to punish her according to the ancestral laws, on account of the remembrance of his own household’s disgrace,” Dionys. Halicarnass. Histor. lib. ii. cap. 65.

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XLVIII. In the same manner, that the Roman priests, as long as the authority of ignorance prevailed everywhere and the papacy held the evangelical truth captive, committed, under disguise, every manner of crime — no one among the papists themselves, unless he is shamelessly brazen, dares to deny. For after they had stupidly and persistently persuaded the blind populace that certain gentle spirits, by no means very hostile to the human race, frequented houses by night and did things too shameful to relate, they themselves, masked under the name of those spirits, truly carried out all those most foul crimes which they wished, most foolishly and ridiculously, to ascribe to those supposedly harmless spirits. Thus our own Chaucer, concerning a certain fraternal convent well-known in his day:—

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“For there as wont to walken was an elfe, There walketh now the Limitor himselfe. In every bush, and under every tree, There nis none other incubus but he.”

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XLIX. Now that the observance of virtue had been rendered nearly impossible for the Greeks by this impiety — charging Apollonius with it — the Indian philosopher Iarchas affirms, in Philostratus, book iii, ch. vii, of the Life of Apollonius: “But those who are reckoned among you as the wisest do not permit you to be just and good, even if you wished to be.” And he adds the reason, that they held the most wicked of men in the place of gods. Apollonius himself openly confessed the same thing, book v, ch. v: “For the fictions about heroes, which form the whole subject-matter of the poets, corrupt the ears of their hearers; recounting their illicit and abominable loves — such as marriages of brothers and sisters, calumnies against the gods, the devouring of children, mutual and base quarrels, acts of injustice, unrestrained villanies, and the dragging away of those who had done no wrong, and the lover, and the one consumed by jealousy, and the one who strives for riches or for tyranny — after the manner of the unwise.” That is: “The things fabricated about heroes, which form the entire material of the poets, corrupt the ears of those who hear them; recounting their illicit and abominable loves — such as marriages of brothers and sisters, and calumnies against the gods, and the devouring of children, and base and mutual altercations; for when these things are brought forward by the poets as actual deeds, they lead men to love, envy, and desire for riches and power.” For no one can think himself to be sinning while he imitates the gods. Marcus Tullius also repeats the same things in book i of On the Nature of the Gods, ch. xvi: “I have set forth,” he says, “not so much the judgments of philosophers as the dreams of madmen; for those things which the voices of the poets have poured forth are not much more absurd, which, by their very charm, have made their impression — introducing gods inflamed with anger and raging with lust, making us see their wars, battles, combats, wounds; and besides, their feuds, dissensions, discords, births, deaths, complaints, lamentations, lusts poured out in every kind of intemperance, adulteries, chains, intercourse with the human race, and mortals begotten from an immortal.” And what Plato has argued to the same end in the Timaeus, let the reader consult, for it is worth reading.

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L. Aligned alongside the poets were the lawgivers and philosophers. It pleased the latter to forge a certain natural theology; which in reality was nothing other than the idolatry of the first apostates in the worship of the works of creation. For with the benefit of the traditions lost — that is, utterly destroyed by the fables of the poets — and with the mind of the common people held captive besides by insurmountable prejudices, neither the one party nor the other was ever able, and they scarcely attempted, to liberate natural theology from the impure and most pernicious fables and idolatrous worship.

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LI. In fashioning theology, the lawgivers had scarcely anything else in mind than to regulate religion in such a way that no disturbances or evils might arise from it in the civil state. This is still the opinion of most politicians concerning religion. They therefore found it necessary to inscribe into the tables of the laws all the errors and fables and the entire idolatry with which the poets had infected the peoples — provided only that these did not conflict, as they say, with the public governance of cities or with honorable morals.

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LII. It is worth observing Plato himself bowing to the prejudices of the common people. He writes as follows in the Timaeus: “Concerning the other divine beings — those whom we call the lesser gods — to speak of their generation and to comprehend so great a matter in our minds is beyond our faculty and our powers. We must trust those who have previously spoken and who, being themselves the offspring of the gods as they claimed, surely knew their own ancestors. It is impossible to disbelieve the children of the gods, even if they speak without probable signs or necessary proofs; but because they claim to speak of their own kindred and of things known to themselves, we must obey the ancient law and custom and give credence to them. Thus, in accordance with their tradition, let the generation of these gods be accepted.” So he writes, mindful, no doubt, of what had befallen his teacher Socrates, who was condemned to death precisely because he refused to hold as gods those whom the city held as gods. He therefore admits the popular gods, though not without an open mockery of the credulity of the common people. He argues similarly in book two of the Republic. Strabo, in Geographica, book i, teaches that the lawgivers had deliberately invented fables for religion in order to restrain the minds of peoples through a certain terror of invisible evils: “Thunderbolt,” he says, “and aegis, and trident, and torches, and serpents, and the thyrsus-bearers, and the weapons of the gods — these are myths, and the whole theurgical craft has demonstrated these through bugbears to those who are without understanding.” And so it was once done by the priests in the papacy. For after they had, through the grossest ignorance and wicked morals, utterly rooted out all efficacy of the Christian religion from the minds of the common people, they found it necessary to devise purgatory and certain other terrors, in order to keep that people somehow within the bounds of duty. LIII. And this was the most corrupt theology of the Gentiles; concerning the sacred —

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CHAP. VIII.] ON CORRUPTION AND LOSS, liii

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Seneca: “All these things the wise man will observe as if commanded by the laws, not as if pleasing to the gods.” Since, therefore, the common people would not suffer the poetic furies to be taken from them, and were willing to be displaced in their civic standing sooner than in their criminal religious opinions, while the lawgivers found it sufficient to seize all the old fables for their own purposes, the philosophers repudiated this entire mythological theology as a fiction devised for the maintenance of order among men in life. And so the worthless wares were cheapened, and were always held of little account.

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LIV. The philosophers appeared more sharp-sighted. They surveyed everything most carefully, investigating the corrupted theology. But, to speak plainly, they were unable to extricate themselves from the corrupted traditions and the monstrous fictions of the poets, except by means of opinions drawn from the pools of atheism. From these there arose a natural theology. That this was the mark of men hardened in the greatest wickedness and unwilling to yield to the truth, Eusebius demonstrates so brilliantly in his books on the Preparation for the Gospel that nothing need be added to them. And so this class of men also “became utterly vain, and their foolish heart was darkened.” LV. And by these degrees all knowledge of God was corrupted. Yet among the bad — though not the worst — methods of practicing religion, the common people appear to have retained something beyond which those who lacked any wisdom beyond obscure traditions interlarded with the monstrous fictions of fables knew nothing. Those who aspired to the praise of the most shrewd inquiry and acumen in sacred things were plainly foolish. The old opinion prevailed among the common people concerning some kind of exercise of judgment after this life and a different state of men among the shades below, and the people were never willing to dissent from themselves on this matter. How much weight this persuasion has brought to bear in restraining the wickedness and impiety rampant upon the earth is evident. Even after all that theology of former ages had at last been everywhere among the nations destroyed, those who live outside the knowledge of Christ have some presentiment, I know not what, concerning that judgment and the future state. But the entire philosophical senate almost unanimously laughed at this whole opinion as an idle tale — I know not whether with a sober laughter. LVI. And this was the superstition of the Gentiles. It pleased him to express the term deisidaimonia by that word. The etymology of the word varies. The father of Roman eloquence affirms that superstition was named from those who prayed all day long that their sons might survive them. The comic poets testify that parents were daily urgent in this vow:—

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“As you wish your only son to survive safe and sound, and to outlive you.” —Plaut., Asinaria, Act I, Sc. i. 6.

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“By Castor, a fine boy has been born to Pamphilus; I pray the gods that he may survive.” —Terent., Andria, Act III, Sc. ii.

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And in the Heautontimorumenos, Act V, Sc. iv. 7: “May you outlive both me and him.”

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Servius writes that old women, who have survived through a long age, “being addicted to idle things, rave while wishing to appear excessively religious.”

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Nor does Donatus say otherwise. “The superstitious,” he says, “are old men and women who, having survived to a great age, now rave;” whence also “the superstitious are those who fear the gods too much,” which is a sign of raving. Hence the Satirist:

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“This god-fearing great-aunt, or aunt who fears the divine, lifts the boy from his cradle,

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and with her infamous finger wipes his forehead and wet lips,

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having first purified them with her ritual spittle.

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He purifies them.’ —Pers., Sat. ii. 31–34. This custom is retained in the baptism of the papists. Lactantius holds that the “superstitious” are those “who cultivate the memory of deceased ancestors,” Instit., lib. ii, cap. xxviii. Also superstitious is one who is divinely inspired and a divine seer — as Plautus says: “This man is indeed superstitious; he speaks true things,” in Curculio, Act III. 27. Superstition, however, denotes either a corrupt disposition of the soul regarding divine things, or a vain and foolish worship. On the former sense, Cicero and Plutarch have said a great many things most erroneously — the former scattered throughout his writings, the latter in a particular and elegant treatise on superstition. In the latter sense, Tacitus impiously calls our religion a destructive superstition, Annals, lib. xv.; and Suetonius in his Life of Nero calls Christians “a race of men given to a new and maleficent superstition.” Some have even rejected all religion under the name of superstition:

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“Empty superstition; virtue alone is the goddess in the breast.”

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LVII. Would that even today no one who raves in this madness could be found. Yet although the religion of the pagans was nothing other than the most pernicious superstition, they themselves acknowledged the distinction; and they asserted that superstition was necessary on account of the common multitude, who could not be restrained without it. Strabo puts it admirably — writing that myth and the fearful, the monstrous, and the marvelous hold sway over the common crowd; that those who govern cities use these as a preliminary hold upon the minds of the masses, for when they hear accounts of the noble deeds of heroes such as Heracles and Theseus, and of the honors bestowed by the gods, or when they see paintings and images bearing some such story of suffering, they are moved to piety. But when one would call the multitude to virtue through reason, relying on the words and deeds of philosophers, it is not so easy to lead a mass of women and all the common throng to piety, holiness, and faith — it must rather be done through superstition and the fear of the divine (Geographica, lib. i.). Who would not think he was hearing the supreme pontiff speaking from his chair! This vice, however, as the great Plato admirably explains in all things, he says — it is the habit of women especially, and of all those who are in any notable weakness, danger, or serious want, and conversely, when some abundance flows in upon them that seems to be at hand, always to consecrate something and to vow sacrifices and to promise statues to gods and daemons and the children of the gods; and both when apparitions appear to those awake through terrors, and when in their very dreams they recall having seen many things, seeking to bring remedies to each case, they have filled all houses and all villages with altars and shrines, and by these rites have dedicated places as if they were pure (De Legibus, lib. x, sub fin.) — that is: “It is the custom especially of women, and of those who are held by some notable infirmity, or who are in some danger, or who labor under some grievous want, and on the other hand, when some abundance of a thing overflows, as it seems to be present, always to consecrate things and to vow offerings and to promise statues to gods and daemons and the sons of the gods; and then when apparitions appear to those keeping watch because of terrors, and also in their very dreams, calling to mind that they had seen many things, and where they attempt to bring remedies to each, they have filled all homes, all villages with altars and shrines, and in these rites have dedicated places as if purified.” In what other words a thorough papist could paint that superstition which flourishes in popery more superstitiously, I truly do not know. So Cicero on religion and superstition, in the second book On Divination, toward the end: “Wherefore, as religion ought also to be promoted — that which is joined with the knowledge of nature — so all the roots of superstition must be torn out. For superstition presses hard and urges, and wherever you turn, it pursues you; whether you hear a soothsayer or an omen; whether you sacrifice or look at a bird; whether you see a Chaldean or a haruspex; if lightning flashes, if it thunders, if anything is struck from the sky; if something is born or done that resembles a portent — things of which it is necessary that something nearly always comes to pass — so that one can never rest with a quiet mind.” I have cited these things so that we may know that under every profession of whatever religion, superstition is everywhere like unto itself. LVIII. Moreover, as to those things pertaining to the religion or superstition of the pagans, many have committed them to memory; what the manner of cultivating religions was according to their understanding, Varro, Cicero, Ovid, Festus Pompeius, Macrobius, Censorinus, Pliny, and most historians explain in the life of Numa. It is certain that some traces of truth lay hidden in the ceremonies as received from the fathers. As for those things which fell from their lips — whether unwillingly, or while engaged in other matters, or while themselves searching for the very truth — we have a sufficiently abundant harvest of testimonies of purer theology in Josephus, Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Eusebius, Theodoret, Lactantius, Augustine, Steuco of Gubbio, Horneius, Grotius, and countless others among more recent writers. The foolishness, stupidity, impiety, frenzy, and madness of the worship and the whole religion that flourished among them are admirably exposed — after the apostle himself in the first chapter of the Epistle to the Romans — by Tertullian, Eusebius, Augustine, Theodoret, and others; Maimonides, Giraldus, Stucky, Vossius, and Selden, with Hesiod, Cicero, Plutarch, Strabo, Pliny, and Seneca not dissenting, set forth elegantly and lucidly the origin, the practice, and the secrets of idolatry.

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LIX. But after religion among the nations had grown into so great a mass of superstition and idolatry, emerging from an infinite heap of fables — such that nothing more foolish, or more abhorrent to all natural theology, could ever have been devised — in the end all the rites and the entire worship of the gods began to cause shame to every person of the greatest wisdom, so that beyond the contemplation of nature and the observance of what is right and honorable, they wished to have nothing more in common with the gods. So concerning Socrates, Cicero says in the Academica Quaestiones, lib. i, §4: “Socrates,” he says, “seems to me to have brought philosophy down to common life, so that he might inquire about virtues and vices and about all good and evil things; but heavenly matters he considered either to be far beyond our knowledge, or — even if they were known to the greatest degree — they contribute nothing to living well.” And Tacitus, in the Annals, book six, ch. xxii.: “When I hear these and such like things, my judgment remains uncertain whether the affairs of mortals are governed by fate and immutable necessity, or by chance; for you will find the wisest of the ancients, and those who emulate their school, of opposed views; and many have the settled opinion that the gods have no care for the beginnings of our existence, nor for its end, nor indeed for men at all.” And Seneca: “We shall worship in such a way that we remember the worship of Him pertains more to custom than to reality.” To these correspond those words in which Marcus Tullius closes his most learned books On the Nature of the Gods: “When these things had been said,” he writes, “we parted in such a way that to Velleius it seemed that the view of Cotta

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the argument seemed truer, while to me the argument of Balbus seemed more inclined toward the likeness of truth.” And thus he had earlier set forth the judgment of his own mind on all divine matters at the beginning of the first book (ch. v.): “We are not,” he says, “those to whom nothing seems true; but we are those who say that to all true things certain false things are joined with such great similarity that in them there is no certain mark for judging and assenting.”

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LX. It pleased Satan that they should thus waver; because he had nothing certain to put in place of the truths he had taken away. Hence when the Athenians consulted the Pythian Apollo as to which religions they should especially observe, the oracle was given that they should follow those which were in the custom of the ancestors — as the same Cicero testifies in De Legibus. And so at last every good and wise person came to agree upon that religion which Lucan ascribes to Cato:—

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“This was the unbending school of stern Cato: to keep to the mean, to hold to the limit, to follow nature, and to spend his life for his country; to believe himself born not for himself, but for the whole world. For him a banquet was to have overcome hunger; and great household gods, to have warded off winter with a roof; and costly raiment, to have clothed his limbs above with the rough toga in the Roman manner of the Quirites; and for him the highest use of Venus was offspring. He is a father to the city and a husband to the city; a cultivator of justice, a keeper of rigid honor; good for the common welfare.” — Lib. ii, 381–391.

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Persius also speaks admirably concerning that state of affairs and that uncertainty by which all were agitated:—

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“What does it help to bring our vices into the temples, and to derive blessings from the gods from this wicked flesh? Tell me, pontiffs, what does gold do in a sacred place? Surely the same as what dolls dedicated by a maiden to Venus do. Why do we not offer to the powers above that which the blear-eyed offspring of great Messalla cannot give from a great platter! A well-ordered sense of right and duty in the soul, and the holy retreats of the mind, and a breast steeped in noble honor — these let me offer when I approach the temples, and I will sacrifice with a handful of meal.” — Sat. ii. 62, etc.

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LXI. At last, weary of the fables, they poured themselves out in contempt of the gods upon whatever occasion presented itself. Let the most pious orator himself serve as an example — Cicero speaking before the pontiffs, in his oration For His House, against Clodius: “You deny,” he says, “that what I am accustomed to proclaim about myself is to be endured; and you, a clever man, introduce also an urbane and charming turn of speech: that I am accustomed to say that I am Jupiter, and likewise to assert that Minerva is my sister. I am not so insolent in saying that I am Jupiter as I am unlearned in thinking that Minerva is the sister of Jupiter. But for all that, I claim a virgin sister for myself; you did not allow your sister to remain a virgin. But see to it whether you ought to call yourself Jupiter, since you are able to call the same woman both your sister and your wife.” ch. xxxiv. LXII. Also to Antony in his drunkenness, pretending to be Bacchus, the Athenians publicly betrothed their own Minerva with solemn ceremonies — as Dio testifies, Hist. lib. xlviii. Nor, when placed in dangers, was there any expectation of help or aid from those gods. Hence King Porus, when his friends urged him to sacrifice to the river so that it might not bear the Macedonian rafts nor afford Alexander an easy crossing, replied — as the wise Indians report in Philostratus, Vita Apollonii, lib. i, ch. x — “It is not for those who bear arms to supplicate.”

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LXIII. Those who think Nero deserves to be counted among human beings should see in Suetonius how he treated the gods. Nor without cause did Seneca ascribe to him that utterance which, as the prophet testifies, Isa. xliv., would well suit all idolaters, in the Tragedies, Octavia, Act 2: “Shall I foolishly fear the gods, when I myself make them?”

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Nor is it otherwise in the greatest of poets, where Achilles speaks, Il. x. 15, 20:

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“But you, Hector — you shall make atonement to all the gods…”

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“How shall I repay you, if only I have strength to do so?” “But you, O worst of divine Titans, have done me the greatest wrong; you, wicked one, shall pay me the penalty, if strength be mine.” And Propertius:

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“Good Sense, if you are any goddess at all, I dedicate myself to your shrines: so many of my prayers had fallen on deaf Jupiter.”

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LXIV. Tertullian, however, sharply attacks all this impiety in the Apology — that is, after his manner: “The household gods,” he says, “whom you call lares, you handle by domestic power — pledging them, selling them, exchanging them — sometimes making Saturn into a cooking-pot, sometimes Minerva into a ladle, according to how worn and battered each has become; each is worshipped only as long as its master has found the domestic necessity more pressing.”

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LXV. Having set forth the origins and progress of the theology of the Gentiles, its catastrophe must now be briefly treated. For God had determined from the foundations of the world, at an appointed time, to send to them His Son for their revelation and redemption. But He was pleased to conceal this mystery within Himself for a time, even while He had permitted all the nations to walk in their own ways, until, covered over with the thickest darkness and every misery, that saving light —

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would at last shine forth freely. Yet He did not so utterly hide this counsel of His will in the secret treasury of His infinite wisdom that there did not proceed from His supreme mercy toward the human race — and from His most just and most holy wrath toward false, empty, worthless gods and idols — both promises of this grace and terrible threatenings. For: “Jehovah is the true God, the living God, and the everlasting King: at His fury the earth shall tremble, and the nations shall not be able to endure His indignation. Thus,” He says, “you shall say to them: The gods that have not made the heavens and the earth shall perish from the earth and from under these heavens,” Jer. x. 10, 11. In like manner He threatens to make all the gods of the earth waste away, Zeph. ii. 11. And it is established that God intended these threatenings against those fictitious gods and idols, under whose auspices, and in obedience to whose instigation (that is, yielding to the old serpent in them), the four most famous empires had continually waged war against Him and His people. But all these things have long since come to pass. They have departed from their shrines; their heaven and their sun have collapsed; mountains and islands, together with all worship, stage-apparatus, and worshippers, have been removed from the earth and from the regions under heaven. Indeed, at the very first ray of the rising sun of righteousness, the idolatrous world felt and mourned that it had lost its gods — nay, that it recoiled from them in horror:

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“The oracles of Delphi fall silent, and the darkness of the future condemns the human race.”

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Juven. Sat. vi. 554. Nowhere, however, do the wisest of the Gentiles display greater absurdity than in assigning causes for the cessation of oracles. “It is possible,” says Cicero, De Divinat. lib. i. 19, “that that power of the earth which stirred the mind of the Pythia with divine inspiration has vanished with age, just as we see that certain rivers have vanished and dried up, or have been twisted and diverted into another course.” Plutarch agrees with him. Nor is there anyone who offers anything better.

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LXVI. Moreover, by sending forth His saving light gradually, God at last so firmly established the ancient oracles that there is no mortal among any of the nations who uses that Gentile theology, or who worships or venerates those ancient idols with their ancient rites. Thus all those things by which, through so many centuries of years and an unspeakable succession of time, the world — lying in wickedness — out of the cunning of Satan and the native blindness of the human mind, vainly, absurdly, and blasphemously defiled, polluted, and rendered useless natural theology, have utterly perished by the sentence of an avenging God.

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Chapter 9.

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The power and efficacy of the gospel in overthrowing Gentilism — All of Bellarmine’s marks of the true church agree with Gentilism — An examination of the prejudices which they instill into the minds of men — Satan’s last effort on behalf of his worship.

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I. Whoever has considered attentively the dominion of ancient Gentilism over the human race, what roots it struck through the long succession of ages throughout the whole world, and what fruits it bore —

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— and its utter devastation — will have weighed somewhat more attentively, he will perhaps find the feeling of his own mind not far removed from the questions with which, in the Orator, Velleius the Epicurean assails the Platonic account of the origin of all things. “What machinery,” he says, “what tools? what levers? what workmen were employed in so great a work?” (All of which things, however, as Maffeo and Ribadeneira relate, God the Father showed to Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuits.) The mind, I say, cannot but be struck with the thought of what and of what kind that force or hidden power was which God employed to remove so great a mass, which had grown from time immemorial “like a tree in the hidden age.” For so great a work to be accomplished, and the ancient and universal foundations of corrupt superstition to be overthrown, the finger of God was plainly required. II. And that this may appear more clearly, I will show briefly what pretexts the human race had for retaining its universal and most ancient superstition, and upon what prejudices and reasonings it relied in opposing itself to divine truth. For prejudices give strength and force to error, from which, by means of vain reasonings, arise pretexts by which men fortify the approaches of their minds against the light of opposing truth. Men who now please God in their worship are called the church. For that assembly, that community of men, which strives to please God in celebrating the worship which He Himself instituted, is the true church, and always has been. It is the opinion of many learned men that that assembly or community can be distinguished from all others who would falsely arrogate that name to themselves by certain marks. The most learned Bellarminus has shown at length that the chief of these marks, numbering fifteen, possess a certain incredible power for winning credence for that assembly to which they properly belong. Those who, on the evidence of those marks, think they have found the true church will sooner leave this life than allow themselves to be cast out of its communion. But in very truth all those marks of Bellarmine, most of them at least, and those by far the most excellent, are better suited to adorn Gentilism with the title of true religion than to point out that divine truth and its profession which we learned with the Son of God Himself as teacher, or its professors. But if the by far greatest part of those who are called Christians, as they boast of themselves, is persuaded that it still ought to confide in those marks to such a degree as to reject the most certain testimonies of divine truth and to trust in those marks alone in the matter of religion and to commit souls to be directed toward truth, how much more firmly ought pagan men to have clung to that profession of divine worship which was fortified by those marks, when all other evidences of heavenly truth were entirely unknown to them. III. Now the first mark of the true church according to Bellarmine is the name itself — “catholic”; namely, that which is called catholic is the true church. This mark, since it is nearly worthless, the learned man doubtless sent forward first, as a lightly armed soldier to be sacrificed. We know where and when the disciples of Jesus were first called Christians; but the origin of this name, “catholic,” is as uncertain as the sources of the Nile. It does not appear in Holy Scripture. Irenaeus, reciting the Symbol of Faith, makes no mention of it, lib. i. cap. ii; nor does Tertullian, de Praescript. Adver. Haeret.; and, as Justin rightly observes, a name is judged neither good nor bad apart from the deeds of those who bear it, Apol. 1. The Roman church indeed is called catholic by itself; but the holy men of old did not call it so. For Ignatius, the church was “which presides in the place of the region of the Romans” — if indeed that epistle is Ignatius’s. For Clement, it was “the church sojourning at Rome.” And the Pope is called, at the first council, Bishop of Rome, can. vi. How he himself and the Roman church were regarded at that time is sufficiently taught by the Council of Chalcedon. To very many Christians dispersed throughout the whole world over many centuries, it is Pontifical, Papist, apostate, idolatrous, Roman. Since the name is therefore the work of men of uncertain standing, let us set aside the dispute and look at the thing itself. IV. From the time when the name “catholic church” was devised by some, it began wonderfully to please all the worshippers of true religion (since there was no lack of those who would most absurdly confine the church of Christ within the limits of this or that portion or faction of Christians) — and not entirely without reason; since by that word they wished to express nothing but what our Savior Himself had foretold would come to pass, namely, that the gospel was to be preached throughout the whole inhabited world, Matt. xxiv. 14, or throughout the whole world, Cap. xxvi. 13, or into all the world, Marc. xiv. 9, and not to the Jews only. And the fame of that celebrated word, once it became current, grew daily in renown and praise. But when the Roman Pope had ascended by evil arts to that pinnacle of secular power, so that it was easy for him to attract flatterers with the hope of gain, he attempted to draw this name to himself and his faction from their flattery (availing himself also of the negligence and lowliness of others), meanwhile repaying them in turn with no ungenerous hand for things which no sober person would believe had ever truly been in his power. So it was practiced of old, as Horace, lib. ii. Epist. ii, 99–101: “I depart — Alcaeus by his vote: who is he by mine? Who but Callimachus? If he seems to claim more, he becomes Mimnermus, and grows by the coveted name.” V. By the same right the Mohammedans are Mussulmans; and Simon, of old, was “the great power of God”; and Diana was a great deity. Even now, wherever one looks on earth, those who are the majority adorn themselves with honorable titles. For nomenclature belongs to the larger faction, or to the party that holds power. Let us therefore consider, even if the pagans themselves did not arrogate to themselves alone those names which at that time were reckoned most honorable among men, while the worshippers of the true God were everywhere marked with opprobrious names — they at least gloried constantly and contended sharply that they alone had cultivated faith and true religion, that all the rest were superstitious, ignorant of the ancient gods, and, as I may say, heretics and schismatics;

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— they sharply contended. We know that until the coming of our Lord, the worship of the true God flourished among the Jews alone. As to what opinion others held of them, the most weighty authority is Cornelius Tacitus, Hist. lib. v. cap. iv: “Moses,” he says, “in order to secure this people to himself for the future, introduced new rites contrary to those of all other mortals. All things are profane there which are sacred among us; again, what is permitted among them is impure to us” — that is, they are heretics and schismatics, because the lawgiver taught them to observe rites abhorrent to the universal practice of mankind. Plutarch says nearly the same. And there is scarcely a historian who has not recorded for posterity that they worshipped the head of an ass in the temple. “They consecrated in the inner sanctuary,” says Tacitus, “the image of that animal” (that is, by the author’s own account, an ass) “by whose guidance they had dispelled their wandering and thirst.” Hist. lib. v. cap. ii. iv. And the historian Democritus in Suidas: “They worshipped a golden head of an ass.” That Posidonius and Apollonius Molo had related the same, Josephus shows in the second book against Apion, who raved with the same madness. I pass over the other monstrous lies, a comparison of which, however, with what the Pontificians — the so-called Catholics — fabricated against the Albigenses, Waldenses, and other faithful servants of Christ, would not be inapt. With one voice they all said that that nation was subject to superstitions, opposed to true religion, and at variance with the common opinion of mortals regarding the worship of God. VI. At length Christians arose; they too for some time were confounded with the Jews. Nor did the Gentiles for a long time distinguish between the two peoples. “The Jews, at the instigation of Chrestus, continually causing tumults, Claudius expelled from Rome,” says Suetonius. And Arrian, Epict. lib. ii. cap. ix: “Do you not see how each one is called a Jew? And when we see someone wavering between the two, we are accustomed to say, he is not a Jew but plays the part of one; but when he takes on the disposition”

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— of the one who has been baptized and has chosen, then he truly is and is called a Jew” — “Do you not see how each one is called a Jew? But if we have seen someone wavering, we are accustomed to say that he is not a Jew but plays the hypocrite. But when he has adopted the disposition of the baptized, that is, of the one who professes that sect, then he truly is and is called a Jew.” This passage certain people adduce in vain to prove that the Jews were accustomed to make use of the rite of baptism, when the philosopher is most plainly speaking of Christians. Even in Apoc. iii. 9, by “Jews” the Holy Spirit Himself understands none other than Christians. Now concerning these, the same Tacitus expounds the judgment of the world, Annal. lib. xv. cap. xliv.: “Nero inflicted the most exquisite punishments upon those whom the common people, hated for their crimes, called Christians. The originator of that name was Christ, who had been put to death in the reign of Tiberius by the procurator Pontius Pilate. Though checked for the moment, the deadly superstition broke out again.” And Arnobius teaches that all things in morals and sacred rites were alleged against Christians as contrary to the human race. As for the name of the religion and the worship of the gods, they were so secure as to judge that the very name “Christian” contained enough ground for inflicting the ultimate punishment, or heretic-killing,

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— they judged it to contain. Hence Tertullian and others were compelled to compose an Apology for the very name itself. “Vile wretches,” “Followers of Apelles,” “Jews,” “Christians,” “Heretics” — among those Catholics they were names of crime. Therefore both idolatrous peoples began their march at an equal pace. If there is any force or efficacy, then, in honorific names for indicating truth and confirming the mind in the opinion they adorn, as the Cardinal judges, those who practiced Gentilism made the greatest use of it. VII. The second place with Bellarmine is occupied by antiquity — not that absolute antiquity which traces its origin to God alone, in which, if the controversy were to halt, these marks of Bellarmine would plainly be done for; but that uncertain and merely probable antiquity which must be drawn out from histories and other monuments of past events, and judged from them. Upon this same argument, or prejudice, the whole of Gentilism formerly rested. For when Jesus Christ Himself first went forth to expound heavenly truth from the bosom of the Father, the Pharisees assailed Him with that very question: “What new teaching is this?” Marc. i. 27. VIII. In like manner, when the apostle Paul was preaching the same truth at Athens, the philosophers assailed him. “May we know,” they said, “what this new teaching is that you are speaking?” Acts xvii. 19. And in that whole contest which existed between the gospel and the superstition of the Gentiles, there was scarcely anything which stirred the minds of unbelievers more violently to rage against the truth than that the Christian religion was new, that it was without antiquity, that it sought to abolish the ancient rites and the traditional worship of God. How great a measure of prejudice that persuasion instilled into their minds can easily be inferred from the Pontificians themselves, hardened by the pleasures, or rather the profits, of their errors. But that the antiquity which the Romanists claim is doubtful in all respects and in most cases openly false, very many have shown. It was moreover evident that, setting aside those monuments of events alone which they thought fit to despise (because they belong to Jews, heretics, and schismatics), there was absolutely no memory of things or religions in existence since man was born that preceded the origin of their worship; so that no one doubted that the religion they professed was eternal, or rather, if things themselves have a beginning, at least coeval with eternity. Therefore nothing was more loudly proclaimed than this: that it was everywhere, always, and by all. Hence Symmachus, Epist. ad Theodosium: “If long age,” he says, “winds authority for religions, the faith maintained through so many centuries must be preserved, and we must follow our forebears who followed their own forebears with good fortune. Let us now think of Rome as standing before us and addressing you with her own words: Most excellent princes, fathers of the fatherland, respect my years, to which a pious rite has brought me, that I may use the ceremonies of my ancestors.” And Caecilius in Minucius Felix: “How much more venerable and better is it to receive the discipline of truth from the elders, to cultivate the religions handed down, to fear the gods with whom you were imbued from your parents beforehand and to know them more intimately and to worship them; and not to pass judgment on the divine powers, but to yield to former authorities.” Whence Augustine aptly observes: “This is the devilish custom, that through the conduit of antiquity

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— deceit should be commended.” Indeed, the American Indians themselves, as the Jesuit Xavier testifies, lib. iv. epist. i, were accustomed to glory in the antiquity of their religion against the novelty of the gospel. My purpose now is not to show that Bellarmine fights against evangelical truth with the weapons of the Gentiles; but I am showing that it was the prior task to overcome and abolish Gentilism, even though its professors were fortified with those same arguments which that most learned man judged to have so great a power for retaining the minds of men in the opinions they had once adopted.

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IX. Edmund Campianus no doubt thought he had done something splendid when, to the arguments by which he attempted to persuade the ignorant of the Pontifical religion, he added as a colophon: “Witnesses are the academies, witnesses are the tablets of the laws, witnesses are the vernacular customs of men, witnesses are the election and inauguration of Emperors, witnesses are the rites and unction of kings, witnesses are the orders of knights and their very cloaks, witnesses are the windows, witnesses are the coins, witnesses are the urban harbors and civic buildings, witnesses are the fruits and life of our forefathers, witnesses are all things and their records — that no religion in the world has ever been seated in its deepest roots except ours.” Though these things are indeed very weighty, they clearly demonstrate that that religion has spread far and wide over no small span of time and has taken hold of the minds of very many and shaped their customs. But how much more pompously, and with what greater appearance of argument, all these things could be said of Gentilism at the time when it was at war with evangelical truth, no one is ignorant. For the superstition of the pagans had not merely overrun a single Europe, or only certain more celebrated parts of it, as did that of the Pontificians, but had from the most ancient ages occupied the whole world — beyond all historical credibility and human memory — in such a way that nothing whatever existed throughout the whole globe of the earth that did not bear witness to its dominion. Well known are the arguments which Clement, Justin, Origen, Tertullian, Augustine, Ambrose, and others opposed to this pretense of antiquity. If, therefore, that uncertain antiquity which can be investigated from the monuments of events and deeds among men is a presumption of truth, then no mortal, in any age, in any cause, could have produced it with greater evidence and multitude of testimonies than the patrons of Gentilism. Doubtless very many were no more persuaded that they were human beings or that they were living than that from the beginning of things, the religious worship of their nations and peoples had flourished — or, if all things have a beginning, that it was coeval with eternity, as eternity itself. Therefore nothing was more loudly proclaimed by them than this: everywhere, always, and by all. Hence Radbod, king of the Frisians, when he was about to be baptized and had dipped in one foot, asked “where the greater part of his ancestors was — in hell or in paradise?” When he was told that more were in hell, he immediately drew back and said, “It is better to follow the majority than the minority.”

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X. Next, in the third place the Cardinal sets down long and uninterrupted duration. If he understands this of past times, this mark does not truly differ from the one that preceded it, except in this distinction: that here the duration is said to be uninterrupted, long, or extended from ancient times. But if he is speaking of future times, this mark is nothing more than the conjecture of a learned man — although I for my part would indeed believe that the Roman church will endure until He comes who will destroy her with the breath of His mouth. But the pagans also pledged perennial duration to their worship by vows and confirmed it by predictions. The poet, about to demonstrate that he had won for himself an eternal name, says —

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“I shall continue to grow, fresh with the praise of posterity, as long as the pontiff climbs the Capitol with the silent virgin.” Hor. Od. iii. 30, 7.

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Whether he wishes to proceed historically, he is in no way to be compared with the Gentiles. The origins of idolatrous superstition are to this day entirely unknown. Yet it is not doubted that at least two thousand years elapsed from its rise until the gospel was preached throughout the world, and its profession was never once interrupted. This is a well-known matter and requires no proof. Now so deeply had this prejudice — arising from its antiquity and long duration — taken root in the souls of those who observed that religious worship, that it ought not to surprise us if they could scarcely in any way be torn away from an opinion so pernicious and so fortified by it. XI. In the fourth place the cardinal enumerates the multitude and variety of believers, so as to assign this mark to his church. Without doubt all sectaries everywhere would greatly profit thereby, since it runs directly counter to that mark of the true church which Christ Himself declared — provided the flock of Christ is the true church. But since he wishes it to be a mark of the papacy, let it be noted. One who maintained that multitude is not a mark of the true church — if this controversy must be settled by the word of God — and who contended that the Roman faction ought to be called neither absolutely nor comparatively great or numerous, would in my judgment have an easy case at hand. But this is not our present concern. Most of the papists are wise and learned men, and most highly practiced in practical affairs. They have known thoroughly what things are fitted and suited to allure the minds of mortals into adopting some position in religion, or to persuade them to cling to it stubbornly and tenaciously. How great, therefore, the force of multitude is in this cause has been well perceived by them. Indeed it is now long since all their hope in the cause seems to reside in nothing else but that they are many; and accordingly, abandoning all other arguments, they have long since resolved to decide the business of religion by the sword wherever in the world they may be. Meanwhile we know that this mark most properly belongs to Gentilism. They were the many, the all, the whole world. The disciples of the mathematicians affirm that the highest mountains are no obstacle to the earth’s being called a perfect sphere. Still less does the very small flock of the worshipers of the true God prevent the whole world from being said to lie in the evil of Gentilism.

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For nearly all of humankind had with singular accord agreed upon polytheism. And, good God! what men, and what emperors, kings, generals, philosophers, wise men, good, just, temperate, brave men, most devoted to their country, most zealous for equity and goodness beyond anything that can be imagined — was it then to be expected that they should allow themselves to be torn away and separated from the religion of these men, that is, of absolutely all men and especially the best? What more contrary to all reason can be said or thought, than that they, bewitched by the persuasion of a few men, should renounce the conviction of the whole world maintained through so many ages? See, reader, this corner of the world in which, by God’s gracious ordering, we live: how few are there who do not regard it as the height of madness to depart from the most widely received opinion of the majority, especially when that departure is attended by some of those evils which fell in crowds upon the first preachers of the gospel. And yet we all profess that we ought to be obedient not to the multitude, not to antiquity, but to the single word of Christ. The Catholicism of the papists will never equal, still less surpass, the breadth of Gentilism. XII. Next in Bellarmine comes the succession of bishops in the Roman church; the same argument holds among the Mohammedans with regard to the caliphate. Ancient Rome likewise had its own supreme pontiffs, whose title, name, place, office, and spirit that Bellarmine’s bishop has invaded, seized, and now possesses, Apoc. xiii. 11–13. The succession of those pontiffs from the earliest consuls to Tiberius Caesar, under whose reign the name of Christ first became known, was recorded in the public registers. Their people believed that their supreme authority had been divinely constituted. So the orator, in his speech for his own house, ch. i., xii., says: “Although many things have been divinely devised and established by our ancestors, O pontiffs, nothing is more illustrious than that they willed that you should preside over both the worship of the immortal gods and the highest affairs of the republic.” In which opinion all the Romans continue to this day. He immediately adds remarks which still fill both pages in the disputes of the papists concerning the church: “For what is so arrogant as to attempt to teach the college of pontiffs concerning religion, divine matters, and sacred ceremonies? Or so foolish as for someone to tell you what he has found in your own books? Or so curious as to wish to inquire into those matters concerning which our ancestors willed that you alone should be consulted and should know?” And none of these pontiffs was a woman, a magician, a murderer, an adulterer, or a sacrilegious person, as far as we know from the records of those times. But to hold an opinion in religious matters different from theirs was reckoned as nothing less than extreme madness.

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XIII. Indeed those supreme pontiffs were of such great authority that it was scarcely more permissible for anyone to dissent from their judgment in religion than it is now to dissent from the pope himself. For the historian describes their authority in such terms that you can scarcely tell whether he is speaking of ancient or of new Rome. The pontiffs, he says — established by Numa, of course — “have the greatest authority among the Romans… They are lords of the most important affairs, and they judge all sacred disputes, both among private persons and among magistrates and ministers of the gods” (which distribution of members into various classes is still customary in the Roman church), “and they are lawgivers for all matters pertaining to sacred rites and customs, and they judge…”

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“…all matters pertaining to both divine and human law. They set over all sacrifices and acts of worship those whom they judge fit, and they oversee all the priests, their assistants and ministers, who serve at the sacred rites, and they take care that these commit no offense against the sacred laws. For private persons also who are ignorant of matters pertaining to the gods or piety or holiness, they become expounders and prophets, and they do not permit anyone who has complied with their injunctions to be fined without an inquiry, whether the matter involves loss of life or of property, nor are they required to render an account to the senate or the people. When any one of them ends his life, another is appointed in his place, chosen not by the people but by the pontiffs themselves.” Dionys. Halicarnas. Antiquit. Rom. lib. ii. Whether Dionysius, if he were living now in Rome (as he once did), could have given a more accurate description of papal authority, may justly be doubted. “The pontiffs,” he says, “are endowed with supreme authority and hold dominion in the most important affairs. For they judge all sacred disputes between private persons, magistrates, and ministers of sacred rites.” (In the exercise of this part of their authority, the Roman pontiff has thrown every Christian kingdom into turmoil, and has even brought some to ruin and overthrow.) “But they also enact laws concerning sacred matters that have not yet been written down, nor received by usage, if they seem worthy to be sanctioned by laws and customs” (that is, they alone were judges of unwritten traditions, so that whatever they wished, and whenever they wished, they decreed to be observed by laws and canons; which is the most strongly fortified citadel of the present pontifical power). “They also inquire into all magistrates to whom sacrifices and the worship of the gods are entrusted, and into all priests, and keep the ministers of sacred rites in their duty, lest they offend in anything against the sacred laws.” (They alone, of course, are the lord, the source and origin of all clerical order and ecclesiastical authority.) “To private persons also they show and interpret the worship of the gods or of the divine spirits.” (For those private persons, it is sufficient if with implicit faith they reverently observe and embrace what they themselves prescribe in the worship of the saints.) “And if they observe anyone despising their prescriptions, they punish him according to the magnitude of the offense” (but that these penalties were capital we do not read, except in the case of the Vestal Virgins. Yet there is scarcely a region in all Europe which the secondary order of Roman pontiffs has not stained with fatal slaughters, blood, flame, and deaths of various kinds on account of neglected prescriptions). “They themselves are immune from judgment and penalty, and are not required to render an account either to the senate or to the people” (that is, the pontiff judges all and is judged by none. And the word “unaccountable” indeed sounds sweet to pontifical ears. But whether they will or not, they will at last render an account to the Judge of all). “If” —

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“—if any one of them departs this life, another is customarily appointed in the place of the deceased, not by the votes of the people but by whoever seems most suitable to the college.” Just as is still done at Rome. Let the reader therefore learn from this whose successor, and whose vicar, the Roman pontiff truly is.

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XIV. Next he proposes, in the same place, agreement in doctrine with the ancient church. But since he excludes the apostles and their writings from that ancient church, he means nothing other than that the true church is the one which teaches concerning sacred matters just as the predecessors of its members taught. Yet this was the most strongly fortified bulwark of all Gentilism. Nothing was judged more foolish, nothing more worthy of reproach, than to reject traditions handed down from the fathers. That was the superstition that kept the old images of the gods in place. Socrates was condemned to death for no other reason than that he held that the gods which the city had believed from ancient times to be gods were not gods. Against Christians especially, as deserters of the religion of their native land, the fiercest persecution raged. How greatly the idolaters pressed this argument against the professors of the gospel business, Origen, Justin, Tertullian, Arnobius, Lactantius, Augustine, Clement of Alexandria, and all without exception who undertook the defense of truth against their sophisms, are witnesses. Thus they too were not immune from this prejudice against the gospel. XV. The seventh Bellarminian mark is the union of members among themselves and with the head, the Roman bishop. One is ashamed of such insolent boasting; for that union which prevails among the Romans is the greatest disgrace of the Christian name; and unless the argument that makes for self-interest were the most powerful among the majority, it would long since have been nearly nothing. Remove the most savage tyranny, burnings alive, ignorance, greed, worldly pride, and love of the present world, and that union will immediately appear too feeble to endure. What kind of union it is, the wars, robberies, murders, slaughters, devastations of cities, and depopulations of fields which are daily committed and carried out among the members of that church — the Roman pontiff protesting in vain — testify. Were they not stupid, blind, or the most shameless of mortals, and likewise the most ignorant of evangelical truth, they would long since have been ashamed of this most disgraceful boasting. I myself would prefer the church divided into a thousand pieces to one united in the papal manner. The world knows the divisions, dissensions, schisms, political, ecclesiastical, in soul, in opinion, in writings, which prevail in that conspiracy of men which wishes to be called the church; and in that one matter only, for various political, secular, and Satanic reasons, all men bewitched by worldly affairs seem to agree: namely, to oppose strenuously the truth of the gospel and the liberty obtained for Christians by Christ Himself. Yet I would not assert that there is no unity at all among the papists, since the Spirit had predicted concerning the pope that “he would cause all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to bear a mark on their right hand,” Apoc. xiii. 16. Among the Gentiles very many things were otherwise. That strong armed man kept his whole household — the whole world — in peace and union. There was a certain diversity in worship, not unlike that which is seen among the religious orders, where one prefers this saint and another prefers a different one. As to the sum of the matter, the ancient idolaters maintained close peace among themselves under their head Satan and his vicar the supreme Roman pontiff, especially after the world had yielded to the city. That one should introduce foreign religions, or that other gods than those he himself worshiped should be adored and preached — Maecenas persuaded Augustus in Dio’s account of this, as we have shown elsewhere at length — and the law of the Twelve Tables also forbade the introduction of foreign gods. For Romans to adopt religious customs foreign to that city was deemed wicked and unlawful, as is argued against the doctrine of Paul in Act. xvi. 21. Egypt alone was virtually the birthplace of heresies. In the suppression of truth there was no dissension. “The pagans,” says Augustine in his Sermon on Fasting, “worshiping many diverse gods, nay, quarreling and burning with mutual hostile hatred, yet maintain among themselves a certain unity, in that they go equally to their temples, and when the gods themselves are angry, they themselves are in harmony.” And elated by this opinion of their harmony, they were accustomed to reproach Christians with their dissensions; as the same Augustine witnesses, lib. de Ovibus, cap. xv.; and Clement in Stromat. lib. vii. XVI. Let us proceed with the cardinal. In the eighth and ninth places he mentions the holiness of doctrine, together with its efficacy, and the holiness of its authors. Without any doubt the most holy doctrine is the most true. For the gospel itself is the truth according to godliness, as the apostle testifies in the letter to Titus, cap. i. 1. And it is likewise most efficacious; since “the word of God is living and effectual,” Heb. iv. 12; “nay, it is the power of God for salvation to those who believe,” Rom. i. 16. By it “all who are born of God” are regenerated, 1 Pet. i. 23. And its author is holy, since He was none other than the most holy Son of God, Heb. 1. 1, 2; Joh. 1. 18. But what holiness is, and what is true or false, we cannot know unless taught by that word. Now, holiness that can be seen can be feigned; holiness that cannot be feigned cannot be seen. The holiness of the Roman church, however, is attested by the very many men of all orders within it — nearly all of them: the clergy especially; attested by the lives, conduct, and deaths of the popes, detestable even to the heathen; by the arrogance, pride, greed, ignorance, sloth, cruelty, and rapacity of the bishops; by the cunning, frauds, impurity, hypocrisy, and unspeakable sins of the so-called religious orders; by the idolatry of all; and especially by the frauds, impostures, lies, treacheries, shameful lusts, perjuries, and the skill in extenuating the sins of men of every order that marks the Jesuits. And the holiness of that church has now at length progressed so far that, on account of it, among the American Indians — where they most of all should have cultivated it to the honor of Christ and the gospel — the very name “Christian” has been rendered plainly odious and abominable, so that whatever is at length decreed concerning them, they stubbornly and obstinately refuse to have anything in common with Christians or their religion. That matters have been brought to this pass is complained of by Luis of Granada, “that among barbarous nations the Christian name is so execrable that whenever monks are sent to them, in order that they may not be hated with the same loathing, it is necessary to say that these men are not Christians but fathers who have come to care for their salvation; for the Spaniards have treated them with such cruelty that the most holy name of Christian has come to be regarded not as a name of piety and religion, but of cruelty and brutality.” The most holy Lord Jesus will, at the appointed time, exact the penalties for this holiness. The fathers of the Society also acted in a holy fashion when, in their preaching of the gospel among the Chinese, they studiously concealed the fact that Jesus Christ was crucified, and persuaded them to place their faith in another Jesus, I know not which; which was at last forbidden at Rome. It is remarkable, moreover, that Bellarmine dared to touch on this point, since he knew perfectly well that it would be the easiest thing in the world to compile, from approved histories and the writings of his own church’s authors and daily examples, huge volumes full of the execrable crimes, lusts, and impieties of the chief fathers of that church. But this is not our present task. If that most learned man is speaking of holiness that falls under human observation, all confess that it must be measured according to some rule, either divinely given or received in some manner. But such was the doctrine of certain philosophers among the heathen that many Christians even now are not ashamed to call it most holy. That its efficacy in changing human conduct is proved by very many examples; and how great the holiness of life was among the heathen according to the precepts of philosophy is well known. It seems that nearly nothing was lacking in some of them, with the sole exception of faith and the knowledge of the true God in Christ, which alone is eternal life.

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XVII. Next he recounts the miracles which, he maintains, happen in his church and nowhere else. And some pontifical writers conduct themselves nowhere more magnificently than when they come to miracles. Here one may see the great Valerianus at his finest, in his recounting of the miracles of the Capuchin brothers; let the reader consult him — should the Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine not suffice — and also the observations of that most learned man Johannes Comenius on Valerianus’s account of those miracles. If anyone delights in illusions, trifles, fabrications, lies, vanities, useless things, portents, diabolical things, ridiculous and blasphemous things, let him go to the legends, the writers of saints’ lives, the archives of monasteries, the canonizations of papal saints, and even the compilers of ecclesiastical annals after the fourth century, and they will supply him to his fill with whatever of that sort can be scraped together or invented anywhere. I have judged it necessary to repeat here just one out of a thousand, by which the rest may be judged; and it is handed down from memory in the book of the Conformities. When Francis, says the author, “was on a certain occasion preaching, and an ass in the crowd was making a disturbance, Francis said to it: Brother ass, be quiet until I finish the sermon. At once the ass, obedient to the command, settled itself with a composed posture at Francis’s feet.” It would be remarkable if a single ass remained in the whole world that would not at once yield itself to the power of that church in which this entire capacity for performing miracles holds its place.

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XVIII. Meanwhile, although all know that true miracles, wrought by the immediate power of God to confirm heavenly truth — such as those of our Lord Jesus Christ and the apostles — had great force and efficacy in stirring up the minds of men to hear and believe the truth itself; yet it is most certain that diabolical portents and wonders whose causes cannot be investigated, and fabrications sold and believed as true miracles, are most powerful for ensnaring the common people in superstitious credulity, and for persuading them with stubborn reverence to embrace dogmas which appear to be confirmed by those miracles. Now miracles of this kind were most frequent among the Gentiles. There is scarcely one among the more reputable Greek or Latin historians who has not handed down many of them in writing. Well known are the accounts which Porphyry wrote concerning Pythagoras, and Philostratus concerning Apollonius — to such a degree that Hierocles impiously contended that that magician of Tyana was to be compared with Christ Himself in the brilliance of his miracles; whose wicked audacity Eusebius refutes in a separate work. But this is nothing to the papists, for whom it is customary to swear that this or that friar has performed more miracles than Christ Himself and all the apostles. The wonders of this kind that Diodorus, Livy, Polybius, Plutarch, Cicero, Pliny, Suetonius, Tacitus, Caesar, Pausanias, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus record here and there are innumerable. Some of them were collected by Valerius Maximus, lib. i. cap. vi.; but I do not wish to dwell on particular instances or to compare them with the miracles of the papists. It will suffice to have mentioned the most celebrated story of the deliverance of the Delphic temple from the sacrilege of the Gauls. Pausanias, among others, recounts it in the Phocica. All know that Satan had set up his throne among men, chiefly at Delphi, for several centuries. Nowhere on earth did he peddle himself more shamelessly as the god of this world. When the Gauls, bursting into Greece under the leadership of Brennus, set about plundering the temple of Apollo that had been built there — enriched with the votive offerings of nearly all nations and peoples — and when Brennus, having passed Thermopylae, marched directly on Delphi, the townspeople, struck with fear, fled to the oracle; the god at once commanded them to be of good courage and fear nothing: “he promised that he himself would defend his own” — and immediately everything was full of prodigies. “Prodigies sudden and most evident of all we have ever heard of appeared divinely against the barbarians.” “For the earth, as much of it as the Gallic army had violently occupied, trembled with a great shaking for nearly the whole day.” Then “continual thunders and lightning bolts occurred, and they struck down and stunned the Gauls…”

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— directing them also to those who proclaimed the things announced to them — “The thunders and lightnings not only terrified the Gauls, but, dulling their senses, struck them with bewilderment, so that they could not hear the signals given by their commanders.” And in addition, heroic apparitions were seen rising up against them — Hyperochous, Laodocus, and Pyrrhus — “They saw, moreover, the forms of heroes rising against them: Hyperochous, Laodocus, and Pyrrhus,” and others besides. While the barbarians were thus pressed throughout the day by alarms and slaughters, the calamities that fell upon them in the night were felt to be yet more grievous — “In the night a most bitter frost with snow afflicted them severely. Moreover, great rocks and the cliffs of the mountain, torn spontaneously from Parnassus, fell upon the barbarians as if at a fixed signal. They were crushed not singly or in pairs, but thirty and more at a time, as each happened to be encamped together or sleeping side by side; and confusion and panic arose from the crashing of the crags.” Terrified, broken, and scattered in this manner, they were all utterly destroyed to the last man. Thus it pleased God to avenge the wicked impiety of the human race and its defection from the knowledge and worship of Him. For because it did not seem good to them to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over into the power of the prince of darkness, and permitted him, to the end of greater hardening, in the defense of the stronghold of demon-worship, to produce so many and so great prodigious miracles. He foretold that He would deal in the same manner with the followers of Antichrist, and so He did. For because they did not receive the love of the truth that they might be saved, “God sent upon them the working of error, that they should believe a lie, and delivered them over to be deluded by him whose coming is by the effective working of Satan, with all power and signs and lying wonders;” as the apostle teaches us, 2 ad Thess. 11.9, 11. Yet there is this difference between the degrees of either working: that the papal Antichrist has never anywhere yet perpetrated so many miracles and prodigies as Satan produced in defense of ethnic idolatry. For although myriads of such portents and prodigies are not worth a straw against even a single testimony of Holy Scripture, yet if such things as occurred at Delphi had ever and anywhere taken place in defense of pontifical rites, of whatever kind they were, one can easily conjecture how greedily the papists would seize upon them for their own cause, and with what arrogant boasting they would display themselves everywhere. It was precisely on account of this prejudice in favor of miracles, then, that they refused to be easily torn away from the darkness of their errors. For what indeed? Were they to abandon powerful, gracious, present gods — whom they possessed such brilliant proofs had at heart both themselves and their worship, whose divine power, authority, supreme might, and benefits had been made manifest through so many wonderful prodigies — at the preaching of a new religion, previously unheard of in the world, to which a few obscure, superstitious, worthless men had applied themselves? This seemed to them sufficiently alien from all wisdom, constancy, faith, and virtue. Should it be deemed right to receive an unknown God, a crucified Deliverer, a Jewish religion, abandoning the gods of their fathers, after they had employed them in war and in peace through a countless series of years? It would be better to die than to take upon themselves this supreme crime and disgrace. But that the gospel overcame these mountains of prejudices is well known.

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XIX. Prophetic light is the twelfth mark of Bellarmine; not that light, to be sure, which was inherent in the divinely inspired writers of the Old and New Testaments; not that of Jesus Christ and His apostles, upon which all Christian faith rests; but a certain gift of predicting future things, which the cardinal contends and maintains that some in the Roman church have possessed. That false prophets have existed in every age both within and outside the people of God, all know; and there is nothing by which Satan has more fascinated the minds of men and rendered them more subject to himself than by predictions of future events. Among the Gentiles the Sibyls lived and were themselves Gentiles; their oracles were most celebrated, and all of them served to confirm the most foul idolatry, as is evident from all the prophecies taken from their books that are found in Livy, Cicero, and others. The Delphic oracle and others the whole world venerated. How far Satan may be able, how far God may be willing to permit him to predict future things, we do not now dispute. This is certain: among the Gentiles it was a most firmly held conviction that prophetic light resided with themselves alone; that their gods alone foreknew and foretold the future; and that they had communicated that gift of foreknowing future things to many. Occupied therefore by this prejudice as well, they declared war on the truth, persistently.

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XX. In his thirteenth mark, which is the confession of adversaries, the cardinal manages poorly; had he not previously resolved to fill out the number of fifteen marks, he would beyond all doubt not have snatched up this most absurd one from the gutter. But would that there had been none among the ancient Fathers, the scholastics, or others, who so far concurred with paganism in their own confession as to affirm that those people could have been saved in that superstition, provided they truly lived according to reason; nor will the cardinal ever wring a more telling testimony from the mouths of any adversaries of his church. XXI. The unhappy end of those who opposed the church constitutes the fourteenth mark. This too the idolaters claimed for themselves. We have recalled the wickedness of the sacrilegious Gauls. The “Gold of Tolosa” passed into a proverb. Historians universally record the unhappy ends of those who undertook any enterprise with the sacred rites neglected or despised.

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(footnote: 1 “A proverb concerning a thing ruinous and fatal to its possessor, about the sacrilegious plunder that proved destructive to the Gauls.” See Justin, book xxxii, chapter iii. — Ed.)

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— with the sacred rites neglected or despised — undertook any enterprise, all historians record as having unhappy ends. Moreover, one may conjecture from this how much confidence the Gentiles placed in this mark; for when the gospel first began to become known, the metropolis of all superstition had grown through various successes and prosperous turns of events in secular prosperity to such a height that it had nowhere higher to ascend. And from that point they persistently affirmed that all adverse turns of events, all unhappy outcomes of wars, and all evils by which the human race was in any way afflicted, were to be imputed to the Christians and their religion. Hence Tertullian: “They bring forward also that vanity to justify their hatred, namely, their belief that the Christians are the cause of every public disaster and every popular misfortune. If the Tiber rises to the walls, if the Nile does not rise to the fields, if the sky stands still, if the earth trembles, if there is famine, if there is plague, immediately the cry goes up, ‘Christians to the lions.’” Similar things are found in Cyprian, To Demetrian; Augustine, book 3 of The City of God, chapter 30, and book 5, chapter 22; and in the latter part of Question 126 to the Orthodox, which is as follows: that the Greeks do not show themselves more unrighteous in this, that while those former times held the cities and the arts of war and prosperity were acquired, and the cities were at that time more frequently warred upon, yet after the Christian proclamation took hold of the nations, homes, and habitations, and left the rest of their prosperity desolate — and the cities that were formerly held by Greek-founded settlements now stand as witnesses of the former prosperity and of the present desolation, each of the two religions producing its own respective fruits. It is therefore most certain that Bellarmine fights here with none but the weapons of the Gentiles. Let the apologetic writings of the ancient Christians — of Justin, Tertullian, Arnobius, Augustine, Orosius — be consulted; they show clearly what the pagans determined concerning this mark and what ought in truth to be determined.

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XXII. Temporal felicity divinely granted is the last of Bellarmine’s marks of the true church. Had he approached the task of ruining the church with a sober mind, he would scarcely have employed this mark. It is pagan, it is Mohammedan, it is above all contrary to the word of God. Indeed the idolatrous crowd of Jews in Egypt argued this very point against the prophet Jeremiah, Jer. xliv. 15-18: “Then all the men who knew that their wives were burning incense to other gods, and all the women who stood by, a great assembly, all the people who lived in the land of Egypt, in Pathros, answered Jeremiah, saying, As for the word which you have spoken to us in the name of Jehovah, we will not listen to you. But we will certainly carry out every word that has proceeded from our mouths, by burning incense to the queen of heaven and pouring out drink offerings to her, as we ourselves, our forefathers, our kings, and our princes did in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem; for then we had plenty of food and were well off, and we saw no evil. But since we stopped burning incense to the queen of heaven and pouring out drink offerings to her, we have lacked everything, and we have been consumed by sword and by famine.” Let the cardinal now come forward and teach us what difference there is between his mark and this mark of the Jews. From both sides they argue most vehemently, affirming on the one hand that temporal felicity was divinely granted from the time they devoted themselves to the worship of heavenly beings, and on the other hand that they incurred the greatest misery because of its neglect. But what are these things, I ask — bread, food, and merriment — compared to what the pagan orator brings forward in assertion of this mark? “However much,” he says, “conscript fathers, we may love ourselves, yet it is not in numbers that we have surpassed the Spaniards, nor in strength the Gauls, nor in cunning the Phoenicians, nor in arts the Greeks, nor indeed in that native and innate sense of their own race and land the Italians and Latins themselves; but in piety and religion, and in that one wisdom of perceiving that all things are ruled and governed by the divine power of the immortal gods, we have surpassed all peoples and nations,” Cicer., Oration on the Responses of the Haruspices, ix. If the cardinal were to hear a man of consular rank discoursing most gravely on the deeds, victories, and prodigious successes of the Romans, and abusing all of these things as confirmation of the most empty superstition, what, I ask, would he have to reply? He would not deny that these things furnish a mark of the true church and therefore of true religion and true worship; whether he would yield the point or not is uncertain; it is very difficult to conjecture how he would defend himself and the truth. So Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities, book 2, states that he set forth the sacred rites of Rome so that those to whom the piety of the Romans, which the men practiced, was previously unknown might cease to wonder that the most favorable outcomes of wars always fell to them; for they will find that all those things were begun most religiously and with the most just causes, and that for this reason they had the gods most gracious to them in dangers — that is, “so that those to whom the piety of the Romans has hitherto been unknown may cease to wonder that the most favorable outcomes of wars have always fallen to them; for they will find that all their undertakings and enterprises were conducted most religiously, and for this reason they had the gods most propitious in dangers.”

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XXIII. And all these things are said to this end: that the divine power and efficacy of the gospel, or of the word of the cross of Christ — which within a brief span of time erected conspicuous trophies over all idolatrous worship — might shine forth the more clearly. Relying on it alone, and on the presence and power of Christ in it, a very few men attacked innumerable men, the whole world; the poor attacked the masters of earthly things; the unwise attacked the most wise; the unlearned attacked the most learned — men fortified with prejudices, with arguments, with the most ancient traditions, with miracles, with those arguments which even those who are Christians in name only still regard as irrefutable — and they did not cease until, through a thousand dangers, deaths, torments, and innumerable perils, they had subdued the whole world to God and to Christ.

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XXIV. But as soon as the light of the gospel began to shine forth, Satan seemed to foresee from many signs the ruin of his Catholic and most ancient dominion. Yet, lest he should appear to give way or to fail himself in extremity, he left no stone unturned by which he might fortify himself and his own against the heavenly truth and suppress it. For besides the fact that by savage cruelty he compelled his slaves to rage against the professors of the gospel, so that, if it could be done, he might suffocate the truth in the blood of those who cherished it — he also attempted to renew that superstition.

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— that superstition, which was itself alone everything to him, he endeavored to renew in various ways and to add new strength and new luster to it. For since paganism had two parts — namely, vain opinions concerning God and divine things, and idolatrous worship — there were very many things in each part that were most widely received among all men, from which human reason itself, when it brought them to examination, was necessarily compelled to recoil. Lest anyone should therefore first take occasion from these things to doubt that whole most empty superstition in which they were ensnared, and thereupon to investigate the truth, as soon as the fame of the gospel spread abroad in the world, he stirred up great and learned men who, while preserving its autocracy, might devise and defend opinions concerning God and divine things more spiritual and less repugnant to right reason, and might establish modes of conducting worship at least less absurd and ridiculous than those that were in common use. In the first part of the work, Amelius, Eumenius, Plotinus, Proclus, Hierocles, Celsus, and others plied their diligent labor for him. For these men

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Although they were most tenacious in their idolatry, they nevertheless diligently set forth views of God more sober than the common run of philosophers had previously delivered, and they condemned vain, false, and harmful opinions about the divine. That they did so by means of that very truth which they hated — truth that had already cast its rays into the minds of men — and that they made use of its benefit, is most certain. The chief men among those who labored to gloss over with paint the impious cult and its most wicked mysteries were Apollonius, Porphyry, Iamblichus, and Julian; and in these men consisted the last effort of a crumbling Hellenism. But the word of God and the Spirit prevailed, until, with the wickedness and impiety of men growing strong, nearly the entire world once more shamefully fell away from the true and pure worship of God.