The City of God

...therefore, my son Marcellinus, I would not wish that you, nor others who usefully and liberally serve this labor of ours in the charity of Christ, should be such judges of my writings that you always desire a response when you hear that something has been contradicted in what is read, lest you become similar to those who never arrive at the truth.

Concerning what was accomplished in the first volume. Chapter II

otherwise, resisting

In the previous book, when I had set out to speak of the City of God, from which this entire work was undertaken with His aid, it occurred to me that I must first respond to those who attribute these wars, by which this world is crushed, and especially the recent devastation of the city of Rome by the barbarians, to the Christian religion, by which they are forbidden to serve the wicked sacrifices of demons. Yet they ought rather to attribute to Christ the fact that, because of His name and contrary to the established custom of wars, the barbarians provided free and most ample places to which they might flee, and in many places, they honored the service owed to Christ—not only genuine service but also one feigned out of fear—in such a way that they judged it illicit for themselves to do what could have been done to them by the right of war. From there arose the question of why these divine benefits reached even the impious and ungrateful, and why those harsh events, which were done in a hostile manner, afflicted the pious along with the impious. This question, spread through the daily occurrences of this age, whether as gifts of God or as human disasters—which, because they often happen to the well-living and the ill-living alike, mixed and indiscriminately—often move many to ask regarding the women, both pious and chaste, in whom something was perpetrated by the enemy that brought pain to their modesty, even if it did not take away the firmness of their chastity, lest they repent of their life; among whom there is no cause for repenting of wickedness. Next, I said a few words against those who harass, with the most impudent insolence, Christians affected by those adverse things, and especially the shame of humiliated women, even though they were chaste and holy, when those harassers are themselves most wicked and irreverent. They celebrate them in memory, or rather, they strongly oppose their glory; for Rome, built by the ancients and increased by their labors, they made more foul standing than falling, since in its ruin only stones and timber fell, but in their lives, everything fell—not walls, but monuments and ornaments—since their hearts burned with more fatal desires than the roofs of that city burned with fires. With these things said, I finished the first book; and so I determined to say henceforth how many evils that city suffered from its very origin, whether within itself or in the provinces already subject to it, all of which they would attribute to the Christian religion if the evangelical doctrine were already resounding then with the freest testimony against their false and deceitful gods.

Concerning the adoption of history, which shows what evils happened to the Romans when they worshipped the gods, before the Christian religion grew. Chapter III

Remember, however, that while commemorating these things, I am still acting against the unskilled, out of whose ignorance that vulgar proverb also arose: "The rain has ceased because of the Christian name." For there are those among them who, trained in the liberal studies, love history, by which they know these things most easily. But in order to render the masses of the unlearned most hostile to us, they pretend that they do not know them, and they strive to affirm among the common people that the disasters by which the human race must be afflicted at certain intervals of places and times happen because of the Christian name, which is spread throughout everything with great fame and most illustrious celebrity in opposition to their gods. Let them, therefore, review with us the time before Christ came in the flesh, before His name was spread abroad, and let them defend their gods if they can, if they contend that they must be worshipped for that reason. For why did they permit those things, which I am about to relate, to happen to their worshippers before the name of Christ, having been declared, offended them and prohibited their sacrifices?