We had promised, then, that we would say something against those who
attribute the calamities of the Roman republic to our religion, and
that we would recount the evils, as many and great as we could remember
or might deem sufficient, which that city, or the provinces belonging
to its empire, had suffered before their sacrifices were prohibited,
all of which would beyond doubt have been attributed to us, if our
religion had either already shone on them, or had thus prohibited
their sacrilegious rites. These things we have, as we think, fully
disposed of in the second and third books, treating in the second of
evils in morals, which alone or chiefly are to be accounted evils;
and in the third, of those which only fools dread to undergo--namely,
those of the body or of outward things--which for the most part the
good also suffer. But those evils by which they themselves become
evil, they take, I do not say patiently, but with pleasure. And how
few evils have I related concerning that one city and its empire! Not
even all down to the time of Cæsar Augustus. What if I had chosen to
recount and enlarge on those evils, not which men have inflicted on
each other, such as the devastations and destructions of war, but which
happen in earthly things, from the elements of the world itself? Of
such evils Apuleius speaks briefly in one passage of that book which
he wrote, _De Mundo_, saying that all earthly things are subject to
change, overthrow, and destruction.[156] For, to use his own words, by
excessive earthquakes the ground has burst asunder, and cities with
their inhabitants have been clean destroyed: by sudden rains whole
regions have been washed away; those also which formerly had been
continents, have been insulated by strange and new-come waves, and
others, by the subsiding of the sea, have been made passable by the
foot of man: by winds and storms cities have been overthrown; fires
have flashed forth from the clouds, by which regions in the East being
burnt up have perished; and on the western coasts the like destructions
have been caused by the bursting forth of waters and floods. So,
formerly, from the lofty craters of Etna, rivers of fire kindled by God
have flowed like a torrent down the steeps. If I had wished to collect
from history wherever I could, these and similar instances, where
should I have finished what happened even in those times before the
name of Christ had put down those of their idols, so vain and hurtful
to true salvation? I promised that I should also point out which of
their customs, and for what cause, the true God, in whose power all
kingdoms are, had deigned to favour to the enlargement of their empire;
and how those whom they think gods can have profited them nothing, but
much rather hurt them by deceiving and beguiling them; so that it seems
to me I must now speak of these things, and chiefly of the increase of
the Roman empire. For I have already said not a little, especially in
the second book, about the many evils introduced into their manners by
the hurtful deceits of the demons whom they worshipped as gods. But
throughout all the three books already completed, where it appeared
suitable, we have set forth how much succour God, through the name of
Christ, to whom the barbarians beyond the custom of war paid so much
honour, has bestowed on the good and bad, according as it is written,
"Who maketh His sun to rise on the good and the evil, and giveth rain
to the just and the unjust."[157]