goodness itself? Whence then comes it that I choose the evil and refuse the good, that so a reason should be found for my just punishment? Who set this in me, and implanted in me this root of bitterness, seeing I was wholly formed by my most sweet God? If the devil were the author, whence is that same devil? And if he also by his own perverse will, of a good angel became a devil, whence, again, came in him that evil will, whereby he became a devil, since his whole angelhood was made good by the Most Good Creator? By these thoughts I was again thrust down and suffocated; yet not so brought down to that hell of error, where no man confesseth unto Thee, as to think rather that Thou dost suffer ill, than that man doth it.

CHAPTER IV.

That God is not corruptible: or He would cease to be God.

FOR

OR I was in such wise striving to find out the rest, as one who had already found, that the incorruptible must needs be better than the corruptible: and Thee therefore, whatsoever Thou wert, I confessed to be incorruptible. For never soul was, nor shall be, able to conceive of any thing better than Thee, who art the sovereign and the chiefest good. But since most truly and certainly, the incorruptible is preferable to the corruptible, as I did now prefer it, then, unless Thou wert incorruptible, I could in thought have arrived at something which was better than my God. Where then I saw the incorruptible to be preferable to the corruptible, there ought I to seek for Thee, and there observe "whence evil was;" that is, whence is that corruption, by which Thy substance can by no means be injured. For in absolutely no way at all doth corruption injure our God; by no will, by no necessity, by no unlooked-for chance; because He is God, and what He wills is good, and Himself is that good. But to be corrupted is not good. Nor art Thou against Thy will constrained to any thing, since Thy will is not greater than Thy power. For it could only be greater, if Thou Thyself wert greater than Thyself; for the will and power of God is God Himself. And what can be unforeseen to Thee, who

knowest all things? and there is no nature, except because Thou knowest it. And what should we more say, "why that substance which God is, should not be corruptible," seeing that if it were so, it should cease to be God?

CHAPTER V.

Questions concerning the relation of evil to God: since if He be the sovereign good, He cannot be the cause of evil.

AND I sought, "whence is evil," and sought in an evil

way; and saw not the evil in my very search. I set now before the sight of my spirit, the whole creation, whatsoever is visible in it, such as earth, and sea, and air, and stars, and trees, and mortal creatures; and whatsoever in it is invisible, as the firmament of heaven, and besides all the angels and all the spiritual things thereof. But these also, as though they were bodies, did my imagination arrange in such and such places; and I made one great mass of Thy creation, distinguished as to the kinds of bodies; some, real bodies, some, what myself had feigned for spirits. And this mass I made huge, not as it was, which I could not know, but as large as I chose, yet bounded on every side; but Thee, O Lord, I imagined on every part surrounding and penetrating it, but in every direction infinite: as if there were a sea, every where, and on every side, through unmeasured space, one only infinite sea, and it contained within it some sponge, huge, but finite; that sponge must needs, in all its parts, be filled from that unmeasured sea: so I imagined Thy finite creation full of Thee, the Infinite; and I said, Behold God, and behold what God hath created; and God is good, yea, most mightily and imcomparably better than all these but yet He, the Good, created them good; and see how doth He surround and fill them. Where is evil then, and whence, and how crept it in hither? What is its root, and what its seed? Or hath it no being? Why then do we fear and shun what hath no existence? Even if we fear it idly, yet surely that very fear is evil, whereby the soul is thus idly goaded and tormented; and so much a greater evil, as there is nothing to fear, and yet we do fear. Therefore there is either evil, which we fear,

then ?

or this is itself the evil, namely, that we fear. Whence is it then? seeing God hath made all these things, and He being good hath made them good. He indeed, the greater and chiefest Good, hath created these lesser goods; still both Creator and created, all are good. Whence is evil? Or, was there some evil matter out of which He made these things, and did He give it form and order, and yet leave in it something which He did not convert into good? Why so Had He no might to turn and change the whole, so that no evil should remain in it, seeing He is Almighty? Lastly, why would He make any thing at all of it, and not rather by the same Almighty power cause it entirely to cease to exist? Or, could it really exist against His will? Or if it were from eternity, why suffered. He it so to be for infinite spaces of times past, and yet chose so long after to make something out of it? Or if He now suddenly chose to do something, an Almighty being would be more likely to do this; to wit, to cause this evil matter to cease to be, and that He only should exist, the very sovereign and Infinite Good; or if it was not good that He who was good, should not also frame and create something that were good, then, that evil matter being taken away and brought to nothing, He might establish good matter, whereof to create all things. For He should not be Almighty, if He could not create something good except by the assistance of that matter which Himself had not created. These thoughts I turned over in my miserable heart, weighed down with most corrosive anxieties, and a dread of death, ere yet I should have found the truth; yet was the faith of Thy Christ our Lord and Saviour, professed in the Church Catholic, firmly fixed in my heart, in many points, indeed, as yet without form, and vacillating beyond the strict limit of doctrine; yet did not my mind utterly leave it, but rather daily drank in more and more of it.

Y

CHAPTER VI.

He rejects astrological divinations.

By this time also I had rejected the lying divinations

and impious ravings of the astrologers. Let Thine own mercies, out of my very inmost soul, confess unto

Thee for this also, O my God. For Thou, Thou altogether (for who else calls us back from the death of all errors, save the Life which knows not death, and the Wisdom which needing no light enlightens the minds that need it, by which the universe is governed, even to the fluttering leaves of trees?), Thou didst provide for my obstinacy wherewith I contended against Vindicianus, an acute old man, and Nebridius, a young man of admirable talents; the former vehemently affirming, and the latter often (though with some doubtfulness) saying, "That there was no such art whereby to foresee things to come, but that men's conjectures often had the nature of an oracle, and that out of their many forecasts, a good part would come to pass, though the foretellers knew nothing of it, but had only stumbled upon it by their ready tongue." Thou didst provide then a friend for me, no negligent consulter of the astrologers; nor yet well skilled in those arts, but (as I said) a diligent consulter with them: yet he knew something, which he said he had heard from his father, but how far it went to overthrow the estimation of that art, he knew not. This man then, Firminus by name, having had a liberal education, and well taught in Rhetoric, consulted me, being an intimate friend of his, as to what, according to his so-called constellations, I thought on certain affairs of his, wherein his worldly hopes had risen, and I, who had herein now begun to incline towards Nebridius' opinion, did not altogether refuse to conjecture, and tell him what came into my unresolved mind; but added, that I was now almost persuaded, that these were but ridiculous and vain follies: thereupon he told me, that his father had been very curious in such books, and had a friend as earnest in them as himself, who with joint study and conference fanned the flame of their affections to these toys, so that they would observe the moments, whereat the very dumb animals, which bred about their houses, gave birth, and then observed the relative position of the heavens, in order to make experiments in this socalled art. He said then that he had heard of his father, that when his mother was about to give birth to him, Firminus, a woman-servant of that friend of his father's, was in the same condition, which could not escape her master's notice, who took care with most exact diligence to know the births of his very puppies. And so it fell out that the

one for his wife, and the other for his servant, with the most careful observation, reckoning days, hours, nay, the lesser divisions of the hours, both were delivered at the same instant ; so that they were constrained to cast the nativity, the one of his son, the other of his servant, from the same constellations even to the minute. For so soon as the women began to be in labour, they each gave notice to the other what was taking place in their houses, and had messengers ready to send to one another, so soon as the actual birth had been announced to each of them; and that the announcement should be immediately made, they had easily made provision, each in his own domain. Thus then the messengers of the respective parties met, he averred, at such an equal distance from either house, that neither of them could make out any difference in the position of the stars, or any other minutest points; and yet Firminus, born in his parents' house, in ample circumstances, entered upon his career along the sunnier paths of the world, increased in wealth, and was raised to honours; but the slave, without any relaxation of the yoke of his condition, continued in servitude to his masters; as he testified of his own knowledge.

Now when I heard these things, and believed them (the teller being such as he was), all my hesitancy was swept away; and first I endeavoured to reclaim Firminus himself from that curiosity, by telling him, that upon inspecting his constellations, I ought, if I were to predict truly, to have seen in them, parents eminent among their neighbours, a noble family in its own city, honourable birth, gentle breeding, and liberal education: but if that servant had consulted me upon the same constellations, since they were his also, in order that I might also declare what was true for him, to read in them the meanest lineage, the condition of slavery, and all else most different and remote from the former forecasts; whence then it must happen, that on inspecting the same stars I should draw opposite conclusions, if I would say truths; but if I drew the same, I should utter false predictions: thence it followed most certainly, that whatever, upon consideration of the constellations, was predicted truly was predicted not by skill, but by hazard; but that false predictions were due not to want of skilled knowledge, but to the misleading nature of the hazard.