ℹ️ This corpus has no morphological tagging. Glosses are matched by word form against a dictionary — a match does not prove it is the same word (an inflected form can coincide with another word’s lemma). Verify against the original and a specialist lexicon where precision matters.
ℹ️ The Chinese and English alongside are this site's own translation, made directly from the original text on this page (not the CUV or the WEB, which follow the Masoretic Text and a different textual tradition).
Wherefore, if either reason or our discourse has moved you at all, and if, as I believe, you bear a true care for yourself, I would have you hear me, and commit yourself to the good teachers of catholic Christianity with pious faith, eager hope, and single-hearted love; and cease not to pray to God himself — by whose goodness alone we were made, by whose justice we pay the penalty, and by whose clemency we are set free. So shall you lack neither the precepts and disputations of most learned and truly Christian men, nor books, nor those serene thoughts themselves, by which you may easily find what you seek. But as for those wordy and wretched men — for what milder thing could I say of them? — forsake them utterly: who, while they inquire too much whence evil is, find nothing but evil.
In this question they often rouse their hearers to inquiry, but they so teach those they have stirred up, that it were better to sleep forever than to be thus awakened. For out of lethargic men they make frenzied ones; and between these diseases — though each is generally deadly — this difference nevertheless holds: that the lethargic die without troubling others, while the frenzied is to be feared by many who are healthy, and especially by those who wish to come to his aid. For God is neither the author of evil, nor did it ever repent him of anything he had done, nor is he disturbed by the tempest of any commotion of soul, nor is a little patch of earth his kingdom, nor does he approve or command any outrages or crimes, nor does he ever lie.
For these things and things of this kind used to move us, when they battered them with great invectives and charged that this was the teaching of the Old Testament — which is utterly most false. And so I grant that they rightly reprehend these things. What then did I learn? What do you suppose, but that when these things are reprehended, the catholic teaching is not reprehended? Thus what I had learned true among them, I hold; what I had thought false, I reject. But the catholic Church taught me many other things also, to which those men — bloodless in body, but gross in mind — cannot aspire: that God is not corporeal, that no part of him can be perceived by bodily eyes, that nothing of his substance and nature is in any way violable or changeable or composite or fabricated;
and if you grant me these things — for God is not to be conceived otherwise — all their contrivances are overthrown. But as to how this may be — namely, that God neither begot nor made evil, nor is there, nor ever was, any nature and substance which God did not either beget or make, and yet that he frees us from evil — this is proved by reasons so necessary that it cannot be doubted at all, especially by you and such as you, provided that to a good natural disposition there be added piety and a certain peace of mind, without which nothing whatever can be understood concerning matters so great. And here there is no rumor sprung from smoke, no I-know-not-what Persian fable, to which it is enough to lend the ear and a mind not subtle, but plainly childish.
Far otherwise, altogether far otherwise — not as the Manichees rave — does the truth stand. But since this discourse of ours has proceeded much further than I supposed, let us here make an end to the book: in which I would have you remember that I have not yet begun to refute the Manichees, nor yet assailed those trifles of theirs, nor disclosed anything great concerning the catholic faith itself, but have only wished to root out for you, if I could, the false opinion about true Christians malignantly or unskillfully instilled into you against us, and to rouse you toward the learning of certain great and divine things. Wherefore let this volume be as it is; but when your mind has been made more peaceable, I shall perhaps be readier in the rest. Amen.