Lactantius — Divine Institutes 7.1

It is well: the foundations have been laid, as the outstanding orator says. But we have not only laid foundations firm and fit to carry the work; with great and sturdy masses we have brought the whole building almost to the summit. What remains — far easier — is to cover or adorn it; yet without that the earlier works are both useless and thankless. For what good is it to be freed from false religions or to understand the true one? What good to see through the vanity of false wisdom or to know what true wisdom is? What good, I say, to defend that heavenly justice? What good to hold the worship of God through great hardships — which is the highest virtue — unless the divine prize of perpetual beatitude follows it? Of that prize we must treat in this book, lest all that went before seem empty and fruitless if we leave uncertain the very thing for whose sake those labors were undertaken, lest anyone think such toils are taken up in vain while he distrusts their heavenly wage, which God has fixed for the one who has despised these sweet goods of earth for the sake of bare and naked virtue alone. Let us do enough for this part too, both with the testimonies of the divine writings and with probable arguments, so that it may be equally clear that future things are to be preferred to present ones, divine to earthly, and perpetual to brief, since the prizes of vices are temporal and those of virtues everlasting. I will therefore set out the account of the world, so that it may easily be understood both when and why it was made by God — which Plato, who treated of the world's fashioning, could neither know nor explain, since he was ignorant of the heavenly mystery learned only from the prophets and from God as teacher, and therefore said the world was fashioned to last forever. That is far otherwise, since whatever exists in solid and heavy body, as it once took a beginning, must likewise take an end. For Aristotle, who, because he did not see how so great a mass of things could perish, and wished to escape this rule, says the world always was and always will be, saw nothing at all, because whatever is must once have had a beginning, and absolutely nothing can be unless it has begun. For when we see earth and water and fire perish, be consumed, and be extinguished — which are surely parts of the world — it is understood that that whole is mortal whose members are mortal. So it comes about that whatever can perish was born. But also everything that comes under the sight of the eyes, being bodily, as Plato says, must also be dissoluble. Epicurus alone, then, with Democritus as author, was truthful in this matter, who says both that it once arose and that it will at some time perish. Yet he could give no account of the causes for which this great work is either dissolved or at what time. Since God has revealed this to us, and we reach it not by conjectures but by heavenly tradition, we will teach carefully, so that at last it may appear to those eager for truth that the philosophers neither saw nor grasped the truth, but only lightly caught its scent, yet in no way sensed from where that scent of wisdom, so sweet, so pleasant, had blown upon them.

Meanwhile I think it necessary to warn those who will read that these things we hand on the depraved and vicious minds will either not understand at all — for their sharpness is blunted by earthly desires, which weigh down all the senses and make them weak — or, even if they understand, they will still dissemble and will not want these things to be true, because they are dragged by vices and, knowing it, favor their own evils, by whose sweetness they are caught, and desert the way of virtue, by whose bitterness they are offended. For because they burn with greed and with a kind of unquenchable thirst for wealth, because they cannot, having sold or given away what they love, live a life of thin worship, they without doubt prefer that to be fiction by which they are forced to renounce their desires. Likewise those who, spurred by the goads of lust, as the poet says, rush into furies and fire, will certainly say we bring unbelievable things, because the precepts of continence wound their ears — precepts that forbid them the pleasures to which they have sentenced their soul together with the body. But those swollen with ambition or inflamed with love of power, who have turned their whole zeal to gaining honors, will not lend faith to that teaching — even if we should carry the sun itself in our hands — which commands them, every power and honor despised, to live humble, and so humble that they can both receive injury and refuse to return it if they have received it. These are the humans who bark against the truth with closed eyes in whatever way they can. But those who will be sound — that is, not so sunk in vices that they are incurable — will both believe these things and gladly approach, and whatever we say will seem to them open, plain, simple, and, what is most needed, true and impregnable. No one favors virtue except one who can follow it, but to follow is not easy for all: those can who have been trained by poverty and lack of things and made capable of virtue. For if virtue is endurance of evils, then those who have always been in goods do not take hold of virtue, because they have neither experienced evils nor can bear them, by habit and longing for goods, which alone they know. Hence it happens that the poor and humble believe God more easily, being unencumbered, than the rich, who are tangled in many hindrances — rather, chained and fettered, they serve at the nod of mistress Desire, who has snared them with inextricable bonds, and they cannot look up to heaven, since their mind is bent to earth and fixed on the ground. But the way of virtue does not take those carrying great loads: the trail is quite narrow by which justice leads a human into heaven; no one can hold it unless he has been unencumbered and bare. For those rich ones, loaded with many huge packs, walk the way of death, which is widest, since ruin rules widely. To these are bitter, to these are poisons, the things God commands toward justice and the things we, by God's teaching, treat concerning virtue and truth. If they dare to fight back against these, they must confess themselves enemies of virtue and justice.

I will now approach what remains, so that an end may be set on the work; and what remains is that we treat of the judgment of God, which will then be established when our Lord has returned to earth, so that he may pay each one according to desert either the prize or the punishment. And so, as in the fourth book we spoke of his first coming, so in this we will report the second coming, which the Jews also both confess and hope for — but in vain, since he must return to console those to whom he first came to call. For those who impiously violated the humble one will feel him the victor in power, and with God paying back they will suffer all those things they read and do not understand, since, stained with all sins and moreover steeped in holy blood, they have been destined to eternal punishments by that very one on whom they laid unspeakable hands. But we will have a separate treatment against the Jews, in which we will convict them of error and crime.