17. The hypocrite does not call upon God except when set in straits. — For the hypocrite calls upon God only when the tribulation of earthly matters presses him hard. For when he has found in this world the fulfilment of the happiness he sought, he does not seek the Author who bestowed that very happiness. But because, as we have said before, the art of teachers must be such that they strive first to destroy what is perverse in the minds of their hearers, and afterwards to preach what is right, lest the good seed of holy preaching find no room in hearts full of evils — whence it is said to Jeremiah: 「Behold, I have this day set thee over the nations and over the kingdoms, to root out and to pull down, and to destroy and to throw down, and to build and to plant」 (Jeremiah 1:10). (First, therefore, he is commanded to destroy, and afterwards to build;
first to root out, and afterwards to plant, because the foundation of upright truth is by no means laid unless first the edifice of error be destroyed.) Blessed Job, after he had answered the arguments of his friends concerning the causes of the universal Church, as it were against the words of heretics, and had by his manifold reply overthrown their arrogance, now shows that he is teaching — namely so that in what he adds he may plainly be seen to plant what is right, while in what he has set forth before he may be seen to have rooted out what is perverse. There follows: