GENESIS. In the beginning the Lord set in place the heaven and the earth: for the earth was formless and hidden beneath the flood, and the measureless God moved over the vast waters, while chaos and black darkness shrouded all things. When he commanded these to be parted from their axis, he says: 'Let there be light,' and all things gleamed in a bright world. When the Lord had completed the works of the first day, he founded the firmament, whitening with rising clouds: the immense sea received the wandering shores, sweeping up manifold rivers in mighty currents. The third light unveiled the tawny face of the lands; soon, a name being given, the dry land is called earth; flowery shoots rise up in the windy fields, and at once the fruit-bearing branches bow down their arms. On the fourth day he begets the moon together with the lamp of the sun.
And he fashions the stars, radiant with trembling light: these elements he gave as ensigns to the world set beneath, that they might teach the seasons to be changed through their various risings. On the fifth day the flowing rivers receive the fishes, and the birds hang their various wings upon the air. On the sixth the Father makes the cold serpents slip into their coils, and pours forth whole herds of four-footed beasts into the fields, and commanded all things everywhere to grow with manifold seed, and to roam and feed upon the boundless lands. When the divine power had established these things by command, seeing that a ruler was wanting to the affairs of the world, he speaks thus: 'Let us make man in our own image, like to our countenance, that he may reign over all the world.'
And although he could have composed him with a single word, yet he himself deigned to lead him forth with holy right hand, and breathes into the dumb breast a spirit from his own divine bosom. When he had seen him formed into an image as though his own, he judged that solitude would breed gnawing cares. At once he pours upon his eyes an irrigating sleep, that more gently a woman might be formed from the plucked rib, and that the substance might strengthen the limbs by a twofold mingling. And a name is bestowed, which for life is called Eve. Wherefore children, according to custom, leave their parents and cleave to their spouses in a fixed abode. On the seventh light God rested at the end of his works, ordaining that day as hallowed for the joys of the age to come: then, the throngs of living things being brought forth in order, Adam, skilled by the prudence granted to him, gives to each one, one by one, a name that endures.
Him, joined now with Eve, God deigns to address: 'Increase by manifold birth unto the coming ages, that both the sky and the earth may be full of your offspring; and, my heirs, pluck the various fruits which the groves and the fields yield from their rich turf.' When he had discoursed thus, glad Paradise is set up as in a hall and beholds the light of the first sun. Among these there is born a tree of deadly fruits, breeding a taste of life and death joined together. In the midst of the dwellings a river flows in a pure stream, which waters the notable sources with its clear waves and cuts fourfold channels from its surging spring. Phison, most rich, flows with gold-bearing waters and grinds out conspicuous gems from its hoarse whirlpool:
This one's name is the leek-green stone, that one's is the glowing carbuncle; and clear in its shallows the river Havilah first laps the earth. After this Gihon, gliding down, enriches the Ethiopians. The third is Tigris, joined to the pleasant Euphrates, furrowing Assyria apart with its swift stream. Here Adam is placed as guardian with his faithful spouse, and as its tiller he is fashioned by such a voice of the Thunderer: 'Do not fear together to pluck the permitted fruits, which the unshorn grove has brought forth on its leafy bough; only be anxious lest perchance you gather the harmful evil, which grows green, set apart for a twofold office by its double sap.' And nonetheless meanwhile deep night held the blind pair, nor had any garment covered their newly-formed limbs.
Among these seats and among the risings sweet with their mild berries, the foaming serpent, surpassing the beasts in cunning sense, was creeping silently in cold coils, rolling livid lies with biting intent, and tempts the soft heart within the woman's breast: 'Tell me, why do you fear the happy shoots of the evil tree? Has not God hallowed all the fruits as known to you? If of these you were eager to pluck the honeyed food, the golden world would return upon its star-bearing axis.' She refuses, and fears to touch the forbidden branches: yet nonetheless her heart is overcome by feeble sense. At once, when now she bit the mild fruit with snowy tooth, the serene sky, stained by no cloud, shone forth. Then the taste, planting an allurement in her honeyed throat, compelled her to bear the gift to her unwitting husband.
As soon as he took it, night being wiped away, his shining eyes flashed forth, the world gleaming serene. Therefore, when each beheld the naked body, and when they see their shameful parts, they shade them with fig leaves. By chance, under the now-setting light of the Lord's sun, they hear a sound, and, trembling, make for the byways. Then the Lord of heaven addresses the mournful Adam: 'Say, where do you now dwell?' He, a suppliant, answered thus: 'O Lord, being addressed, I tremble in my fearful heart; O Great One, being yours and naked, I am worn out with chilling fear.' Then the Lord: 'Who gave you the harmful fruits?' The woman handed them over, while he says that his eyes, flooded with the white day, and the clear serene sky, the sun and the stars of heaven, had shone upon him.
Straightway the wrath of God terrifies the troubled Eve, while the Most High seeks out the author of the forbidden deed. She discloses under these words: 'Persuaded by the speaking serpent, I received it, deceived by his guile and coaxing entreaty: for weaving his own words with viperous venoms, he told me these things sweet above all fruits.' At once the Almighty condemns the deeds of the dragon, commanding all to look upon the hated monster: soon to crawl forward with breast poured out on the ground, then alone with its bite to chew the earth, with war remaining for all time among human senses and against man himself in his tottering, so that, its head cast down, it should creep prone behind the legs of men, that man may trample it as it slides and presses close. The woman, wretchedly deceived by fraud-bearing persuasions, is sentenced to bring forth offspring in hard peril, and to endure servitude to the will of her husband.
But you, to whom the counsel of your wife seemed true — she who, conquered, yielded to the pitiless dragon — you shall bewail your wretched toil through long ages: for instead of the seed of wheat there shall rise for you the thistle and the buckthorn with many sharp thorns, so that, with weary entrails and mournful breast, your anxious food shall yield you very many sighs, until, at the coming of the time of death in the west, you be given back to the earth as you lie there, whence you bear your body. When these things were done, the Lord gives to the trembling pair a weariness of life, and drives them far off from the hallowed gardens, and sets them turned away, and expels them by fire in the midst, in which the Cherub is whirled with swiftest heat, while the hot point boils down and rolls its flames.
The Lord, lest their limbs should stiffen with sluggish cold, sewed together the skins plucked from beasts, covering the naked limbs with warm garments. Therefore, when the faithful Adam now felt himself to be a husband by wedlock, he bestows on his wife the name of the beloved mother of the living. Made a father by twin offspring, he at once names them with different words. And this one bears the name Cain, to whom Abel is joined: with much care the one guarded the harmless sheep, while the other turned the earth with the curved plow. When these bore their gifts perpetually to the Thunderer, they offered, at the prompting of their disposition, dissimilar fruits. For the elder offered what had been sown from the fertile clods; but the other devotes himself with a gentle lamb, bearing the pure entrails in his hand and the snowy fat. And at once it pleases the Lord who watches over pious vows.
On account of which Cain grew hot with a cold wrath. Him God, deigning to address, begins with such words: 'Tell me, if you should live rightly and discern harmful things, could you not pass your life pure from contracted crime? Cease to destroy your brother with biting intent, who, subject to you as to a lord, will offer his neck.' Nor yet, broken by these words, does he desist, but leads his brother out to the fields, and when he saw him caught unawares on the deserted grass, he crushes his pious throat, throttling it with both palms. Which deed the Lord, watching from heaven on high, inquires into: in what part of the lands does Abel dwell? The other denies that he was set as guardian of his brother. To whom God declares: 'Does not the voice of his blood, sent to me, sound aloud and ascend to the lofty height? Know, therefore, what awaits you for so great a crime:'
For the earth which now was drenched with a brother's blood, ill-cursed, will deny you the seed committed to it, and, the herbs being consumed, will bring forth no fruit, so that you, benumbed, dash your limbs together with much trembling. II. SODOM. Now God almighty had abolished the crimes of the primeval age with an avenging flood in all the waters — as many as the heaven scatters, the earth spews forth, the sea spits out — and, having thus far agreed to decree punishments by watery destruction, whenever the air should bring on winter, he had commanded the varied bow to be for the reining-in of the rains, marking the clouds with a purple and green fringe: called by the name of Iris, which is the storm-cloud's own clasp. But relapsing, the impiety of men, together with the second race, springs up, and again a new age of evil sprouts forth, now allotted for its punishment not rains but fires:
Thus the land of Sodom deserved to be burned by fiery dews and to foreshow the signs of the end to come. There a savage wantonness, the enemy of modesty, stood in the place of law, which the foreseeing guest would flee — choosing rather, at the Scythian altars or at the altars of Busiris, to seek death amid the rites, and by the boxing-glove to yield his gore to the Bebrycian king, to glut the Libyan wrestling-grounds; rather even to take on Circean shapes through the ninth cup, than at Sodom to lose his violated sex. Their monstrous unions beat upon heaven with their outrage, nature rebelling against itself in like incest of kind, and the very name of man violated together with his body. But in due time God, having foreseen all things, patiently judges the unjust, when the age of crime, having wasted the space granted for ceasing, had compelled his wrath. And now the avenging day was at hand: two, sent from the heavenly host.
Two youths, angelic in form, both of whom were spirits performing divine ministries, as the Lord's commands ordained, come to Sodom. There, of the stock of the pious, the sojourner Lot, wise tiller of what is fair and just, was alone in remembering God: even as a useful tree is wont to lie hidden in the wild woods with its hospitable fruit. He then, sitting before the gate — scarcely were the heaven-dwellers approaching the walls — though all unknowing, of his own accord calls the divine ones, addresses them, venerates them with fatherly honor, and calls them to his hospitality, though they were preparing to lodge far off: striving with long entreaties, he discharges with friendly zeal the pious pledges of his table and the honest duty. Night had given rest, another light had unloosed the night, and Sodom clamors at the doors with its shameful law. Lot, a suppliant, against them:
'Let not ill-fed lust inflame you, young men, to defile that youth of yours — the lust by which begetting is left idle, by which the seed is spent in vain, by which no living souls mate; not the beasts that haunt the lairs, not those returning to their stalls, not those gaping beneath the waves, nor those that hang near the clouds by the measures of their wings, nor those that glide along the earth with body drawn out. Every kind has begotten by union; a female is spouse to all, and never to any is a mother anything but a female. Now if the youthful torch craves to lay waste modesty, I have within twin daughters, of marriageable age, their virginity swelling in bloom, now due to the harvest, worthy of the desire of men — take them as your will shall incline: I, their father, give them up, and for my guests I will pay out the sorrow.' The frenzied mob to these words:
'Who are you, and how great, and whence, that you would lord it over our minds and stow away laws for us? A sojourner, not a ruler of the Sodomites, you measure out our acres. Now, therefore, you yourself shall pay the penalty for what our desire is, both for your daughters and for your guests: one man is enough for all.' Said and done at once: no delay of the raging mob. As a turbid torrent is rolled with wintry force, and bears up on a single foot the countless streams of the brooks: if any tree there is struck by the rushing waves, not destined to remain long — as long only as its root will allow the leafy delays to endure — when, the soil beneath being eaten away, it now hangs with its trunk dug round about, this way and that it postpones its certain ruin, uncertain which way. Not otherwise Lot, in the midst of the whirling of the mob, was tottering, now almost to be overcome:
but the divine power comes to his aid; the angelic youths, snatching Lot from the threshold, restore him to the house: but the mad mob there, meanwhile, as the first tokens of their punishment, they smite at times in their eyes with loss of light. Then they unfold the decrees of God: that a fitting punishment would come from heaven upon Sodom, but that he himself had deserved salvation by the title of righteousness: 'Why, then, are you not girded to hasten your flight from here, and likewise to lead out anyone of your kin that you have? We now bring destruction upon the city.' Lot swiftly addresses his sons-in-law, but the hard mind of men scorned to believe the warning and laughed at his fear. Soon, at the time when the light attempts now to cleave the darkness, and the face of heaven is two-colored, of night and day, the youths were pressing to lead the Chaldean stock out from Sodom and to grant the just household to salvation:
'Come now, Lot, arise and take your wife and your two daughters, and go hence as an exile, forestalling the punishment of Sodom.' With friendly hands too they lead forth the trembling ones, and there give the rest of their commands: 'Save your life, Lot, and do not by chance wish to turn your gaze backward, nor to begin that, nor to halt your step; onto the mountain — make haste!' Lot feared the heights, that with slow step he must clamber up, lest the heavenly wrath should first overwhelm them: he sets about to beg for another haven, the little city which he had seen over against him. 'Hither,' he says, 'let my flight be; surely it scarcely stands out with walls, neither far, nor great to me.' They favored the fearful man, and likewise granted the safety of that very city: from that place the barbarous tongue came to know the name Zoar.
Then Lot enters Zoar; at the same time the sun rises, that day indeed the last for Sodom, for now the wrathful sun, seething with conflagrations, had armed its rays with all its fire. A rival gloom is sown up in its place, beginning to shut in the light and to weave globes of smoke into the confused heaven. Smoking clouds come together, an unwonted rain rushes down, sulphur with flames, chaos blazes, the ether boils, the scorched air crackles with liquid burnings. Hence the fable has drawn its fame from the true into the false: that the offspring of the Sun longed for his father's chariot, and, a weak boy, was not able to rein the proud horses of the Sun, and the world caught fire: then the charioteer was snatched away by a thunderbolt, and the sisters changed their unlawful lament into poplars. Let Eridanus be witness, if any poplar there gleams white, if there any bird more tuneful feathers with old age.
Here in another manner they mourn the marvel of a changed form. For the companion, his wife — alas, then too ill-suffering the divine law — the woman, at the murmurings of heaven, in vain turned her bold eyes back behind her, though she would have no one to whom to tell what she had seen: and at once there, changed into brittle salt, she herself stood, her own sepulchre and her own image, keeping for herself a form without a body: for she endures even still under the open sky in her naked station, neither dissolved into decay by the rains nor overthrown by the winds: nay even, if any stranger should mutilate the form, straightway of itself, by a swelling-up, it fills up the wounds. And she is said to be living, now in another body, as a sex discharging its accustomed months with bountiful blood. And now nowhere are the cities of Sodom, nowhere the impious race; the whole region is one pyre:
hence with the black horror of embers, and hence with hoary decay, the ashes mark the burnings. No one plows in vain the pitch-dark clods, grimy with soot. That former beauty perished, which Lot, looking out and parted from his uncle, had chosen as his rich fields. Even half-consumed, if any acres there attempt the glad wealth of autumn, they easily promise to the eyes to be excellent — pears and peaches and all manner of apples — until the birds go to pluck them: for straightway, at a betraying touch, the deceit of the empty fruit is dissolved into ash.
Thus, therefore, heaven and earth alike being buried, neither does the sea live there — death is the very peace of that sea, whereby it stirs no waves through panting rollings, and whereby also it never sighs from its native south wind, and whereby it lacks the power to bring forth from its whirlpool any race — scaly-skinned or smooth-skinned or hedged about with a shell, or a curled conch or one baffled by a double joining. There alone it measures out bitumen from its own produce, the soot of the burnt-out sea, which the living heat, cooking beneath the pools from the boiling of sulphur and salt, tempers, and grants to the earths to possess a sea-born pitch: at its proper season is brought forth the fat poison of the burnt water, and over the surface a skin of black foam is woven.
They call it — what a taking of merchandise is this? — and they lean their smooth skiffs with a balancing of the sides, that they may teach the boat, once laid upon it, to climb the vein of bitumen: for, now lifting itself of its own accord, it will give itself to the idle vessel and will sink it beneath so bountiful a gift, unless a woman touch that region with the blood by which she clothes the months. Behold, another marvel of the deep is noted from this disaster: all things there swim unwilling; nature has withdrawn the law fixed for the sinking of bodies. If at last you should set a light-bearing shell to swim, in which is the breath of fire, the point of flame will spread its sail; but if the flame be quenched, the shipwrecked destruction of the light will pass beneath the waters.
These punishments of Sodom and Gomorrah, sealed unto the ages for the unjust nations — in whom hard hearts forsook the fear of God — will teach them to revere the heavenly ordinances and to hope in the one Lord of all. III. CONCERNING JONAH. After the living funerals of Sodom and Gomorrah unto the age, and the burnings of punishment marked by the decay of ashes, and the fruits born in vain for the eyes alone, and likewise the death there of sea and salt made so — if man is anything, keeping his punishment in a changed body — the heaven's fire had almost struck down others with a shower from above: the city of Nineveh, which had transgressed the way of the equitable and the just. For what fear is there to a subverted mind? All the proofs of punishments are of no avail among the common folk where error holds sway.
But the good and forbearing and slow-to-strike Almighty Lord will hurl no wrath, unless first he admonish and knock upon the hardened breasts, driving on with his august mind the foreseeing prophets. And now the Lord had bidden Jonah to proclaim destruction to the deserving Ninevites: but he, knowing that God is wont to spare the subject and to remit the due penalty to suppliants and to be ready in doing good, delayed to go, lest he should prophesy in vain, the threats being about to yield to a peace that would annul them. Soon flight becomes his counsel — if indeed there is any such power, to avoid God and to escape the Lord's right hand, beneath which the whole trembling world is held in check. Or is there reason in what the prophet does from a holy heart? On the lip of the shore, most renowned for its trusty harbor, the city Joppa is poised over against the coasts of the Cilicians.
Thence, then, Jonah in haste demands passage to Tarshish by ship, over the pools of the same God: nor, in the end, is it any wonder if, fleeing the Lord on the lands, he finds him in the waves. For suddenly a tiny cloud had stained the air, roused by the wind from a sulphurous fleece of seed, and little by little, bringing forth its swelling mass, it clung together with the sun, and shut the deceived day within a column of gloom. The sea becomes a mirror of heaven, a black circuit stains the waves, into darkness the ether rushes and the sea rises: nor is there anything between, while the wave touches the clouds, the halls of the winds, all of which it mingles in a whirlwind. A many-sided fury gnashed against the fugitive Jonah.
One ship was the battleground of both heaven and sea; it is battered on this side and that, all its timber trembles under the wave-breaking blow, beneath, the spine of the shaken keel throbs, the creaking labor of the yardarm shudders from on high, and the very mast, hesitating to be broken, is bent. Meanwhile the sailors' groaning and fear try everything for the ship and for their lives: to make fast the delaying coils of rope, to lash the stay, to strain at the efforts of the rudders, to haul the struggling lines, to drive the pulley-wheels with the breast: a part in turn admirably snatch up the well of the inner sea, heavy with its stench, then they hurl headlong the merchandise and all the cargo and strive to overcome the perils by their losses. Then wretched cries at every crashing fragment of the deep.
They stretched out their hands to none of the powers of the gods, they whom the might of sea and sky does not fear, and drowned those men no less, buried in their vessels beneath the wrathful whirlwind. Unaware of all this, the guilty one himself, beneath the hollow arch of the ship's stern, was snoring out sleep that echoed through his puffed-up nostril, even then, in his slumber, prefiguring the type of the Lord. And he who directs the tasks of the wave-cleaving prow came upon him, lulled by placid peace, proud in his repose, and shoved him, pressing hard: 'What,' he says, 'amid such a crisis are you snoring out dreams? In so great a tempest do you alone possess a haven? Behold, the wave overwhelms us; our one hope is in the gods. You too — whoever your God may be — say your vows and prayers, and as a suppliant, calling upon him, bend the ancestral godhead.'
Then who was nearer to the fault, who was the cause of the storm, they resolve to learn by lot; nor did the lot lie about Jonah. Then they keep asking: who and whence among men are you, who, in short, in the order of things — of what people, of what dwelling do you boast renown? He confesses himself a servant, and one who greatly fears the God who lifted the heaven on high, who set the earth in place, who poured out the whole world from his own substance. And he reveals that he himself is a fugitive from that God, and discloses the causes. They stiffened with dread: 'What fault, then, do we hold against you? What is to be done now? By what pact shall we appease the waters?' For more and much more the savage straits kept swelling. Then the prophet of the Lord, with the Spirit's prompting, begins: 'Behold, I am the tempest, I the whole madness of the world; upon me,' he says, 'for your sakes the sky comes crashing and the sea rises; upon me the land afar off, death close at hand, no hope of God at all.'
'Nay, cast me headlong as the cause, and lightening the ship, throw this one great burden into the willing deep.' But they strove in vain to turn their course back toward return, for neither did the rudder allow itself to be steered, nor did the hard beam of the yardarm consent to be shifted. At last they cried to the Lord: 'Do not give us over into the maw of death for one soul's sake, nor will that we be spattered with righteous blood, if thus your right hand guides.' And now there, rising from the lowest gulf, a sea-monster, unrolling the scaly mass of its body with its shells, was pressing closer upon the shaken flood, seizing by God's own will the prey which, tumbled from the ship's height, it swallowed down its slimy jaws, and hastened the living feast into its long belly, and gulped down, along with the man, the fury of sky and sea.
The wave of the sea is stilled, the shadow of the sky is dissolved. From here the billows, from there the breezes are rendered friendly, and as the placid keel marks out a safe path, the white wake blossoms in a sea-blue furrow. Then the sailor, glad, offers to the venerable Lord the sacrifice of thanks for his fear, and enters the friendly harbor. The prophet Jonah too sails on, taken up in another vessel, and cleaves the waves beneath the deepest waves, making a sail of the entrails, breathing with the beast's own breath, enclosed yet not drenched by the waters, the inmost of the sea yet an outsider, amid half-eaten fleets and bodies loosened by rotting decay, learning even now his own coming funeral. But being destined to serve at some time as a sign of the Lord, he was not for destruction, but a witness of death driven away. IV. TO A SENATOR CONVERTED FROM THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION TO THE SERVICE OF IDOLS.
When I saw you once again enslaving yourself to diverse and empty rites and held fast by ancient error, I was struck with amazement and moved. Because you have always loved songs, answering you in song I made haste to write these verses, that I might rebuke you: for who could endure your preferring darkness to light — that you can believe her to be called the Great Mother, and think again that she must be worshipped as a goddess, whose worshippers foul infamy brands? For her priests in women's tunics confess by their outward garb the vice within, and think that permitted which is not permitted; whence through the city they walk mincingly, speaking with softened voice, and holding their worn-out loins with outstretched thumb, and change their own sex by a crime made public. And when they celebrate their rites, they claim that on these days they are chaste.
But if only then, as they claim, are they chaste, what are they in all the remaining time? Yet because they are compelled to be pure at least once, they rage in mind, mangle their body, and pour out their gore. What sort of sacred rite is it, indeed, that is offered under the name of blood? Now too I have learned that it was not age that made you bald, but your religion, and that, the Gallic boot removed, your foot is bound with soft papyrus. A thing wondrous enough, and cast down from the highest summit: if some consul should march into the city from the temple of Isis, there will be laughter on every face; and who would not laugh at you — you who were once a consul, and are now a minister of Isis?
And what shames you at first, you are not ashamed to be at second, and to condemn your own genius through shameful hymns, while the crowd answers you back and the senate mangles you, and though once painted in your own house with the fasces of office, now also with the sistrum you bear a dog-like face. Is this humility? It is a mere image of humility. Those memorials will remain in your house forever. And a public rumor has reached even our ears, that you have said: 'Goddess, I strayed, forgive me, I have returned.' Tell me, so you may prosper — when you would often ask such things and beg for pardon, what words did she speak with you? Truly you lack a mind, you who follow the mindless. These things you take up again, nor do you perceive that you sin. See what you deserve: perhaps you would be less to be censured, if you only knew this and remained in this error.
But when you have entered the doorway of the truth-honoring law, and it has been granted you within a few years to know God, why do you hold fast to what must be forsaken, or why do you forsake what must be retained? You worship nothing while you worship all things; nor do you ponder in your heart what truth differs from falsehood, what lights differ from shadows. You pretend to be a philosopher, since opinion sways you: for if a popular anger stirs your bile, you will even become a Jew, and you are held wholly uncertain. Indulge my words: lofty wisdom does not please you. Everything excessive falls into its opposite: both heat and cold work one effect; thus this, thus that, sears. Thus darkness takes away sight, thus the contrary sun takes it too, and the icy and the boiling bath harm alike.
Food nourishes the body, the body is spoiled by food, and lessens its own strength if anything is prolonged beyond measure. In short, if you sit down, it is a great rest from labor; if you sit too much, it is toil. For Maro the poet set it down as a punishment: 'Unhappy Theseus sits, and shall sit forever.' The useful, when prolonged, always does harm: long banquets harm, long fasts weary. So too much savor makes a man foolish. 'A base sect' — thus the goddess taught me — 'has called restraint lovely.' But you care for neither the sect nor its restraints. Yet the steadfast mind is overturned by no surging passion, and simplicity itself never devises any evil. Hence sincere faith shall enjoy an eternal dwelling, and deceit, on the contrary, shall be tormented with a long-lasting fire. Choose what you will, that you may shun the punishments you deserve.
Yet so, I say, may the believer merit this pardon: light will the offense be, if you are unwilling to know the truth; no light offense will it be, if you forsake the truth once known. But perhaps ripe old age, once you are corrected and sated with these errors, calls you back to something better: for time changes evils, time disposes all things. Then therefore, when a considered age has led you back, learn to keep faith with God, lest by chance you incur the same fall twice; for truly that saying holds: he who does not know how to avoid a second time the stone on which his foot has struck, and, incautious, has again bruised his limbs, let him blame himself, and not blame it on any chances. Correct your fault by trust, correct your mind. It sufficed to have sinned once; cease to fear: he shall not be in fault who repents of what he was before. V. ON THE PASCH.
There is a place, midmost of the whole world, as we believe, which the Jews call Golgotha by their ancestral name. Here I recall that a tree, cut from a barren trunk and then planted, brought forth wholesome fruits — yet it did not offer these to those who had set themselves up as its cultivators; strangers had the blessed fruits. Such is the form of the tree: from a single stalk it rises and soon extends its arms into twin branches, just as full sails stretch the heavy yardarms, or as yokes are joined to the plow with the oxen unyoked. The one whom it bore, with its first ripe seed, fallen to the ground, the earth conceived; then from there (wondrous to tell) the third light again raised up a branch, dreadful to earth and to those above, blessed with life-giving fruit.