12 Appendix.

the air the bird, in the waters the fish, on the earth the human. These, I say, and other divine works should be the spectacles for faithful Christians. What theater constructed by human hands can be compared to these works? Even if it is built with great masses of stone, the crests of the mountains are higher; and even if the ceilings shine with gold, they are outshone by the radiance of the stars. No one will ever marvel at human works who has recognized himself to be a son of God. He casts himself down from the height of his own nobility who is able to admire anything after God.

10 Let the faithful Christian occupy himself with the Sacred Scriptures, I say; there he will find spectacles worthy of faith. He will see God establishing His world, and with other animals, making human beings—that admirable and better structure. He will watch the world in its sins, the just shipwrecks, the rewards of the pious and the punishments of the impious, the seas dried up for the people, and again stretched out for the people from the rock. He will watch harvests descending from heaven, not pressed out from threshing floors by the plow; he will inspect rivers offering dry crossings with the hosts of waters restrained; he will see faith struggling with fire in certain ones, wild beasts overcome by religion and turned into gentleness; he will contemplate souls already recalled from death itself; he will consider even the lives of those very ones who have been perfected, brought back from the sepulchers to the body. And in all these, he will see a greater spectacle: that devil, who had triumphed over the whole world, lying beneath the feet of Christ. How decorous a spectacle this is, brothers, how pleasant, how necessary! To always gaze upon one's own hope and to open one's eyes to one's own salvation. This is the spectacle which is seen even with the eyes lost. This is the spectacle which neither a praetor nor a consul exhibits, but He who alone is both before all things and above all things.