Saint Augustine: The City of God (De Civitate Dei)

S. AUGUSTINI

14

the others suffer, but the good pray and offer praise. It matters so much, not what things, but what sort of person one is while suffering. For with the same motion, filth exhaled by movement smells horrible, while an ointment smells sweet.

Concerning the reasons for corrections, on account of which both the good and the wicked are scourged alike.

What, therefore, did the Christians suffer in that devastation of things, which, if they considered it faithfully, did not redound to their advancement? First, because they humbly think upon the very sins for which God, in His indignation, filled the world with such calamities. Although they are far from being criminals, villains, or the impious, they do not consider themselves so alien to such faults that they judge themselves unworthy of suffering temporal evils for them. For, except for the fact that everyone, however praisably they live, yields in certain ways to carnal concupiscentia lustful desire, even if not to the enormity of crimes and the abyss of wickedness and the abomination of impiety, but nevertheless to some sins, whether rare or all the more frequent as they are smaller—this being excepted, who is easily found who holds these very people, on account of whose horrendous pride, luxury, avarice, and execrable iniquities and impieties God—just as He foretold in His warnings—crushes the lands, as they ought to be held? Who lives with them as one ought to live with such people? For often, teaching, admonishing, and sometimes even reproving them is poorly neglected, either when we are tired of the labor, or when we are ashamed to offend their faces, or when we avoid enmities lest they hinder and harm us in these temporal things, whether those our greed still seeks to acquire or those our infirmity fears to lose, so that, although the life of the wicked is [a trial] for the good...