a commonwealth. But what things that people has loved in its earlier and
later times, and how it fell into bloody seditions and into social and
civil wars, breaking and corrupting that concord which is the health of
a people--of these things history is witness. Yet I would not on that
account deny it the name of a people, nor its estate the name of a
republic, so long as there remains some assemblage of rational persons
associated by unanimity with regard to the objects of love. But in
general, whatever be the nation in question, whether Athens, Egypt,
Babylon, or Rome, the city of the ungodly--refusing obedience to the
commandment of God that no sacrifice should be offered but to Him
alone--is without true justice.

For though there may be an apparent mastery of the soul over the body,
and of reason over vices, yet if soul and reason do not serve God as He
has commanded, they can have no true dominion over the body and its
passions. How can the mind which is ignorant of the true God, and
instead of obeying Him is prostituted to impure demons, be true mistress
of the body and the vices? Nay, the very virtues which it appears to
itself to possess, by which it rules the body and the vices in order
that it may obtain and guard the objects which it desires, being
undirected to God, are rather vices than virtues. For as that which
makes flesh to live is not flesh but above it, so that which enables man
to live in blessedness is not of man, but above him.


_III.--THE DESTINY OF THE JUST_


Who is able to tell of the creation, with its beauty and utility, which
God has set before the eyes of man, though here condemned to labour and