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nydus/The City of God, Volume IPublic

Saint Augustine defends the Christian religion against accusations that the sack of Rome by the Goths resulted from the abandonment of polytheistic worship. This twenty-two-book treatise refutes pagan arguments regarding worldly prosperity and divine worship before establishing the author's own theology concerning the origin, history, and destiny of the city of God and the city of the world.

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Table of Contents

BOOK SIXTH.

aside that doubt which he is wont to have recourse to in all things, as if, when about to dispute in favour of the doubt of the Academics, he had, with respect to this one thing, forgotten that he was an Academic. But in the first book, when he extols the literary works of the same Varro, he says, "Us straying and wandering in our own city like strangers, thy books, as it were, brought home, that at length we might come to know of who we were and where we were. Thou hast opened up to us the age of the country, the distribution of seasons, the laws of sacred things, and of the priests; thou hast opened up to us domestic and public discipline; thou hast pointed out to us the proper places for religious ceremonies, and hast informed us concerning sacred places. Thou hast shown us the names, kinds, offices, causes of all divine and human things."201

This man, then, of so distinguished and excellent acquirements, and, as Terentian briefly says of him in a most elegant verse,

who read so much that we wonder when he had time to write, wrote so much that we can scarcely believe any one could have read it all,—this man, I say, so great in talent, so great in learning, had he been an opposer and destroyer of the so-called divine things of

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