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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.

Page 656 of 735
Table of Contents

Notes

1

a.d. 410.

2

Retractations, ii. 43.

3

Letters 132-8.

4

See some admirable remarks on this subject in the useful work of Beugnot, Histoire de la Destruction du Paganisme, ii. 83 et sqq.

5

As Waterland (iv. 760) does call it, adding that it is "his most learned, most correct, and most elaborate work."

6

For proof, see the Benedictine Preface.

7

"Hitherto the Apologies had been framed to meet particular exigencies: they were either brief and pregnant statements of the Christian doctrines; refutations of prevalent calumnies; invectives against the follies and crimes of Paganism; or confutations of anti-Christian works like those of Celsus, Porphyry, or Julian, closely following their course of argument, and rarely expanding into general and comprehensive views of the great conflict."—Milman, History of Christianity, iii. c. 10. We are not acquainted with any more complete preface to the City of God than is contained in the two or three pages which Milman has devoted to this subject.

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