True Worship

Why else do they strive so hard to hide and conceal whatever it is they worship, when what is honorable always rejoices in the open, and crimes are secret?

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Listen also to the poets, who proclaim one father of gods and of humans, and say that the mind of mortals is such as the parent of all things has brought the day.

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He had hurried to Rome for business and to see me, leaving behind his home, his wife, his children, and what is more lovable in children: those still in their innocent years, still attempting half-formed words, a speech all the sweeter for its very stammering.

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We learn these fables and errors from unthinking parents. And what is worse, we work at them ourselves through our studies and learning, especially through the poems of the poets, who by their authority have harmed the truth as much as anyone could.

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Then Octavius said: "It is not the mark of a good man, my brother Marcus, to abandon a friend who clings to your side at home and abroad in such blindness of vulgar ignorance, and on so bright a day to allow him to dash against stones—stones that are shaped into images and anointed and crowned—when you know that the…

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But do you think we hide what we worship because we have no shrines and altars? What idol could I fashion for God, when, if you judge rightly, man himself is God's idol? What temple could I build for him, when this whole world, made by his work, cannot contain him?

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Since from the beginning of things the founder of these was discovered together with them, they themselves having been brought forth for this—that God might be known.

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Who will be able to know properly the one God of the heavens, except the one he has drawn up from wicked error? I was wandering ignorant, roaming, caught by empty hope, while the fury of first age carried me into the air.

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This one, then, we acknowledge and know as God, founder of all things, Lord because of power, parent because of establishment — this one, I say, who spoke, and all things were made, commanded, and the universe proceeded; about whom it is written: You made all things in wisdom;

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In the beginning God made the light, and divided it by a twelve-fold measure of hours, by day and by night, namely so that night might bring a place of rest over men's labors, and again day might overcome; by this alternate turn labor would be refreshed by rest, and rest again tempered by the exercise of day.

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3.1. Unless perhaps you doubt whether that commander of whom we speak exists, and you rather believe Apollo is, Diana, Mercury, Mars. 2. Give a true judgment, and looking around at all these things we see, one will doubt more whether the other gods exist than hesitate about God, whom we all naturally know…

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Aesculapius himself, born not without Apollo's shame, what else did he do worthy of divine honors except that he healed Hippolytus? He had a more famous death, because he deserved to be struck by a god's thunderbolt.

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