Excerpt from Our City of God

When Augustine, amid the fast approaching dissolution of the Empire, with the Vandals already in his native Africa, wrote the "De Civitate Dei," he worked upon a conception which perhaps strikes us most for its contrast with our own. With the world, as it seemed, going to pieces around him, he looked for consolation in the thought of a Church, a body of elect souls who, and who alone, would be saved from this wreck of all that was visible.

He makes an absolute dichotomy, to us terrible in its completeness, of the human race. On one side are the elect, found in all the six periods into which he divides world-history, from the Creation to the Second Advent. With the saints are included the elect angels, and these together make up the eternal kingdom, the heavenly Jerusalem, the abiding City of God. The host outside are a massa perditionis, whose very virtues are splendida vitia, and whose doom is the eternal fire.

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This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. Это и многое другое вы найдете в книге Our City of God (Classic Reprint) (J. Brierley)