Ante-Nicene Fathers/Volume VI/Arnobius/Adversus Gentes/Book II/Chapter LXI

by Arnobius

61. What business of yours is it, He^[1] says, to examine, to inquire who made man; what is the origin of souls; who devised the causes of ills; whether the sun is larger than the earth, or measures only a foot in breadth:^[2] whether the moon shines with borrowed light, or from her own brightness,—things which there is neither profit in knowing, nor loss in not knowing? Leave these things to God, and allow Him to know what is, wherefore, or whence; whether it must have been or not; whether something always existed,^[3] or whether it was produced at the first; whether it should be annihilated or preserved, consumed, destroyed, or restored in fresh vigour. Your reason is not permitted to involve you in such questions, and to be busied to no purpose about things so much out of reach. Your interests are in jeopardy,—the salvation, I mean,^[4] of your souls; and unless you give yourselves to seek to know the Supreme God, a cruel death awaits you when freed from the bonds of body, not bringing sudden annihilation, but destroying by the bitterness of its grievous and long-protracted punishment.

Footnotes

1. i.e., Christ.
2. As Heraclitus is reported to have said.
3. The ms., first five edd., and Oehler read supernatum, for which the other edd. read, as above, semper natum, from the margin of Ursinus. The soul is referred to.
4. So the later edd., following Elmenhorst, who emended dico for the ms. dici, omitted by the first four edd.