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

by Arnobius

43. What say you, O offspring and descendants of the Supreme Deity? Did these souls, then, wise, and sprung from the first causes, become acquainted with such forms of baseness, crime, and bad feeling? and were they ordered to dwell here,^[1] and be clothed with the garment of the human body, in order that they might engage in, might practise these evil deeds, and that very frequently? And is there a man with any sense of reason who thinks that the world was established because of them, and not rather that it was set up as a seat and home, in which every kind of wickedness should be committed daily, all evil deeds be done, plots, impostures, frauds, covetousness, robberies, violence, impiety, all that is presumptuous, indecent, base, disgraceful,^[2] and all the other evil deeds which men devise over all the earth with guilty purpose, and contrive for each other’s ruin?

Footnotes

1. The ms. reads, habitare atque habitare juss-e-r-unt. All edd. omit the first two words, the first ed. without further change; but the active verb is clearly out of place, and therefore all other edd. read jussæ sunt, as above. Oehler, however, from habitare omitted by the others, would emend aditare, “to approach,”—a conjecture with very little to recommend it.
2. These are all substantives in the original.