in the _De Civitate Dei_, Bk. xii. ch. 21. It
comes to this: God creates a being out of nothing, forbids him some
things, and enjoins others upon him; and because these commands are not
obeyed, he tortures him to all eternity with every conceivable anguish;
and for this purpose, binds soul and body inseparably together, so that,
instead, of the torment destroying this being by splitting him up into
his elements, and so setting him free, he may live to eternal pain. This
poor creature, formed out of nothing! At least, he has a claim on his
original nothing: he should be assured, as a matter of right, of this
last retreat, which, in any case, cannot be a very evil one: it is what
he has inherited. I, at any rate, cannot help sympathizing with him. If
you add to this Augustine's remaining doctrines, that all this does not
depend on the man's own sins and omissions, but was already predestined
to happen, one really is at a loss what to think. Our highly educated
Rationalists say, to be sure, "It's all false, it's a mere bugbear;
we're in a state of constant progress, step by step raising ourselves to
ever greater perfection." Ah! what a pity we didn't begin sooner; we
should already have been there.

In the Christian system the devil is a personage of the greatest
importance. God is described as absolutely good, wise and powerful; and
unless he were counterbalanced by the devil, it would be impossible to
see where the innumerable and measureless evils, which predominate in
the world, come from, if there were no devil to account for them. And
since the Rationalists have done away with the devil, the damage
inflicted on the other side has gone on growing, and is becoming more
and more palpable; as might have been foreseen, and was foreseen, by the
orthodox. The fact is, you cannot take away one pillar from a building
without endangering the rest of it. And this confirms the view, which
has been established on other grounds, that Jehovah is a transformation
of Ormuzd, and Satan of the Ahriman who must be taken in connection with
him. Ormuzd himself is a transformation of Indra.

Christianity has this peculiar disadvantage, that, unlike other
religions, it is not a pure system of doctrine: its chief and essential
feature is that it is a history, a series of events, a collection of
facts, a statement of the actions and sufferings of individuals: it is
this history which constitutes dogma, and belief in it is salvation.
Other r