rom the sacrifice, Moses from Egypt, the captive Jews from
Babylon, and all faithful souls from heathen forgetfulness and idolatry.
For a certain tribe had been set apart from the beginning to keep alive
the memory of God's judgments and promises, while the rest of mankind,
abandoned to its natural depravity, sank deeper and deeper into crimes
and vanities. The deluge that came to punish these evils did not avail
to cure them. "The world was renewed[A] and the earth rose again above
the bosom of the waters, but in this renovation there remained eternally
some trace of divine vengeance. Until the deluge all nature had been
exceedingly hardy and vigorous, but by that vast flood of water which
God had spread out over the earth, and by its long abiding there, all
saps were diluted; the air, charged with too dense and heavy a moisture,
bred ranker principles of corruption. The early constitution of the
universe was weakened, and human life, from stretching as it had
formerly done to near a thousand years, grew gradually briefer. Herbs
and roots lost their primitive potency and stronger food had to be
furnished to man by the flesh of other animals.... Death gained upon
life and men felt themselves overtaken by a speedier chastisement. As
day by day they sank deeper in their wickedness, it was but right they
should daily, as it were, stick faster in their woe. The very change in
nourishment made manifest their decline and degradation, since as they
became feebler they became also more voracious and blood-thirsty."

Henceforth there were two spirits, two parties, or, as Saint Augustine
called them, two cities in the world. The City of Satan, whatever its
artifices in art, war, or philosophy, was essentially corrupt and
impious. Its joy was but a comic mask and its beauty the whitening of a
sepulchre. It stood condemned before God and before man's better
conscience by its vanity, cruelty, and secret misery, by its ignorance
of all that it truly behoved a man to know who was destined to
immortality. Lost, as it seemed, within this Babylon, or visible only
in its obscure and forgotten purlieus, lived on at the same time the
City of God, the society of all the souls God predestined to salvation;
a city which, however humble and inconspicuous it might seem on earth,
counted its myriad transfigured citizens in heaven, and had its
destinies, like its foundations, in eternity. To this City of God
belonged, in the first place, the patria