§ 1. There will be a place more proper to this disputation in Book II. For I shall show that the wicked are punished and good princes favored and defended.
Divine vengeance proceeds with a slow but weighty step, although punishment is sometimes made present swiftly. Indeed, this most especially demonstrates the active force of divine judgment against transgressors. Although no one among sinners escapes, but is either soon led to punishment or is deferred—unless through repentance and good deeds he anticipates the avenging hand of the divine power—the greatest part of punishments is preserved for the future. Yet in the meantime so many temporal evils precede those everlasting evils that no one can doubt that God exists, who rules and judges mortal affairs, rewards the good, and avenges himself upon the impious. He judges the world in equity and the peoples in his truth.
What some interpret as the necessity of fate, and others as a fortuitous event, is the judgment of God. Hence come the marvelous and unexpected revolutions of affairs. There is no year that is not marked by some distinguished fall or death of powerful persons—indeed, no day that does not see certain men lying low in the evening whom it had seen proud in the morning. This is not done by
a star and the wondrous power of hidden fate,
but by God—God, I say, because he calls the stars and they say, “We are present”; he who made those lights not for their own service, but for the utility of human beings.
§ 2. Struck by that judgment, the first fratricide, wandering and trembling with perpetual dread, carried the marks of his crime around the world. By that judgment the flood inundated the lands, heavenly flame burned the Sodomites, the Red Sea overwhelmed the Egyptians, and Israel destroyed the Canaanites. By this judgment Korah, Dathan, Abiram, and many thousands fell in the desert. For many years Israel was oppressed by the tyranny of neighboring kings; afterward it was afflicted under its own kings and condemned to seventy years of servitude.
But let us consider greater examples. God permitted the avarice of the Assyrians to exhaust all Asia; he despoiled them through the Chaldeans; and the luxury of the Chaldeans through the Medes and Persians, who ruled most widely and, raised even to the highest summit and openly displaying vices greater than their dominion, were compelled through the Macedonians, the most contemptible nation of Greece, to accept the yoke of servitude. But he cast the Macedonians, who had collided among themselves, before the Romans to be defeated, crushed, and stripped to the bone.
Then, when the sins of the Romans exceeded their measure, so that they could neither be tolerated any longer nor bear a remedy, he first wore the Romans down by mutual slaughter and then divided them among the Cimbri, Heruli, Goths, Vandals, Lombards, and other barbarians. Now all Asia, the more excellent portion of Africa, and noble Greece pay the penalties of despised religion beneath the bitter and harsh dominion of the Ottomans.
All disasters that have afflicted either the whole world or its parts in turn are executions of divine judgments. “We read,” says Tertullian in the Apology, chapter 40, “that Hierapolis and the islands of Delos, Rhodes, and Cos perished together with many thousands of human beings. Plato also records that a land greater than Asia and Africa was taken away by the Atlantic Sea. The earthquake also drank up the Corinthian Sea. And the force of the waves severed Lucania from Italy and banished it into the name of Sicily.” The punishments were exceedingly ancient, but the crimes which drew punishment as their companion were still more ancient.
The ancients relate that during the reign of the impious Phaethon, Greece and Ethiopia were devastated by fires and the king himself destroyed by a thunderbolt. In vengeance for adultery, the kingdom of Priam and barbarian opulence passed into funeral pyres. Sardanapalus the Assyrian, together with a herd of shameful men and women, brought his immense luxury to an end in his burning palace. A most just thunderbolt crushed Tullus Hostilius, king of the Romans. We read of the fires of Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, Sidon, Tyre, Thebes, Persepolis, Saguntum, Corinth, Carthage, Numantia, Byzantium, Nicomedia, Aquileia, Padua, Antioch, Basel, Venice, and other cities, and that they were frequently repeated. I pass over earthquakes and other misfortunes.
I would show the great rewards given to the piety of kings and peoples, so that by this part too I might establish God’s rule, but I prefer to defer them to that part in which I shall treat of piety. For no thing demonstrates divine sovereignty within the commonwealth more clearly than the rewards of virtue.