So in morals He gives charity, which produces fruits contrary to lust.

579

Nature has some perfections to show that she is the image of God, and some defects to show that she is only His image.

580

God prefers rather to incline the will than the intellect.  Perfect clearness would be of use to the intellect, and would harm the will.  To humble pride.

581

We make an idol of truth itself; for truth apart from charity is not God, but His image and idol, which we must neither love nor worship; and still less must we love or worship its opposite, namely, falsehood.

I can easily love total darkness; but if God keeps me in a state of semi-darkness, such partial darkness displeases me, and, because I do not see therein the advantage of total darkness, it is unpleasant to me.  This is a fault, and a sign that I make for myself an idol of darkness, apart from the order of God.  Now only His order must be worshipped.

582

The feeble-minded are people who know the truth, but only affirm it so far as consistent with their own interest.  But, apart from that, they renounce it.

583

The world exists for the exercise of mercy and judgment, not as if men were placed in it out of the hands of God, but as hostile to God; and to them He grants by grace sufficient light, that they may return to Him, if they desire to seek and follow Him; and also that they may be punished, if they refuse to seek or follow Him.

584

That God has willed to hide Himself.—­If there were only one religion, God would indeed be manifest.  The same would be the case, if there were no martyrs but in our religion.

God being thus hidden, every religion which does not affirm that God is hidden, is not true; and every religion which does not give the reason of it, is not instructive.  Our religion does, all this:  Vere tu es Deus absconditus.

585

If there were no obscurity, man would not be sensible of his corruption; if there were no light, man would not hope for a remedy.  Thus, it is not only fair, but advantageous to us, that God be partly hidden and partly revealed; since it is equally dangerous to man to know God without knowing his own wretchedness, and to know his own wretchedness without knowing God.

586

This religion, so great in miracles, saints, blameless Fathers, learned and great witnesses, martyrs, established kings as David, and Isaiah, a prince of the blood, and so great in science, after having displayed all her miracles and all her wisdom, rejects all this, and declares that she has neither wisdom nor signs, but only the cross and foolishness.

For those, who, by these signs and that wisdom, have deserved your belief, and who have proved to you their character, declare to you that nothing of all this can change you, and render you capable of knowing and loving God, but the power of the foolishness of the cross without wisdom and signs, and not the signs without this power.  Thus our religion is foolish in respect to the effective cause, and wise in respect to the wisdom which prepares it.