It is no matter to the City of God what dress the citizen wears, or what manner of life he follows, so long as it is not contrary to the Divine commands; so that she does not compel the philosophers, who become Christians, to change their habit or their means of life, which are no hindrance to religion, but only their false opinions.  As for these three kinds of life, the contemplative, the active, and that which partakes of both qualities, although a man living in faith may adopt any of them, and therein reach eternal reward, yet the love of truth and the duties of charity alike must have their place.  One may not so give himself to contemplation as to neglect the good of his neighbour, nor be so deeply immersed in action as to neglect the contemplation of God.  In leisure we ought to delight, not in an empty inertia, but in the inquisition or discovery of truth, in such a way that each may make progress without envying the attainments of another.  In action we ought to seek neither the honours of this life nor power, since all that is under the sun is vanity; but only the work itself, which our situation enables us to do, and to do it rightly and serviceably.

According to the definitions which Scipio used in Cicero’s “Republic,” there never really existed a Roman republic.  For he briefly defines a republic as the estate of the people—­“res publica” as “res populi,” and defines the people as a multitudinous assemblage, united by consent to law and by community of advantage.  So, then, where justice is not, there can be no people; and if no people, then no estate of the people, but only of a confused multitude unworthy of the name of a people.  Where no justice is, there is no commonwealth.  Now, justice is a virtue distributing unto everyone his due.  Where, then, is the justice of the man who deserts the true God and gives himself over to unclean demons?  Is this giving everyone his due?

But if we define a people in another way, and consider it as an assemblage of rational beings united by unanimity as to the objects of their love, then, in order to ascertain the character of a people, we must ascertain what things they love.  Whatever it loves, so long as it is an assemblage of rational creatures and not a herd of cattle, and is agreed as to the objects of its love, it is truly a people, though so much the better as its concord lies in better things, and so much the worse as its concord lies in inferior things.  According to this definition, then, the Roman people is indeed a people, and its estate is a commonwealth.  But what things that people has loved in its earlier and later times, and how it fell into bloody seditions and into social and civil wars, breaking and corrupting that concord which is the health of a people—­of these things history is witness.  Yet I would not on that account deny it the name of a people, nor its estate the name of a republic, so long as there remains some assemblage of rational persons associated by unanimity with regard to the objects of love.  But in general, whatever be the nation in question, whether Athens, Egypt, Babylon, or Rome, the city of the ungodly—­refusing obedience to the commandment of God that no sacrifice should be offered but to Him alone—­is without true justice.