Let us change the rule which we have hitherto chosen for judging what is good.  We had our own will as our rule.  Let us now take the will of [God]; all that He wills is good and right to us, all that He does not will is [bad].

All that God does not permit is forbidden.  Sins are forbidden by the general declaration that God has made, that He did not allow them.  Other things which He has left without general prohibition, and which for that reason are said to be permitted, are nevertheless not always permitted.  For when God removed some one of them from us, and when, by the event, which is a manifestation of the will of God, it appears that God does not will that we should have a thing, that is then forbidden to us as sin; since the will of God is that we should not have one more than another.  There is this sole difference between these two things, that it is certain that God will never allow sin, while it is not certain that He will never allow the other.  But so long as God does not permit it, we ought to regard it as sin; so long as the absence of God’s will, which alone is all goodness and all justice, renders it unjust and wrong.

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To change the type, because of our weakness.

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Types.—­The Jews had grown old in these earthly thoughts, that God loved their father Abraham, his flesh and what sprung from it; that on account of this He had multiplied them, and distinguished them from all other nations, without allowing them to intermingle; that when they were languishing in Egypt, He brought them out with all these great signs in their favour; that He fed them with manna in the desert, and led them into a very rich land; that He gave them kings and a well-built temple, in order to offer up beasts before Him, by the shedding of whose blood they should be purified; and that at last He was to send them the Messiah to make them masters of all the world, and foretold the time of His coming.

The world having grown old in these carnal errors, Jesus Christ came at the time foretold, but not with the expected glory; and thus men did not think it was He.  After His death, Saint Paul[248] came to teach men that all these things had happened in allegory; that the kingdom of God did not consist in the flesh, but in the spirit; that the enemies of men were not the Babylonians, but the passions; that God delighted not in temples made with hands, but in a pure and contrite heart; that the circumcision of the body was unprofitable, but that of the heart was needed; that Moses had not given them the bread from heaven, etc.[249]

But God, not having desired to reveal these things to this people who were unworthy of them, and having nevertheless desired to foretell them, in order that they might be believed, foretold the time clearly, and expressed the things sometimes clearly, but very often in figures, in order that those who loved symbols might consider them, and those who loved what was symbolised might see it therein.