[308] Yet vast as are his excellences and powers, he takes pity and compassion on those most helplessly in need, and does not disdain to give judgement to strangers or orphans or widows. He holds their low estate worthy of His providential care, while of kings and despots and great potentates He takes no account.
[309] He provides for the incomers because forsaking the ancestral customs in which they were bred, customs packed with false inventions and vanity, they have crossed over to piety in whole-hearted love of simplicity and truth, and rendering to Him that truly exists the supplication and service which are His right, partake in due course of His protecting care in the measure that fits their case, and gain in the help that He gives the fruit of making God their refuge.
[310] He provides for the orphans and widows because they have lost their protectors, in the first case parents, in the second husbands, and in this desolation no refuge remains that men can give; and therefore they are not denied the hope that is greatest of all, the hope in God, Who in the graciousness of His nature does not refuse the task of caring for and watching over them in this desolate condition.
[311] Let God alone be thy boast and thy chief glory, he continues, and pride thyself neither on riches nor on reputation nor dominion nor comeliness nor strength of body, nor any such thing, whereby the hearts of the empty-minded are wont to be lifted up. Consider in the first place that these things have nothing in them of the nature of the true good; secondly, how quickly comes the hour of their passing, how they wither away, as it were, before their flower has come to its strength.
[312] Let us follow after the good that is stable, unswerving, unchangeable, and hold fast to our service as His suppliants and worshippers.
So if we are victorious over our enemies, let us not affect their impious ways in which they think to show their piety by burning their sons and daughters to their gods.
[313] This does not mean that all the outside nations have a custom of giving their children to the fire. They have not become so savage in nature as to bring themselves to do in peace to their nearest and dearest what they would not do in wartime to their enemies in the field or to the objects of their implacable hatred. Rather the words refer to that consuming fire in which they veritably destroy the souls of their offspring right from the cradle by failing to imprint on their still tender souls truth-giving conceptions of the one, the truly existent God.
Nor yet if defeated let us lose heart or be overcome by their successes as though the victory were due to their piety.
[314] To many their temporary pieces of good fortune have proved to be a pitfall, a trap baited with evils vast and fatal. And it may well be that the triumph of the unworthy comes to pass not for their own sake but that we should be more abundantly distressed and afflicted for our unholy deeds; we who, born as citizens of a godly community, reared under laws which incite to every virtue, trained from our earliest years under divinely gifted men, show contempt for their teaching and cling to what truly deserves our contempt, count the serious side of life as child’s-play and what befits the playground as matters of serious import.