When the great David heard and understood this,^[1] he [David] said to him who dwells in the shelter of the most High; He will overshadow you with his shoulders, which is the same as being behind God (for the shoulder is on the back of the body). Concerning himself David says, My soul clings close to you, your right hand supports me.^[2] You see how Psalms agree with the history. For as the one^[3] says that the right hand is a help to the person who has joined himself close behind God, so the other says that the hand touches the person who waits in the rock on the divine voice and prays that he might follow behind.

When the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, made from a woman, made under the law.^[1] People are upset by made from a woman, because we confess that he was born of a virgin. It is only of man that we confess he was made; God is always the one who makes, he cannot be made in order to be. God cannot be made; but he is made into, or becomes, something for someone, in the way in which it is said of him, Lord, you have become (or have been made into) a refuge for us; and, The Lord has become (has been made) my helper.^[2] How many things he has been made into, though he never was made at all! Now the Lord Christ was made man, . . . in order for him who was always the creator to be a creature. While remaining God, you see, he became man in order to become what he was not, not in order to stop being what he was.

Say to the Lord, ‘My refuge and my fortress, my God.’ I am hemmed in by enemies. You, therefore, are my refuge. ‘In whom I will trust.’ For he will rescue you from the snare of the hunters.’ Note carefully that the psalmist did not say I trust but I will trust. As long as we continue in a life of sin, we certainly are not trusting; if we put an end to sin, then our hope is confident. For he will rescue you from the snare of the hunters. There are many hunters in this world that go about setting traps for our soul. Nimrod the giant was a mighty hunter before the Lord.^[1] Esau, too, was a hunter, for he was a sinner. In all of holy Scripture, never do we find a hunter that is a faithful servant; we do find faithful fishermen.

For he will rescue you from the snare of the hunters. We were rescued like a bird from the fowler’s snare; broken was the snare, and we were freed.^[2] What snare is this that has been broken? The Lord, says the apostle, will speedily crush Satan under our feet;^[3] that you may recover yourselves from the snare of the devil.^[4] You see, then, that the devil is the hunter, eager to lure our souls unto perdition. The devil is master of many snares, deceptions of all kinds. Avarice is one of his pitfalls, disparagement is his noose, fornication is his bait. And from the destroying word. As long as we are in the state of grace, our soul is at peace; but once we begin to play with sin, then our soul is in trouble and is like a boat tossed about by the waves.

He said these things^[1] about the just and wise person and these are said in the blessings, You will sleep and there will not be anyone who frightens you.^[2] For if I am made just, no one can frighten me; I am afraid of nothing else, if I fear God. For it says, the just is confident as a lion,^[3] and for this reason, he does not fear the lion, the devil, or the dragon, Satan, or his angels;^[4] but, according to David, he says, I shall not be afraid of the nocturnal fear, nor the dart which flies during the day, nor the terror which walks in the darkness nor the ruin and the midday demon. And he adds that the Lord is my light and my Savior, whom shall I fear? The Lord is the defender of my life, at what shall I tremble?^[5] And again, If an army stands against me, my heart will not fear.^[6] You see the steadfastness and vigor of the soul that keeps the commandments of God and has confidence in the freedom that God gives.

Nor the attack of the noonday demon. This is better expressed by the Greek. Symptosis implies a chance occurrence when something strange happens unexpectedly; or symptoma may denote a disaster in which many perish at the same time. Grasp, then, what it means. Even though many have been seduced, nevertheless, you who are in the state of grace may escape seduction. I shall give you an example so that even the more simple[-minded] among you may understand what I mean. If you should go to the city, a monk all by yourself, and while you are strolling about you hear a shout in the circus and someone says to you, Come and see, it is the circus, and you hold back remonstrating, I have no permission, I cannot go; if he should call your attention to the thousands of people there and say to you, Two hundred thousand people are there, are they all going to be lost, and you alone be saved? You have to be aware that symptoma is the devil’s own doing. What I am trying to say is that you have to know that many do perish and are lost.

And now that I am writing to you I beseech you. Do not regard the bodily affliction^[1] that has befallen you as due to sin. When the apostles speculated concerning the man that was born blind from the womb and asked our Lord and Savior: Who did sin, this man or his parents, that he was born blind? they were told Neither has this man sinned nor his parents, but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.^[2] Do we not see numbers of pagans, Jews, heretics and people of various opinions rolling in the mire of lust, bathed in blood, surpassing wolves in ferocity and hawks in rapacity, and for all this the plague does not come near their dwellings? They are not struck as other people, and accordingly they grow insolent against God and lift up their faces even to heaven. We know on the other hand that holy people are afflicted with sicknesses, miseries and want, and perhaps they are tempted to say, Truly I have cleansed my heart in vain and washed my hands in innocence. Yet immediately they go on to reprove themselves, If I say, I will speak thus; behold, I should offend against the generation of your children.^[3] If you suppose that your blindness is caused by sin and that a disease [such as blindness] that physicians are often able to cure is an evidence of God’s anger, you will think Isaac a sinner because he was so wholly sightless that he was deceived into blessing one whom he did not mean to bless.^[4] You will charge Jacob with sin, whose vision became so dim that he could not see Ephraim and Manasseh,^[5] although with the inner eye and the prophetic spirit he could foresee the distant future and the Christ that was to come of his royal line.^[6] Were any of the kings holier than Josiah? Yet he was slain by the sword of the Egyptians.^[7] Were there ever loftier saints than Peter and Paul? Yet their blood stained the blade of Nero. And to say no more of people, did not the Son of God endure the shame of the cross? And yet you fancy those blessed who enjoy in this world happiness and pleasure? God’s hottest anger against sinners is when he shows no anger. Therefore in Ezekiel he says to Jerusalem, My jealousy will depart from you, and I will be quiet and will be no more angry.^[8] For whom the Lord loves he chastens, and scourges every son whom he receives.^[9] The father does not instruct his son unless he loves him. The master does not correct his disciple unless he sees in him signs of promise. When once the doctor gives up caring for the patient, it is a sign that he despairs. You should answer thus: as Lazarus in his lifetime^[10] received evil things so will I now gladly suffer torments that future glory may be laid up for me. For affliction shall not rise up the second time.^[11] If Job, a man holy and spotless and righteous in his generation, suffered terrible afflictions, his own book explains the reason why.

In various ways has the devil rivaled and resisted the truth. Sometimes Praxeas’s^[1] aim has been to destroy the truth by defending it. He maintains that there is only one Lord, the almighty Creator of the world, in order that out of this doctrine of the unity he may fabricate a heresy. He says that the Father himself came down into the Virgin, was himself born of her, himself suffered, indeed was himself Jesus Christ. Here the old serpent has fallen out with himself, since, when he tempted Christ after John’s baptism, he approached him as the Son of God. Surely he was intimating that God had a Son, even on the testimony of the very Scriptures, out of which he was at the moment forging his temptation: If you are the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread.^[2] Again, If you are the Son of God, cast yourself down from here; for it is written, he shall give his angels charge concerning you^[3]—referring no doubt, to the Father—and in their hands they shall bear you up, so that you do not hurt your foot against a stone. Or perhaps, after all, he was only reproaching the Gospels with a lie, saying in fact, Away with Matthew. Away with Luke!

Well, the Donatists^[1] are not false Christians. They are quite simply not Christians at all, since they listen to what the devil suggested and do not listen to the answer Christ gave him. How, after all, did the Lord, our teacher and savior, answer the devil’s suggestion of such things? Get back, Satan, for it is written: You shall not tempt the Lord your God.^[2] The devil, as a matter of fact, had taken his suggestion from Scripture, and the Lord replied from Scripture. The devil had said to the Lord, you see, Since it is written, He will instruct his angels about you; they will lift you up in their hands, lest you should hurt your foot on a stone. Hurl yourself down, he said, and if you are the Son of God, the angels are there to catch you; what are you afraid of? The Lord could indeed both have cast down his body and not allowed it to die; but what the devil was suggesting to Christ at that time is the sort of thing Christ was not teaching future Christians. This, you see, is exactly what the devil is also suggesting to the Donatists, saying, Hurl yourselves down, the angels are there to catch you. With such a death^[3] you do not go to punishment, but you win through to a crown. They would be Christians if they give an ear to Christ and did not trust the devil, who first separated them from the peace of the church and later on gave them cliff-jumpers.^[4]

His^[1] next remark was, Have not these inferior powers been assigned to them by God different departments, according as each was deemed worthy? But this is a question that requires a very profound knowledge. For we must determine whether the Word of God, who governs all things, has appointed wicked demons for certain duties, in the same way as in states executioners are appointed, and other officers with cruel but necessary duties to discharge; or whether as among robbers, who infest desert places, it is customary for them to choose out of their number one who may be their leader—so the demons, who are scattered as it were in troops in different parts of the earth, have chosen for themselves a chief under whose command they may plunder and pillage human souls. To explain this fully and to justify the conduct of the Christians in refusing homage to any object except the most high God, and the Firstborn of all creation, who is his Word and God, we must quote this from Scripture: All that ever came before me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not hear them; and again, The thief does not come, except to steal, and to kill and to destroy;^[2] and other similar passages, as, Behold, I have given you authority to tread on serpents and scorpions and over all the power of the enemy, and nothing will by any means hurt you;^[3] and again, You shall tread on the lion and adder: the young lion and the dragon you shall trample under foot. But of these things Celsus knew nothing, or he would not have made use of language like this: Is not everything that happens in the universe, whether it be the work of God, of angels, of other demons or of heroes, regulated by the law of the most high God? Have these not had assigned to them various duties of which they were severally deemed worthy? Is it not just, therefore, that he who serves God should serve those also to whom God has assigned such power? To which he adds, It is impossible, they say, for a man to serve many masters.^[4]

This power^[1] the Creator conferred on his Christ first of all, even as the ninetieth psalm [LXX] says of him: You shall tread on the lion and the cobra; the young lion and the serpent you shall trample under foot. Isaiah also says, In that day the Lord God shall draw his sacred, great and strong sword (even his Christ) against that dragon, that great and tortuous serpent; and he shall slay him in that day.^[2] But when the same prophet says, The way shall be called a clean and holy way; over it the unclean thing shall not pass, nor shall there be any unclean way; but the dispersed shall pass over it, and they shall not err therein; no lion shall be there, nor any ravenous beast shall go up thereon; it shall not be found there,^[3] he points out the way of faith, by which we shall reach God; and then to this way of faith he promises this utter crippling and subjugation of all harmful animals.

Wild animals are a proof of our faith. Have you trusted in the Lord? You shall walk on the asp and the basilisk; and you shall trample under foot the lion and the dragon. You have the power through faith to walk on serpents and scorpions. Or, do you not observe that the viper that fastened onto Paul when he was gathering sticks inflicted no harm because the holy man was found to be full of faith? Yet, if you are incredulous, do not fear the wild beast more than your own lack of faith, through which you have made yourself an easy prey to every form of corruption.

But what is said to Christ? And you shall trample down the lion and the serpent. The lion because of his open danger, the serpent because of his concealed deception. The serpent drove Adam out of paradise; the very same one, as a lion, persecuted the church, as Peter says: Your adversary the devil goes about as a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour.^[1] Let the devil not appear to you to have lost his rage; when he flatters, he must be feared the more.

However, we should not be without anxiety, dearly beloved, because we know that [God] is keeping his patience for such a long time. The fact that such great things happen in the world and he still does not avenge them indicates patience, not carelessness. God has not lost his power but is preserving us for repentance. Yet, the longer he awaits your amendment, the harsher will be your punishment if you refuse to amend. God indeed holds the sword, and he wishes to strike sin; we, on the contrary, defend our sins because we love them. Thus, we who should be the accusers of our sins become their defenders. Truly, dearly beloved, God does not want to kill the sinner, but his sin. Like a good doctor he wants to strike the disease, not the person who is ill. But, what is worse, we often despise the doctor and love our sickness: we love our sin and despise God. Sin, indeed, is like this, a dragon, a viper; but concerning the Lord it is written, You shall walk on the lion and the cobra; and you shall trample under foot the young lion and the serpent. We, on the other hand, embrace our sins like lions and dragons. But our God, who wants to punish sin and save the sinner, daily exclaims to humanity: Cast off your sin from you, and without you it will die. If you refuse to throw aside your sin, you will perish with it, for sin cannot go unpunished. God wants to kill sin, not to strike the sinner.