Lactantius

Amen.

End of Discourse on All the Saints by Gregory Thaumaturgus Fragments of Lactantius Firmianus by Lactantius This is a LibriVox recording.

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But when they advance beyond their boundaries, that is, when they turn aside to an evil course, then vices and iniquities come forth and produce everlasting punishments.

2.

Within our memory also, Lactantius speaks of meters, the pentameter, he says, and the tetrameter.

3.

Amen.

End of Discourse on All the Saints by Gregory Thaumaturgus Fragments of Lactantius Firmianus by Lactantius This is a LibriVox recording.

All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.

For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org 1.

But when they advance beyond their boundaries, that is, when they turn aside to an evil course, then vices and iniquities come forth and produce everlasting punishments.

2.

Within our memory also, Lactantius speaks of meters.

The pentameter, he says, and the tetrameter.

And both Gregory of Nazianzen and Gregory of Nyssa praise and commend a like mode of disputation in Basil the Great, while Jerome especially commends it in Quadratus, a disciple of the apostles, and Aristides, Justin, Irenaeus, and very many others.

Augustine says, Do we not see Cyprian, that mildest of doctors and most blessed of martyrs, going out of Egypt laden with gold and silver investments? And Lactantius also, and Victorinus, Optatus, and Hilary? And, not to speak of the living, how many Greeks have done likewise? But if natural reason first sowed this rich field of doctrine before it was rendered fruitful by the power of Christ, it must have shortly become more prolific after the grace of the Savior has renewed and added to the native faculties of the human mind.

And who does not see that a plain and easy road is opened up to faith by such a method of philosophic study? But the advantage to be derived from such a school of philosophy is not to be confined within these limits.

The foolishness of those men is gravely reproved in the words of divine wisdom, who by these good things that are seen could not understand him, that is, neither by attending to the works could have acknowledged who was the workman.

Tertullian opposes heretics with the authority of the sacred writings.

With the philosophers he changes his fence, and disputes philosophically, but so learnedly and accurately did he confute them, that he made bold to say, Neither in science nor in schooling are we equals, as you imagine.

Arnobius also, in his works against the pagans, and Lactantius in the Divine Institutions especially, with equal eloquence and strength, strenuously strive to move men to accept the dogmas and precepts of Catholic wisdom, not by philosophic juggling, after the fashion of Academicians, but vanquishing them partly by their own arms, and partly by arguments drawn from the mutual contentions of the philosophers.

But the writings on the human soul, the divine attributes, and other questions of mighty moment, which the great Athanasius and Chrysostom, the prince of orators, have left behind them are, by common consent, so supremely excellent that it seems scarcely anything could be added to their subtlety and fullness.

Whence Eusebius, or rather his interpolator Jerome, has recorded that Peter came to Rome in the second year of Claudius, but Cyril, Bishop of Jerusalem, Philastios, Sulpicius, Prosper, Maximus, Taurinensis, and Hegesippus Junior place this victory of Peter in the time of Nero.

Indeed, the ancienter tradition was that Peter came to Rome in the days of this emperor, as it may seem in Lactantius.

Chrysostom tells us that the apostles continued long in Judea, and that then, being driven out by the Jews, they went to the Gentiles.

This dispersion was in the first year of the Jewish war, when the Jews, as Josephus tells us, began to be tumultuous and violent in all places.