CHAPTER XXVI.

All rule and sovereignty are in the hands of the One God Who is above all.

SEE, therefore, whether it is not He Who dispenses kingdoms, Whose is both the world which is ruled and man himself who rules; whether it is not He Who has ordained the changes of empires with the periods of their duration in the world, Who existed before all time and created the course of this world, the embodiment of times and seasons and events; whether it is not He Who causes the rise and decline of states, under Whom the human race once existed [91] without states. Why do you make such a mistake? Rome in her state of natural wildness is older than some of her own gods; she held sway before she constructed so large an enclosure of Capitol. The Babylonians, too, reigned before your Pontiffs, and the Medes before your Fifteen, the Egyptians before the Salii, the Assyrians before the Luperci, and the Amazons before the Vestal Virgins. Finally, if the religious rites of the Romans are responsible for their kingdoms, Judaea, a despiser of those common divinities of yours, would never have reigned in time past, whose God with sacrifices, whose temple with gifts, whose nation with treaties you Romans have honoured at various times; and never would you have become its lords, had it not in the end sinned against Christ.