THE OBJECTION, WHY DO YOU SUFFER IF GOD CARES
FOR YOU, ANSWERED.
But, say they, if God cares for you, why are you persecuted and put
to death? Has He delivered you to this? No, we do not suppose that
the Lord wishes us to be involved in calamities, but that He foretold
prophetically what would happen--that we should be persecuted for
His name’s sake, slaughtered, and impaled. So that it was not that
He wished us to be persecuted, but He intimated beforehand what we
shall suffer by the prediction of what would take place, training us
to endurance, to which He promised the inheritance, although we are
punished not alone, but along with many. But those, it is said, being
malefactors, are righteously punished. Accordingly, they unwillingly
bear testimony to our righteousness, we being unjustly punished
for righteousness’ sake. But the injustice of the judge does not
affect the providence of God. For the judge must be master of his
own opinion--not pulled by strings, like inanimate machines, set in
motion only by external causes. Accordingly he is judged in respect
to his judgment, as we also, in accordance with our choice of things
desirable, and our endurance. Although we do not wrong, yet the judge
looks on us as doing wrong, for he neither knows nor wishes to know
about us, but is influenced by unwarranted prejudice; wherefore also
he is judged. Accordingly they persecute us, not from the supposition
that we are wrong-doers, but imagining that by the very fact of our
being Christians we sin against life in so conducting ourselves, and
exhorting others to adopt the like life.
But why are you not helped when persecuted? say they. What wrong is
done us, as far as we are concerned, in being released by death to
go to the Lord, and so undergoing a change of life, as if a change
from one time of life to another? Did we think rightly, we should feel
obliged to those who have afforded the means for speedy departure, if
it is for love that we bear witness; and if not, we should appear to
the multitude to be base men. Had they also known the truth, all would
have bounded on to the way, and there would have been no choice. But
our faith, being the light of the world, reproves unbelief. “Should
Anytus and Melitus kill me, they will not hurt me in the least; for I
do not think it right for the better to be hurt by the worse,” [says
Socrates]. So that each one of us may with confidence say, “The Lord
is my helper; I will not fear: what shall man do to me?”[567] “For the
souls of the righteous are in the hand of the Lord, and no plague shall
touch them.”[568]