The Last Watch

These are the things the prophets speak of as still to come. I have not thought it necessary to bring forward their testimonies and their own words, since that would be an endless task, and the limits of my book could not take in so vast a crowd of subjects, when so many of them say the same things with one breath. Besides, I did not want to wear the reader out by piling up material gathered and carried over from every quarter. And there was a further reason: I wanted to confirm the very things I have said not out of my own writings but, above all, out of other people’s, and to show that the truth is kept sealed up not only among us but among the very people who abuse us — a truth they refuse to acknowledge. Anyone who wants to know these things more exactly may draw from the spring itself, and he will find more things worth wondering at than I have gathered into these books. [a]

Someone may now ask when the things I have spoken of are going to happen. I have already shown above that this change must take place when six thousand years are completed, and that the last day of the final end is now drawing near. We are allowed to know about the signs, since the prophets foretold signs by which we are to expect the finishing of the times from one day to the next, and to fear it. But as to when that sum will be complete, the men who have written about dates teach it, gathering from the sacred writings and from various histories how great the number of years is from the beginning of the world. They disagree, and the totals they reckon differ considerably; yet no reckoning stretches the expectation past a limit of two hundred years.

The subject itself declares that the collapse and ruin of the world will happen shortly — except that while the city of Rome stands, it appears that nothing of this kind is to be feared. But once that capital of the world has fallen and has begun to be a back alley, which the Sibyls say will come to pass, who can doubt that the end has then arrived for the affairs of men and for the whole world? It is that city, that one alone, which still holds everything up. So the God of heaven is to be begged and implored by us — if indeed his arrangements and his decrees can be put off — that the loathsome tyrant who will undertake so great a deed may not come sooner than we expect, and gouge out that eye by whose destruction the world itself is about to fall. Now let us go back and set out the other things that are to follow after.

A little earlier we said that at the beginning of the sacred reign the prince of the demons will be bound by God. But when the thousand years of the kingdom — that is, the seven thousand of the world — begin to come to an end, he will be loosed again. Sent out from prison, he will go and gather all the nations that will then be under the rule of the righteous, so that they may make war on the holy city; and from the whole world a countless host of the nations will be collected, and will besiege and surround the city. [f]

Then the last anger of God will come upon the nations and destroy them down to the last man. First he will shake the earth violently, and by that shaking the mountains of Syria will be torn open, the hills will drop away, the walls of every city will fall, and God will make the sun stand still so that it does not set for three days, and will set it on fire. Scorching heat and a great burning will come down on that hostile and godless people, and showers of sulfur, and hailstones, and drops of fire. Their spirits will melt in the heat, their bodies will be battered by the hail, and they will strike one another with the sword. The mountains will be filled with corpses and the plains covered with bones. But through those three days the people of God will be hidden in caves in the ground, until God’s anger against the nations and the last judgment are finished.

Then the righteous will come out of their hiding places and find everything covered with corpses and bones. The whole race of the wicked will perish utterly, and there will no longer be any nation in this world but the nation of God alone. Then for seven years running the woods will be left untouched, and no timber will be cut from the mountains, but the weapons of the nations will be burned instead. And now there will be no war, but peace and rest that never ends.

But when the thousand years are completed, the world will be made new by God. The heavens will be folded together, the earth will be changed, and God will transform human beings into the likeness of angels, and they will be white as snow. They will always be occupied in the sight of the Almighty, and will make offerings to their Lord and serve him forever. At the same time that second and public resurrection of all will take place, in which the unrighteous will be raised for everlasting punishments. These are the ones who have worshiped the works of their own hands, who have either not known the Lord and Parent of the world or have denied him. But their lord, along with his servants, will be seized and condemned to punishment; and with him the whole band of the wicked, each according to what he has done, will burn forever in unending fire in the sight of the angels and the righteous.

This is the teaching of the holy prophets, and we Christians follow it. This is our wisdom — the wisdom that people who worship frail objects, or who keep up an empty philosophy, laugh at as foolishness and nonsense, because we are not in the habit of defending it and asserting it in public. For God orders us to hide his secret in quietness and silence and to keep it within our own conscience, and not to fight with stubborn argument against people who do not know the truth and who go hard at God and at his religion — not in order to learn, but in order to find fault and to sneer. A mystery ought to be concealed and covered with the greatest faithfulness, and above all by us, who carry the name of the faithful. But they charge this silence of ours against us as though it came from a bad conscience; and so they invent revolting stories about people who are holy and blameless, and are glad to believe what they have made up themselves.

But all these fictions have now been hushed, most holy Emperor, from the time when the great God raised you up for the restoration of the house of justice and for the protection of the human race. While you rule the Roman state, we who worship God are no longer counted as cursed and godless. Now that the truth has come up out of obscurity and been brought into the light, we are no longer blamed as unrighteous — we who are trying to do the works of righteousness. No one throws the name of God at us as a reproach any more. Not one of us, who alone of all people are religious, is any longer called irreligious, since we despise the images of the dead and worship the living and true God. The providence of the supreme God has raised you to imperial rank so that you might be able, with true reverence, to cancel other men’s injurious decrees, to correct faults, to provide for people’s safety with a father’s clemency — in short, to remove the wicked from the state. God cast them down by your outstanding reverence and handed them over to you, so that it might be plain to everyone what true majesty consists of.

For the men who wanted to take away the worship of the God of heaven, the God who is one of a kind, so that they might defend godless superstitions, now lie struck down. But you, who defend his name and love it, outstanding in virtue and in good fortune, enjoy your undying glories with the greatest happiness. They are paying, and have paid, the penalty of their guilt. God’s powerful right hand protects you from every danger; he grants you a quiet and untroubled reign, with the warmest congratulations of everyone. And not undeservedly has the Lord and Ruler of the world chosen you before all others as the man by whom he might renew his holy religion, since you alone of all men could offer a surpassing example of virtue and holiness — an example in which you might not only match, but, what is a very great thing, surpass the glory of the princes of old, whom fame nevertheless counts among the good. Those men perhaps only resembled the righteous by nature. A man who does not know God, the Ruler of the universe, may reach a likeness of righteousness, but he cannot reach righteousness itself. You, though, both by the holiness bred into your character and by your acknowledgment of the truth and of God in every action, carry the works of righteousness through to completion. It was fitting, then, that in arranging the condition of the human race God should make use of your authority and your service. We beg him in our daily prayers that he would guard you above all, whom he has wished to be the guardian of the world; and then that he would put into you a disposition by which you may always remain in the love of his divine name. For that is of service to everyone — to you, for happiness, and to others, for rest.

Now that we have run the seven laps of the work we undertook and have come up to the finish line, it remains for us to urge everyone to take up wisdom together with true religion. Its strength and its business depend on this: that by looking down on earthly things, and putting away the errors that used to hold us while we served frail things and wanted frail things, we may be steered toward the eternal rewards of the heavenly treasure. And to obtain them, the enticing pleasures of this present life must be laid aside as soon as possible — pleasures that soothe people’s souls with a ruinous sweetness. How great a happiness we ought to think it, to be drawn away from these stains of the earth and to go to that most just Judge and indulgent Father, who gives rest in place of labor, life in place of death, brightness in place of darkness, and in place of short and earthly goods gives goods that are eternal and heavenly. Set beside that reward, the hardships and miseries we endure in this world while doing the works of righteousness cannot be compared or matched at all. [n]

So if we want to be wise and happy, we must not only turn over in our minds and set before ourselves those lines of Terence —

but things far more dreadful than those must be endured: prison, chains, tortures. Pains must be gone through; in short, death itself must be taken up and borne, once it is clear to our conscience that a frail pleasure will not go without punishment, nor virtue without a reward from God. Everyone, then, ought to try either to set himself on the right road as soon as possible, or, having taken up and practiced the virtues and having gone patiently through the labors of this life, to be worthy of having God as his comforter.

For our Father and Lord, who built the sky and made it firm, who set the sun in it along with the other heavenly bodies, who by his power weighed out the earth and fenced it with mountains, ringed it with the sea and divided it with rivers, and who made and finished out of nothing everything there is in this workmanship of the world — he observed the errors of men and sent a Guide to open up the way of righteousness for us. Let us all follow him, let us listen to him, let us obey him with the deepest devotion, since he alone, as Lucretius says,

And he did not only point it out; he went ahead of us along it, so that no one would dread the path of virtue for being hard. Let the way of ruin and deceit be abandoned, if that is possible — the way with death hidden in it, covered over by the attractions of pleasure.

And the nearer each one sees the approach of that day on which he must depart from this life, as his years slope toward old age, the more let him consider how he may leave it clean, and how he may come before the Judge innocent. Not the way those men do, whose darkened minds are denied the light: when the strength of their body is failing at last, they take that as a warning of the last pressing necessity, and throw themselves with all the more eagerness and heat into satisfying their cravings. Let everyone pull himself out of that pit while he is allowed to, while the chance is there, and turn himself to God with his whole mind, so that he may wait without anxiety for the day on which God, the Ruler and Lord of the world, will judge what each man has done and thought.

Whatever is desired here, let him not merely neglect it but avoid it, and let him judge his own soul to be worth more than those deceitful goods, whose possession is uncertain and passing. They take their leave every day, and they go out much faster than they came in; and if we are allowed to enjoy them right to the end, they must still, beyond any doubt, be left to somebody else. We can take nothing with us except a life well and innocently spent. That is the man who will come before God with abundant resources; that is the man who will come in wealth — the man who has self-control, mercy, patience, love, and faith. This is our inheritance, which can neither be taken away from anyone nor transferred to another. And who is there who is willing to provide and acquire these goods for himself?

Let those who are hungry come, so that they may be fed with heavenly food and lay aside their lasting hunger. Let those who are thirsty come, so that with full mouths they may draw the water of salvation from a spring that never runs dry. By this divine food and drink the blind will see, the deaf hear, the mute speak, the lame walk, the foolish be wise, the sick be strong, and the dead come back to life. For whoever has trampled the corruptions of the earth underfoot by his virtue, the supreme and truthful Arbiter will raise to life and to unending light.

Let no one trust in riches, no one in the badges of office, no one even in royal power: these things do not make a man immortal. For whoever throws away what makes him a human being and, chasing after present things, flattens himself on the ground, will be punished as a deserter from his Lord, his commander, and his Father. So let us give ourselves to righteousness, which alone will go with us as an inseparable companion and lead us to God; and “while breath rules these limbs,” let us serve God with service that never tires, let us keep our posts and our night watches, let us fight boldly with the enemy we know, so that, victorious and triumphant over an adversary we have beaten, we may receive from the Lord that reward for valor which he himself has promised.