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 vra] CHRISTIAN PROSE 217 diction, Lactantius begins by enlarging upon themes already sketched by Minucius Felix. He then sets forth in detail the entire volume of pagan foolishness and the invalidity of pagan philosophy ; he expounds the Christian faith, shows its superiority in reason, and the warrants of its truth afforded by the miracles of Christ and the predictions of the prophets. He discourses upon justice, and finally upon the purpose of the world's creation and the course of the saecvla until the conflict with the Antichrist ; whereupon follow Christ's thousand years of reign, and then the final conflict with the unchained devil and his hosts ; the wicked are overthrown and cast into Hell, and the righteous rise from their graves to enjoy forever the vita beata. If the Divinae Institutiones was written when hap- pier times might be expected, a hundred years had not passed when Alaric sacked Rome, and the world tottered. Pagans, who still constituted a large part of the Empire, laid the catastrophe to Christianity. There was no wide reaction toward paganism — of which there was enough in Christianity. But "there was cause for the greatest of Christian intellects since Origen, to construct a work more positive and systematic than the Contra Celsum; a work which, with more profundity of thought than could be claimed for Lactantius' Divinae Institutiones, should set forth the aim and course and final goal of God's Common- wealth. Augustine's Civitas Dei undertook to ex- pound the polity of Him who made the world and man. Under His providence waxed the Empire of the earth, the civitas terrenaf with its own aims leading