St. Augustine

The other night I was babysitting for a family of doctors that have a huge library in their home. I put the kids to sleep and I walked quietly towards the library. I sat down on the floor and read through the titles... so many books I wished I had in my own library! The City of God caught immediately my attention. I have been planning to read it for a while... I opened it randomly and read the most beautiful theology. It was like poetry to my ears. I really needed what I read that night. I borrowed the book from the family and started reading it, but eventually I had to buy my own copy. Too many things to highlight!! Here is one of my favorite passages:

"(...) There is a vast difference between the manner in which men use what we call prosperity and adversity. A good man is neither puffed up by fleeting success nor broken by adversity; whereas, a bad man is chastised by failure of this sort because he is corrupted by success. God often shows His intervention more clearly by the way He apportions the sweet and the bitter. For, if He visited every sin here below with manifest penalty, it might be thought that no score remained to be settled at the Last Judgement. On the other hand, if God did not plainly enough punish sin on earth, people might conclude that there is no such thing as Divine Providence. So, too, in regard to the good things of life. If God did not bestow them with patent liberality on some who ask Him, we could possibly argue that such things did not depend on His power. On the other hand, if He lavished them on all who asked, we might have the impression that God is to be served only for the gifts He bestows. In that case, the service of God would not make us religious, but rather covetous and greedy. In view of all that, when good and bad men suffer alike, they are not, for that reason indistinguishable because what they suffer is similar. The sufferers are different even though the sufferings are the same trials; though what they endure is same, their virtue and vice are different. (...) The tide of trouble will test, purify, and improve the good, but beat, crush, and wash away the wicked. So it is that, under the weight of the same affliction, the wicked deny and blaspheme God, and the good pray to Him and praise Him. The difference is not in what people suffer but in the way they suffer. The same shaking that makes fetid water stink makes perfume issue a more pleasant odor."

Gimme all the theology.