Augustine: Earlier Writings
ON FREE WILL igy poral sequence to be displayed. It would be most absurd to say that they should not come to an end. What they have received they traffic with and pay back to him to whom they owe their being in so far as it is being. Whoever laments that temporal things should come to an end should observe his own speaking. Take for example his lamentation, which no doubt he thinks is just and proceeds from prudence. So far as the sounds are concerned which he utters in making it, one has to come to an end and be followed by another so that the whole speech may be made. If anyone loved one particular sound and did not want it to cease and give place to the others, he would be adjudged astonishingly mad.
43. In things which come to an end because it is not given them to last any longer, so that all things may happen in their due times, no one has the right to find fault with their coming to an end. No one can say: It ought to abide, for it cannot pass its appointed bounds. In rational creatures, whether they sin or do not sin, the beauty of the universe reaches its appropriate limit. In them, either there are no sins, which is absurd (for he sins v/ho condemns as sins what are not sins); or sins are not to be blamed, which is no less absurd, for wrong actions will begin to be praised and the whole purpose of the human mind will be thrown into confusion and human life will be subverted, or right action be blamed and execrable madness will arise, or, to use a milder expression, a miserable error. If right reason compels us, as it does, to blame sins and to blame them because they ought not to be what they are, ask yourself what debt sinful nature owes, and the answer will be: Right action. Ask yourself to whom it owes the debt, and the answer will be: God. From God it received the power to act rightly when it would. From him also it received the alternatives, misery if it acts unrighteously, happiness if it acts righteously.
44. No man can overcome the laws of the omnipotent
Creator. Therefore it is not permitted to the soul to escape payment of its debt. It pays it by making a good use of what it has received, or by losing what it was unwilling to make a good use of. If it does not pay its debt by doing what it ought, it will pay it by suffering misery. In either case the word obligation is in order, so we could thus amplify what we said. If it does not pay its debt by doing what it ought, it will pay it by suffering what it ought to suffer. There is no interval of time between failure to do what ought to be done and suffering what ought to be suffered, lest for a single moment the beauty of the universe