Augustine: Earlier Writings
THE USEFULNESS OF BELIEF 295
Testaments do not conflict. According to the allegorical sense we are taught that everything in Scripture is not to be taken literally but must be understood figuratively.
6. In all these senses our Lord Jesus Christ and his apostles used Scripture. When it was objected that his disciples plucked ears of corn on the Sabbath day, his answer was taken from history—"Have ye not read what David did when he was hungry and those who were with him; how he entered the house of God and ate the shew-bread, which it was not lawful for him to eat or for those who were with him, but only for the priests" (Matt. 12:3-4). To aetiology belongs the answer Christ gave to his questioners who, when he forbade divorce except for fornication, told them that Moses had allowed divorce if a bill of divorcement were given—"Moses did this on account of the hardness of your hearts" (Matt. 19:8). Here a reason was given why Moses properly gave permission owing to the circumstances of the time, while Christ gave his commandment under different circumstances. It would take a long time to explain the changes of the times and the order of change which is fixed and settled by a wondrous disposition of divine providence.
7. Then there is the analogical sense which shows the agreement of the two Testaments. I need not say that this is used by all whose authority is accepted by the Manichees. It is their own affair to resolve the problem created by their wonted suggestion that many things have been interpolated into the divine
Scriptures by I know not what corrupters of the truth. That assertion always seemed to me, even when I was their hearer, utterly invalid. And not to me only but to you (for I well remember), and to all of us who tried to exercise a little more care in judging than did the mass of their followers. But now when many of the passages which troubled me most have been explained and straightened out—those ones especially in dealing with which their oratory reached its climax, giving itself a freer rein in the absence of any adversary—none of their teachings seems to be more shameless, or to use a milder expression, weaker or less cautious, than their assertion that the divine
Scriptures have been corrupted, for they can produce no exemplars still extant to prove it. If they said that these writings were not to be accepted because written by men who in their judgment did not write the truth, their cavilling would be more upright or their error more worthy of cultivated people. This they have done with the book called the Acts of the Aposdes. When I consider their method I can hardly marvel at it enough.