But Thee, O Lord, I imagined
on every part environing and penetrating it, though every way
infinite: as if there were a sea, every where, and on every side,
through unmeasured space, one only boundless sea, and it contained
within it some sponge, huge, but bounded; that sponge must needs, in
all its parts, be filled from that unmeasurable sea: so conceived I
Thy creation, itself finite, full of Thee, the Infinite; and I said,
Behold God, and behold what God hath created; and God is good, yea,
most mightily and incomparably better than all these: but yet He,
the Good, created them good; and see how He environeth and fulfils
them. Where is evil then, and whence, and how crept it in hither? What
is its root, and what its seed? Or hath it no being? Why then fear
we and avoid what is not? Or if we fear it idly, then is that very
fear evil, whereby the soul is thus idly goaded and racked. Yea, and
so much a greater evil, as we have nothing to fear, and yet do fear.
Therefore either is that evil which we fear, or else evil is, that
we fear.
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