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Reply to Faustus the Manichaean

7.

Those, accordingly, who, finding fault with what they do not understand, call the typical institutions of the law disfigurements and excrescences, are like men displeased with things of which they do not know the use. As if a deaf man, seeing others move their lips in speaking, were to find fault with the motion of the mouth as needless and unsightly; or as if a blind man, on hearing a house commended, were to test the truth of what he heard by passing his hand over the surface of the wall, and on coming to the windows were to cry out against them as flaws in the level, or were to suppose that the wall had fallen in.

Edition Hide
Contra Faustum Manichaeum libri triginta tres

7.

Proinde isti, qui ea quae non intellegunt reprehendentes lepram vel scabiem seu verrucas legis esse dicunt promissivas figuras sacramentorum, similes sunt hominibus, quibus displicent ea, quorum non capiunt utilitatem, velut si surdus videns moveri labia loquentium, tamquam superfluos oris motus deformesque reprehenderet, vel si quisquam caecus laudata sibi aliqua domo vellet palpando probare, quod dicitur, et parietum levitatem manu pertractans in fenestras irrueret easque velut inconvenientes illi aequalitati redargueret cavernasque ruinosas putaret. p. 596,27