If anyone had made you a gift of but a few acres, you would say that you had received a benefit; and do you say that the illimitable stretches that the earth opens to you are not a benefit? If anyone has presented you with money, and, since this is a great thing in your eyes, has filled your coffer, you will call it a benefit. God has planted in the earth countless mines, has drawn forth from its depths countless rivers that over the lands where they flow carry down gold; silver and copper and iron in huge store have been buried in all places, and he has given to you the means of discovering them by placing upon the surface of the earth the signs of its hidden treasures yet do you say that you have received no benefit? If you should receive the gift of a house that was resplendent with marble and a ceiling gleaming with gold or decked out with colors, you would call it no commonplace gift. God has built for you a huge mansion that need not fear conflagration or ruin, a house in which you see, not flimsy veneers3 thinner than the very blade by which they are sawn, but virgin masses of most precious stone, whole masses of a substance with such a variety of markings that the tiniest fragments of it fill you with wonder, and a ceiling gleaming in one fashion by night, and in another by day — yet do you say that you have received no gift? And, though you prize greatly these blessings that you possess, do you act the part of an ungrateful man, and consider that you are indebted to no one for them? Whence do you have that breath which you draw? Whence that light by which you distribute and order the acts of your life? Whence the blood that by its circulation maintains the heat of life? Whence those dainties that by rare flavors excite your palate when it is already sated? Whence those provocatives of pleasure when it palls? Whence this repose in which you wither and rot? Will you not, if you are grateful, say i.e., of marble.
A god for us this ease hath wrought. For he
Shall ever be a god indeed to me,
And many a firstling lamb his altar stain
From out our flock. You see what boons I gain
My oxen by his bounty roam at will,
While I fond airs upon my pipe can trill?4
But God is he who has set free, not a few oxen, but herds throughout the whole earth, who everywhere supplies food to the flocks as they range far and wide, who after pastures of summer has provided pastures of winter, who has not merely taught how to play upon the pipe and to fashion a tune that, rustic and artless as it is, yet shows some regard for form, but has invented countless arts, the countless variations of the voice, the countless tones that will produce melodies, some by the breath of our body, others by the breath of an instrument.5 For you must not say that whatever we have invented is our own any more than the fact of our growth, or the fact that the behavior of our body corresponds with the fixed, periods of life; now comes the loss of childhood’s teeth, now, as age gradually advances and passes into the hardier stage, puberty and the last tooth that marks the end of the progress of youth. In us are implanted the seeds of all ages, the seeds of all the arts, and it is God, our master, who draws forth from the secret depths of our being our various talents.