The gist is that good and evil are foreordained. What is foreordained comes necessarily to be after a prior act of divine volition...Rather, everything small and large is written and comes to be in a known and expected measure.

To understand is to forgive.

When a man who accepts the Christian doctrine lives unworthily of it, it is much clearer to say he is a bad Christian than to say he is not a Christian.

You gave me health that I might serve you; and so often I failed to use my good health in your service. Now you send me sickness in order to correct me Grant that, having ignored the things of spirit when my body was vigorous, I may now enjoy spiritual sweetness while my body groans with pain.

Since [man] is infinitely removed from comprehending the extremes, the end of things and their beginning are hopelessly hidden from him in an impenetrable secret; he is equally incapable of seeing the nothing from which he was made, and the infinite in which he is swallowed up.

To be mistaken in believing that the Christian religion is true is no great loss to anyone; but how dreadful to be mistaken in believing it to be false!

Man is neither angel nor beast.