“Thou hast commanded me that as against the vain rhetoric of those who, aliens to God’s Commonwealth, coming from country cross-roads and villages are called pagans, because they know earthly things, who seek not unto the future and ignore the past, yet cry down the present time as filled with evil, just because Christ is believed and God is worshipped;--thou hast commanded that I should gather from histories and annals whatever mighty ills and miseries and terrors there have been from wars and pestilence, from famine, earthquake, and floods, from volcanic eruptions, from lightning or from hail, and also from monstrous crimes in the past centuries; and that I should arrange and set forth the matter briefly in a book.” Orosius’s story of the four great Empires--Babylonian, Macedonian, African, and Roman--makes a red tale of carnage. He deemed “that such things should be commemorated, in order that with the secret of God’s ineffable judgments partly laid open, those stupid murmurers at our Christian times should understand that the one God ordained the fortunes of Babylon in the beginning, and at the end those of Rome; understand also that it is through His clemency that we live, although wretchedly because of our intemperance. Like was the origin of Babylon and Rome, and like their power, greatness, and their fortunes good and ill; but unlike their destinies, since Babylon lost her kingdom and Rome keeps hers”; and Orosius refers to the clemency of the barbarian victors who as Christians spared Christians.[87] At the opening of his seventh book he again presents his purpose and conclusions: