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own wretchedness without
knowing God.

587. This religion, so great in miracles, saints, blameless Fathers, learned
and great witnesses, martyrs, established kings as David, and Isaiah, a
prince of the blood, and so great in science, after having displayed all her
miracles and all her wisdom, rejects all this, and declares that she has
neither wisdom nor signs, but only the cross and foolishness.

For those, who, by these signs and that wisdom, have deserved your belief,
and who have proved to you their character, declare to you that nothing of
all this can change you, and render you capable of knowing and loving God,
but the power of the foolishness of the cross without wisdom and signs, and
not the signs without this power. Thus our religion is foolish in respect to
the effective cause and wise in respect to the wisdom which prepares it.

588. Our religion is wise and foolish. Wise, because it is the most learned
and the most founded on miracles, prophecies, etc. Foolish, because it is
not all this which makes us belong to it. This makes us, indeed, condemn
those who do not belong to it; but it does not cause belief in those who do
belong to it. It is the cross that makes them believe, ne evacuata sit
crux.103 And so Saint Paul, who came with wisdom and signs, says that he has
come neither with wisdom nor with signs; for he came to convert. But those
who come only to convince can say that they come with wisdom and with signs.

                           SECTION IX: PERPETUITY

589. On the fact that the Christian religion is not the only religion