The violence which assails good men to test them, to cleanse and purify them, effects in the wicked their condemnation, ruin, and annihilation.

Virtue and vice are not the same, even if they undergo the same torment.

The good man, though a slave, is free; the wicked, though he reigns, is a slave, and not the slave of a single man, but - what is worse - the slave of as many …

Thus, in this universal catastrophe, the sufferings of Christians have tended to their moral improvement, because they viewed them with eyes of faith.