Letter 186: I define the wise — and I offer this as my view, not as law — as those adorned with the virtues of the reasoning...

That the wicked man should prosper, and that the equitable man should find himself in the most extreme hardships, full of the praises that come only at the end, is truly hard to conjecture and hard to attain, and lies beyond the measures of humanity and very far removed from them. For it is necessary to yield to the divine judgments. And if indeed we wish to think rightly, then, having fastened the knowledge of this dispensation [the divine ordering of things] to the undefiled mind alone, we shall proceed to the matters at hand, and even so it is wont scarcely to be found by us. But since you think it right to come to the aid of the argument as far as is possible, we have come to its aid, in so far as we were able, in the discourse written by us against the Greeks [the pagans], on reading which you will learn the solution of the problem.