Note (return) — Chapter IV

3. While it is certain that virtue is a matter of freedom, it is just as sure that no soul is virtuous unless it follows the will of God, i.e., knows and judges of God and all things as they must be known and judged of; and fulfils the commandments of God. This presupposes a revelation of God through the Logos. A revelation of God, complete in itself and mediated by the Logos, is found in the cosmos and in the constitution of man, he being created in his Maker's image.444 But experience has shown that this revelation is insufficient to enable men to retain clear knowledge. They yielded to the seduction of evil demons, who, by God's sufferance, took possession of the world, and availed themselves of man's sensuous side to draw him away from the contemplation of the divine and lead him to the earthly.445 The results of this temptation appeared in the facts that humanity as a whole fell a prey to error, was subjected to the bonds of the sensuous and of the demons, and therefore became doomed to death, which is at once a punishment and the natural consequence of want of knowledge of God.446 Hence it required fresh efforts of the Logos to free men from a state which is indeed in no instance an unavoidable necessity, though a sad fact in the case of almost all. For very few are now able to recognise the one true God from the order of the universe and from the moral law implanted in themselves; nor can they withstand the power of the demons ruling in the world and use their freedom to imitate the virtues of God. Therefore the Almighty in his goodness employed new means through the Logos to call men back from the error of their ways, to overthrow the sovereignty of the demons upon earth, and to correct the disturbed course of the world before the end has yet come. From the earliest times the Logos (the Spirit) has descended on such men as preserved their souls pure, and bestowed on them, through inspiration, knowledge of the truth (with reference to God, freedom, virtue, the demons, the origin of polytheism, the judgment) to be imparted by them to others. These are his "prophets." Such men are rare among the Greeks (and according to some not found at all), but numerous among the barbarians, i.e., among the Jewish people. Taught by God, they announced the truth about him, and under the promptings of the Logos they also committed the revelations to writings, which therefore, as being inspired, are an authentic record of the whole truth.447 To some of the most virtuous among them he himself even appeared in human form and gave directions. He then is a Christian, who receives and follows these prophetic teachings, that have ever been proclaimed afresh from the beginning of the world down to the present time, and are summed up in the Old Testament. Such a one is enabled even now to rescue his soul from the rule of the demons, and may confidently expect the gift of immortality.