Genesis

that it first contrived a dwelling for man — a certain vast mass afterwards, and afterwards a greater one too — that in the great, as in the lesser, he might first try himself and make progress, and so be advanced from the good of God, that is, from the great, to His best also, that is, to the greater habitation.

"You are a king from God among us" — the ruled, by willing judgment, obeying the earnest man through zeal for virtue.

For when Abraham with his servants and confederates had gained a victory, by force of arms, over the four Kings, who had plundered Sodom, God approved of his act by the mouth of his priest Melchisedech, who said to him, “Blessed be the most high God, who hath delivered thine enemies into thine hand.

If Adam was the first man, but the flesh was man before the soul, without doubt the flesh shall have been made into a living soul.

except that I have in no way repented of my first impulse, nor does my soul flag toward the goal of the life that is according to God — which you feared on my behalf, doing rightly and fittingly for yourself, lest, turning back, I should become a pillar of salt, as a certain woman suffered, as I hear.

Yet we have God himself as a worthy promiser and a faithful surety, who promised Abraham that in his seed all the nations of the earth would be blessed, and that from the womb of Rebecca two peoples and two nations would come forth — namely the Jews, that is Israel, and the nations, that is our own.

among them is what was said, “Let us create man after our image” (1) — and He, the Exalted, is not a body, so the soul likewise.

If it is that he prophesied that great mystery concerning Christ and the Church — ‘This is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh;

"And the Lord rained upon Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven.

And therefore the man of God, Adam, and the woman of God, Eve, having performed one marriage between themselves, sanctioned for men a model from the authority of their origin and the first will of God.

"She shall be called woman," as one who was going to be this when she had unsealed her virginity—since He added also, "Therefore shall a man leave father and mother, and shall be joined to his woman, and the two shall be in one flesh.

And, having planted a paradise in Eden toward the east, full of all gladness and delight, he set in it the man whom he had fashioned, commanding him to partake without hindrance of all the divine plants there, but laying down a commandment to taste of one alone not at all — which is called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil — speaking thus:

This authority of Scripture too I vindicate for myself from thence — that God, both he who made and the things which he made, in showing whom he made them, does not also testify from what he made them.

And the earth was invisible and unformed, and darkness was over the abyss, and the Spirit of the Lord was borne over the waters.

So, if persecution is good in whatever way, because it is established by its state, we rightly define that what is good ought not to be avoided, because it would be a transgression to refuse what is good—the more so since it has seemed good to God—and indeed that it cannot even be avoided, because it comes from God, whose will cannot be escaped.

but flesh in the blood of its soul you shall not eat.

Nay, let us consider whether it was not virgins alone whom they desired, since the Scripture says daughters of men, whereas it could have named wives of men, or females indifferently.

" "Let us make man," says God, "after our image and likeness;