XXXII. (157) For, as Moses says, “He judged according to the little and according to the Great,”{48}{#de 1:17.} engendering and fashioning everything, and not taking anything away from the display of his art by reason of the obscurity of his materials, not adding anything because of their brilliancy; (158) since all the artists who have any reputation wish to work up whatever materials they take in an admirable manner, whether they are costly or whether they are inexpensive. And before now, some persons, having even an extraordinary love of distinction, have even spent more skill in working up materials of little value, than they have devoted to those which are costly, wishing to make up for the deficiencies of the material by the additional display of their skill. (159) But there is no material which has any value in the eyes of God, because he has given all materials an equal share of his skill. In reference to which it is said in the sacred scriptures, “God saw all that he had made, and, behold, it was very Good.”{49}{#ge 1:31.} But the things which receive an equal degree of praise, are by all means held in equal estimation by him who confers the praise; (160) and what God praised was not the materials which he had worked up into creation, destitute of life and melody, and easily dissolved, and moreover in their own intrinsic nature perishable, and out of all proportion and full of iniquity, but rather his own skilful work, completed according to one equal and well-proportioned power and knowledge always alike and identical. In reference to which all things were also accounted equal and similar by all the rules of proportion, according to the principles of art and knowledge.
XXXIII. (161) And if there is any one in the world who is a praiser of equality, that man is Moses. In the first place composing hymns in its honour, and in every place, and calling it the especial property of justice, as in fact its very name to some degree shows, to Divide{50}{the Greek is dicha temnein, as if dikaiosyneµ, “justice,” were derive from dicha, “in two parts.”} bodies and things into two equal parts; and in the second place blaming injustice, the worker of the most disgraceful inequality; (162) and inequality has been the parent of two wars, foreign and civil war, as on the other hand equality is the parent of peace. And he also utters the most manifest panegyric on justice, and the most undeniable reproach of injustice when he says, “You shall not commit injustice in any judgment, nor in measures, or weights, or balances: a just balance, and just weights, and a just heap, shall be Yours.”{51}{#le 19:35.} And in Deuteronomy he says, “There shall not be a false weight in thy bag; thy weight shalt be true and just; there shall not be a little weight and a large one; that thy days may be multiplied upon the earth, which the Lord thy God giveth thee for an inheritance, because every one who committeth injustice is an abomination to the Lord.”{52}{#de 25:13.} (163) Therefore God, who loveth justice, hates and abominates injustice, the begging of sedition and of evils; and in one passage the lawgiver represents equality as the muse of justice beginning with the creation of the entire heaven. For he says, “And God made a separation between the light and between the darkness, and he called the light day, and the darkness he called Night.”{53}{#ge 1:4.} (164) For it is equality which allotted night and day and light and darkness to existing things. It is equality also that divided the human race into man and woman, making two divisions, unequal in strength, but most perfectly equal for the purpose which nature had principally in view, the generation of a third human being like themselves. For, says Moses, “God made man; in the image of God created he him; male and female he created Them.”{54}{#ge 1:26.} He no longer says “him,” but “them,” in the plural number, adapting the species to the genus, which have, as I have already said, been divided with perfect equality.
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