From the same author.
Self-conceit is an impure thing by nature.
About promises, etc.
The words of Philo.
To give thanks to God is intrinsically right, but not to do so to him in the first place, and not to begin with the first reasons for gratitude, is blameable, for it is not right to give the chief honour to the creation, and the inferior honour to God, who is the giver of all things in the creation; and indeed that is a most culpable division, inasmuch as it is laying down a certain disorder of order.
About envy.
The words of Philo.
Envy naturally attaches itself to whatever is great.
About industrious people.
The words of the same author.
The most perfect and greatest of all good things are usually the result of laborious exercise and energetic vigorous labour.
From the same author.
It is absurd for a man who is in the pursuit of honours to flee from labours by which honours are acquired.
About the soul and the mind.
From the same author.
What is the meaning of the expression, “You shall not eat the flesh in the blood of the Soul?”{9}{#ge 9:4.} God appears by this expression to intend to show that the blood is the essence of the soul, that is to say, of the soul endowed with the outward senses, not the soul spoken of in the most excellent sense of the word, that is to say, as far as it is endued with reason and intellect; for there are three divisions of the soul, one part being nutritious, a second being endued with the outward senses, and the third being endued with reason. Accordingly the divine Spirit is the essence of the rational portion, according to the sacred historian of the creation of the world, for he says that “God breathed into his face the breath of Life.”{10}{#ge 2:9.} But of that part which is endued with the outward senses, and which has the revivifying power, blood is the essence, for he says in another place that “the soul of all flesh is the Blood;”{11}{#de 12:23.} but what is connected with the flesh is the outward sense and the passions, and not the mind and the intellect; not but what that expression, “in the blood of the soul,” also indicates that the soul is one thing and the body another. So that in real truth the breath is the essence of the soul, but it has not any place of itself independently of the blood, but it resembles and is combined with blood.
About the assistance of God.
The words of Philo, from the fourth book of his treatise on the Allegories contained in the Sacred
Laws.
The extremity of happiness is the assistance of God, for there can be no such thing as want when God gives his aid.
About the creation of the world.
From the same author, from the first book of the Questions arising in Genesis.
It is impossible that the harmony, and arrangement, and reason, and analogy, and that all the great accord and real happiness which we see existing in the world can have been originated by themselves, for it follows inevitably that these things must have had a creator, and a father, and a regulator and governor, who generated them in the first place, and who now preserves what he has generated.
About the church of God.
From the same author.
God wishing to send down from heaven to the earth an image of his divine virtue, out of his compassion for our race, that it might not be destitute of a more excellent portion, and that he might thus wash off the pollutions which defile our miserable existence, so full of all dishonour, established his church among us.
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