world and able to reckon on the gift of immortality. The conception of
the content of virtue, however, contains an element which cannot be
clearly apprehended from the cosmology; moral goodness consists in
letting oneself be influenced in no way by the sensuous, but in living
solely, after the Spirit, and imitating the perfection and purity of
God. Moral badness is giving way to any affection resulting from the
natural basis of man. The Apologists undoubtedly believe that virtue
consists negatively in man's renunciation of what his natural
constitution of soul and body demands or impels him to. Some express
this thought in a more pregnant and unvarnished fashion, others in a
milder way. Tatian, for instance, says that we must divest ourselves of
the human nature within us; but in truth the idea is the same in all.
The moral law of nature of which the Apologists speak, and which they
find reproduced in the clearest and most beautiful way in the sayings of
Jesus,[441] calls upon man to raise himself above his nature and to
enter into a corresponding union with his fellow-man which is something
higher than natural connections. It is not so much the law of love that
is to rule everything, for love itself is only a phase of a higher law;
it is the law governing the perfect and sublime Spirit, who, as being
the most exalted existence on this earth, is too noble for the world.
Raised already in this knowledge beyond time and space, beyond the
partial and the finite, the man of God, even while upon the earth, is to
hasten to the Father of Light. By equanimity, absence of desires,
purity, and goodness, which are the necessary results of clear
knowledge, he is to show that he has already risen above the transient
through gazing on the imperishable and through the enjoyment of
knowledge, imperfect though the latter still be. If thus, a suffering
hero, he has stood the test on earth, if he has become dead to the
world,[442] he may be sure that in the life to come God will bestow on
him the gift of immortality, which includes the direct contemplation of
God together with the perfect knowledge that flows from it.[443]
Conversely, the vicious man is given over to eternal death, and in this
punishment the righteousness of God is quite as plainly manifested, as
in the reward of everlasting life.

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.,