fishermen enclosed the whole
world in their nets for Christ and the unlearned are found wiser than
the wise. This Holy Spirit's grace and wisdom taught Ioasaph to speak
with the king his father, enlightening him with the light of knowledge.
Before now he had bestowed much labour to drag his father from
superstitious error, leaving nothing unsaid and nothing undone to win
him over, but he seemed to be twanging on a broken string, and speaking
to deaf ears. But when the Lord looked upon the lowliness of his
servant Ioasaph, and, in answer to his prayer, opened the closed gates
of his father's heart (for it is said, he will fulfil the desire of
them that fear him, and will hear their cry), then the king easily
understood the things that were spoken; so that, when a convenient
season came, through the grace of Christ, this son triumphed over those
evil spirits that had lorded it over the soul of his father, and clean
freed him from their error, and made the word of salvation clearly
known unto him, and joined him to the living God on high.

Ioasaph took up his tale from the beginning, and expounded to his
father great and marvellous things which he knew not, which he had
never heard with the ears of his heart; and he told him many weighty
sayings concerning God, and showed him righteousness: to wit that there
is no other God in heaven above, nor in the earth beneath, except the
one God, revealed in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. And he
made known unto him many mysteries of divine knowledge; and amongst
them he told him the history of creation, visible and invisible, how
the Creator brought every thing out of nothing, and how he formed man
after his own image and likeness and endowed him with power of
free-will, and gave him Paradise to his enjoyment, charging him only to
abstain from one thing, the tree of knowledge; and how, when man had
broken his commandment, he banished him out of Paradise; and how man,
fallen from union with God, stumbled into these manifold errors,
becoming the slave of sins, and subject unto death through the tyranny
of the devil, who, having once taken men captive, hath made them
utterly forget their Lord and God, and hath persuaded them to serve him
instead, by the abominable worshipping of idols. So our Maker, moved
with compassion, through the good-will of the Father, and the
co-operation of the Holy Ghost, was pleased, for our sakes, to be born
of an holy Virgin, Mary, the mother o