Having reached agreement on this preliminary question our next step will be to gather the relevant considerations into a coherent argument. Let us consider what these are. God is one, but He has around Him numberless Potencies, which all assist and protect created being, and among them are included the powers of chastisement. Now chastisement is not a thing of harm or mischief, but a preventive and correction of sin. Through these Potencies the incorporeal and intelligible world was framed, the archetype of this phenomenal world, that being a system of invisible ideal forms, as this is of visible material bodies. Now the nature of these two worlds has so struck with awe the minds of some, that they have deified not merely each of them as a whole, but also their fairest parts, the sun, the moon and the whole sky, and have felt no shame in calling them gods. It was the delusion of such persons that Moses saw, when he says “Lord, Lord, King of the Gods” (Deut. 10:17), to shew the difference between the ruler and the subjects. There is, too, in the air a sacred company of unbodied souls, commonly called angels in the inspired pages, who wait upon these heavenly powers. So the whole army composed of the several contingents, each marshalled in their proper ranks, have as their business to serve and minister to the word of the Captain who thus marshalled them, and to follow His leadership as right and the law of service demand. For it must not be that God’s soldiers should ever be guilty of desertion from the ranks. Now the King may fitly hold converse with his powers and employ them to serve in matters which should not be consummated by God alone. It is true indeed that the Father of All has no need of aught, so that He should require the co-operation of others, if He wills some creative work, yet seeing what was fitting to Himself and the world which was coming into being, He allowed His subject powers to have the fashioning of some things, though He did not give them sovereign and independent knowledge for completion of the task, lest aught of what was coming into being should be miscreated.
On the Confusion of Tongues 34
Tap any verse to see what it echoes — and start a chain or echo from it.