But Pharaoh the “Disperser of the excellent” cannot receive the vision of timeless values, for the eyes of the soul, whereby alone incorporeal natures are apprehended, are blinded in him, nor will he bring himself to get help through what is timeless. When he is plagued by the frogs, those soulless opinions and conjectures, which produce noise and sound destitute and devoid of all reality, Moses said to him, “Appoint with me a time, when I shall pray for thee and thy servants, to take away the frogs” (Exod. 8:9). Though in that dire strait he should have said “Pray for me at once,” he puts it off with the word “to-morrow.” He must needs maintain to the end the unchanging level of his godlessness. This is the case with almost all the Facing-both-ways, even though they do not admit it in so many words. When anything befalls them which they would not, since they have never had any firm faith in God their Saviour, they first flee to the help which things created give, to physicians, herbs, drug-mixtures, strict rules of diet, and all the other aids that mortals use. And if one say to them, “Flee, ye fools, to the one and only physician of soul-sickness and cast away the help, miscalled as such, of the created and the mutable,” they laugh and mock, and all their answer is “tomorrow for that,” as though, whatever may befall, they would never supplicate God to save them from the ills that beset them. But when no human help avails, and all things, even healing remedies, prove to be but mischievous, then out of the depths of their helplessness, despairing of all other aid, still even in their misery reluctant, at this late hour they betake themselves to the only saviour, God. He, for He knows that what is done under stress of necessity has no sure foundation, does not in all cases follow His law (of mercy), but only when it may be followed for good and with profit. So then every imagination which counts that all things are its own possession and honours itself before God—and such a mind is shown by the words “to sacrifice after some days”—may know that it stands in danger to be brought to the judgement-bar for impiety.
On the Sacrifices of Abel and Cain 19
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