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16. For as a snake does not creep on with open steps, but advances
by the very minutest efforts of its several scales; so the slippery
motion of falling away [from what is good] takes possession of the
negligent only gradually, and beginning from a perverse desire for the
likeness of God, arrives in the end at the likeness of beasts. Hence
it is that being naked of their first garment, they earned by mortality
coats of skins. For the true honor of man is the image and likeness of
God, which is not preserved except it be in relation to Him by whom
it is impressed. The less therefore that one loves what is one's
own, the more one cleaves to God. But through the desire of making
trial of his own power, man by his own bidding falls down to himself as
to a sort of intermediate grade. And so, while he wishes to be as
God is, that is, under no one, he is thrust on, even from his own
middle grade, by way of punishment, to that which is lowest, that
is, to those things in which beasts delight: and thus, while his
honor is the likeness of God, but his dishonor is the likeness of the
beast, "Man being in honor abideth not: he is compared to the beasts
that are foolish, and is made like to them." By what path, then,
could he pass so great a distance from the highest to the lowest,
except through his own intermediate grade? For when he neglects the
love of wisdom, which remains always after the same fashion, and lusts
after knowledge by experiment upon things temporal and mutable, that
knowledge puffeth up, it does not edify: so the mind is overweighed
and thrust out, as it were, by its own weight from blessedness; and
learns by its own punishment, through that trial of its own
intermediateness, what the difference is between the good it has
abandoned and the bad to which it has committed itself; and having
thrown away and destroyed its strength, it cannot return, unless by
the grace of its Maker calling it to repentance, and forgiving its
sins. For who will deliver the unhappy soul from the body of this
death, unless the grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord? of
which grace we will discourse in its place, so far as He Himself
enables us.
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