so far as they reflected at all, regarded the monotheistic explanation of the world as a main part of the Christian religion. The theoretical view of the world as a harmonious whole, of its order, regularity and beauty; the certainty that all this had been called into existence by an Almighty Spirit; the sure hope that heaven and earth will pass away, but will give place to a still more glorious structure, were always present, and put an end to the bright and gorgeously coloured, but phantastic and vague, cosmogonies and theogonies of antiquity. 2. Their clear system of morality is in keeping with their relatively simple cosmology. In giving man reason and freedom as an inalienable possession God destined him for incorruptibility ([Greek: athanasia, aphtharsia]), by the attainment of which he was to become a being similar to God.[440] To the gift of imperishability God, however, attached the condition of man's preserving [Greek: ta tes athanasias] ("the things of immortality"), i.e., preserving the knowledge of God and maintaining a holy walk in imitation of the divine perfection. This demand is as natural as it is just; moreover, nobody can fulfil it in man's stead, for an essential feature of virtue is its being free, independent action. Man must therefore determine himself to virtue by the knowledge that he is only in this way obedient to the Father of the 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,