(1) (From Heracleitus' defence of himself against {254} a charge of impiety in letter iv) 'Where is God? Is he shut up in the temples? You forsooth are pious who set up the God in a dark place. A man takes it for an insult if he is said to be "made of stone": and is God truly described as "born of the rocks"? Ignorant men, do ye not know that God is not fashioned with hands, nor can you make him a sufficient pedestal, nor shut him into one enclosure, but the whole world is his temple, decorated with animals and planets and stars? I inscribed my altar "to Heracles the Ephesian" [Greek: ERAKLEI TOI EPHESIOI] making the God your citizen, not--he continues--to myself "Heracleitus an Ephesian" [the same letters differently divided], as I am accused of doing by you in your ignorance. Yet Heracles was a man deified by his goodness and noble deeds; and were his virtues and labours greater than mine? I have conquered money and ambition: I have mastered fear and flattery,' &c. Then after a passage about the certainty of his own immortal renown, he returns to ridicule idolatry. 'If an altar of a god be not set up, is there no god? or if an altar be set up to what is not a god, is it a god--so that stones become the evidences (witnesses) of Gods? Nay it is his works which shall bear witness to God, as the sun, the day and night, the seasons, the whole fruitful earth, and the circle of the moon, his work and witness in the heavens.' The whole of this letter (iv), which can be paralleled in all its ideas from Stoic and Platonic sources, may compare and contrast with Acts xiv. 15-18; xvii. 22-29. (2) Letter v is written by Heracleitus in sickness. He gives a theory of disease as an excess of some element in the body; and describes his soul as a divine thing reproducing in his body the healing activity of God in the world as a whole,--'imitating God' by knowledge of the method of nature. Even if his body prove unmanageable and succumb to fate, yet his soul will rise {255} to heaven and 'I shall have my citizenship (Greek: politeusouai) not among men but among Gods.' 'Perhaps my soul is giving prophetic intimation of its release even now from its prison house' so short lived and worthless. Letter vi is a continuation of v, containing a denunciation of contemporary medicine on the ground of its lack of science, and a further explanation of the Stoic doctrine of the immanence of God in all nature--forming, ordering, dissolving, transforming, healing everywhere. 'Him will I imitate in myself and dismiss all others.' We should compare and (even more) contrast St. Paul's assertions of independence of bodily circumstances; his belief in the higher sense of 'nature' (Rom. ii. 14), and such phrases as Phil. ii. 20, 'our citizenship is in heaven,' Eph. v. 1, 'Be ye imitators of God.'