The Christian conception of the "descent of God" is repulsive to Celsus, for it means contact with matter. "God's anger," too, is an impious idea, for anger is a passion; and {247} Celsus makes havoc of the Old Testament passages where God is spoken of as having human passions (_anthropopathes_), closing with an _argumentum ad hominem_--"Is it not absurd that a man [Titus], angry with the Jews, slew all their youth and burnt their land, and so they came to nothing; but God Almighty, as they say, angry and vexed and threatening, sends his son and endures such things as they tell?"[29] Furthermore, the Christian account of God's anger at man's sin involves a presumption that Christians really know what evil is. "Now the origin of evil is not to be easily known by one who has no philosophy. It is enough to tell the common people that evil is not from God, but is inherent in matter, and is a fellow-citizen (_empoliteuetai_) of mortality. The circuit of mortal things is from beginning to end the same, and in the appointed circles the same must always of necessity have been and be and be again."[30] "Nor could the good or evil elements in mortal things become either less or greater. God does not need to restore all things anew. God is not like a man, that, because he has faultily contrived or executed without skill, he should try to amend the world."[31] In short, "even if a thing seems to you to be bad, it is not yet clear that it is bad; for you do not know what is of advantage to yourself, or to another, or to the whole."[32] Besides would God need to descend in order to {248} learn what was going on among men?[33] Or was he dissatisfied with the attention he received, and did he really come down to show off like a _nouveau riche_ (_oi neoploutoi_)?"[34] Then why not long before?[35] Should Christians ask him how God is to be seen, he has his answer: "If you will be blind to sense and see with the mind, if you will turn from the flesh and waken the eyes of the soul, thus and thus only shall you see God."[36] In words that Origen approves, he says, "from God we must never and in no way depart, neither by day nor by night, in public or in private, in every word and work perpetually, but, with these and without, let the soul ever be strained towards God."[37] "If any man bid you, in the worship of God, either to do impiety, or to say anything base, you must never be persuaded by him. Rather endure every torture and submit to every death, than think anything unholy of God, let alone say it."[38]