“In man as in angels, for angels also are rational beings, God has placed the power of choosing, so that those who have obeyed might justly be in possession of what is good; and that those who have not obeyed may justly not be in possession of what is good, and may receive the punishment which they deserve.... But if it had been by nature that some were bad and others good, neither would the latter be deserving of praise for being good, inasmuch as they were so constituted; nor the others of blame for being bad, inasmuch as they were born so. But since in fact all men are of the same nature, able on the one hand to hold fast and to do what is good, and again on the other hand to reject it and not do it, it is right for them to be in the one case praised for their choice of the good and their adherence to it, and in the other case blamed and punished for their rejection of it, both among well-governed men and much more in the sight of God.”[432] It is found in Theophilus[433] and Athenagoras,[434] and, as a more elaborate theory, in Tertullian and the philosophers of Alexandria. Just as Epictetus and the later Stoics had made freedom of will to be the specially divine part of human nature, so Tertullian[435] answers Marcion’s objection, that if God foreknew that Adam would fall He should not have made him free, by the argument that the goodness of God in making man necessarily gave him the highest form of existence, that such highest form was “the image and likeness of God,” and that such image and likeness was freedom of will. And just as Epictetus and the later Stoics had conceived of life as a moral discipline, and of its apparent evils as necessary means of testing character, so the Christian philosophers of Alexandria conceive of God as the Teacher and Trainer and Physician of men, of the pains of life as being disciplinary, and of the punishments of sin as being not vindictive but remedial.[436] There was still a large margin of unsolved difficulties. The hypothesis of the freedom of the will, as it had hitherto been stated, assumed that all beings who possessed it were equal in both their circumstances and their natural aptitudes. It took no account of the enormous difference between one man and another in respect of either the external advantages or disadvantages of their lives, or the strength and weakness of their characters. The difficulty was strongly felt by more than one school of Christian philosophers, the more so because it applied, not only to the diversities among mankind, but also to the larger differences between mankind as a whole and the celestial beings who rose in their sublime gradations above it.