The moral teaching of the Clementines is of the most exalted nature. Chastity is commended in a glowing, eloquent address of St. Peter.(295) Poverty is elevated into an essential element of virtue. Property is, in itself, an evil. “To all of us possessions are sins. The deprivation of these is the removal of sins.” “To be saved, no one should possess anything; but since many have possessions, or, in other words, sins, God sends, in love, afflictions ... that those with possessions, but yet having some measure of love to God, may, by temporary inflictions, be saved from eternal punishments.”(296) “Those who have chosen the blessings of the future kingdom have no right to regard the things here as their own, since they belong to a foreign king (_i.e._ the prince of this world), with the exception only of water and bread, and those things procured by the sweat of the brow, necessary for the maintenance of life, and also one garment.”(297) Thus St. Peter is represented as living on water, bread and olives, and having but one cloak and tunic.(298) And Hegesippus, as quoted by Eusebius, describes St. James, first bishop of Jerusalem, as “drinking neither wine nor fermented liquors, and abstaining from animal food. A razor never came upon his head, he never anointed himself with oil, and never used a bath. He never wore woollen, but linen garments.”(299) The Ebionites looked upon Christ as the Messiah rather than as God incarnate. They gave him the title of Son of God, and claimed for him the highest honour, but hesitated to term him God. In their earnest maintenance of the Unity of the Godhead against Gnosticism, they shrank from appearing to divide the Godhead. Thus, in the Clementines, St. Peter says, “Our Lord neither asserted that there were gods except the Creator of all, nor did he proclaim himself to be God, but he pronounced him blessed who called him the Son of that God who ordered the universe.”(300) The Ebionitism of the Clementines is controversial. It was placed face to face with Gnosticism. Simon Magus, the representative of Gnosticism, as St. Peter is the representative of orthodoxy, in the Recognitions and Homilies, contends that the God of the Jews, the Demiurge, the Creator of the world, is evil. He attempts to prove this by showing that the world is full of pain and misery. The imperfections of the world are tokens of imperfection in the Creator. He takes the Old Testament. He shows from texts that the God of the Jews is represented as angry, jealous, repentant; that those whom He favours are incestuous, adulterers, murderers.