to know what God is, and what the Saviour will be in the end, and how the likeness of the Father and the Son has been promised to the saints; for as they are one in Him, so they also are one in them. For we must adopt the view, either that the God of all things is clothed with a body, and as we are enveloped with flesh, so He also with some material covering, that the likeness of the life of God may be in the end produced also in the saints; or if this hypothesis is unbecoming, especially in the judgment of those who desire, even in the smallest degree, to feel the majesty of God, and to look upon the glory of His uncreated and all-surpassing nature, we are forced to adopt the other alternative, and despair either of attaining any likeness to God, if we are to inhabit for ever the same bodies, or if the blessedness of the same life with God is promised to us, we must live in the same state as that in which God lives.” All these points have been omitted by Rufinus as erroneous, and statements of a different kind here and there inserted instead (Ruæus). Footnote 754: Ad unitatis proprietatem. Footnote 755: “Here the honesty of Rufinus in his translation seems very suspicious; for Origen’s well-known opinion regarding the sins and lapses of blessed spirits he here attributes to others. Nay, even the opinion which he introduces Origen as ascribing to others, he exhibits him as refuting a little further on, sec. 6, in these words: ‘And in this condition [of blessedness] we are to believe that, by the will of the Creator, it will abide for ever without any change,’ etc. I suspect, therefore, that all this is due to Rufinus himself, and that he has inserted it, instead of what is found in the beginning of the chapter, sec. 1, and which in Jerome’s Epistle to Avitus stands as follows: ‘Nor is there any doubt that, after certain intervals of time, matter will again exist, and bodies be formed, and a diversity be established in the world, on account of the varying wills of rational creatures, who, after [enjoying] perfect blessedness down to the end of all things, have gradually fallen away to a lower condition, and received into them so much wickedness, that they are converted into an opposite condition, by their unwillingness to retain their original state, and to preserve their blessedness uncorrupted. Nor is this point to be suppressed, that many rational creatures retain their first condition (_principium_) even to the second and third and fourth worlds, and allow no room for any change within them; while others, again, will lose so little of their pristine state, that they will appear to have lost almost nothing, and some are to be precipitated with great destruction into the lowest pit. And God, the disposer of all things, when creating His worlds, knows how to treat each individual agreeably to his merits, and He is acquainted with the occasions and causes by