30. When therefore Marcion or any of his dogs shall bay against the Demiurge, bringing forward arguments from the comparison of good and evil, they should be told that neither the Apostle Paul nor Mark of the maimed finger[148] reported these things. For none of them is written in the Gospel [according] to Mark; [and] Marcion, having stolen them from Empedocles of Agrigentum, the son of Meto, thought until now to conceal the fact that he had taken the whole arrangement of his heresy from Sicily, [after] having transferred the actual words of Empedocles to the Gospel discourses. For now, O Marcion, since you have [Sidenote: p. 381.] made antithesis[149] of good and evil, I also to-day, following up the teachings you have secretly borrowed[150] set them over against [the originals]. Thou sayest that the Demiurge of the cosmos is wicked.[151] Dost thou not then feel shame in teaching to the Church the words of Empedocles? Thou sayest that there is a good God who destroys the creations of the Demiurge. Dost thou not then clearly preach as good news[152] to thy hearers the good Love of Empedocles? Thou dost forbid marriage and the begetting of children and [dost order thy hearers] to abstain from the meats which God has created for the participation of the faithful and of those who know the truth,[153] having purposely forgotten that thou art teaching the purifications of Empedocles. For, following him as you truly do throughout, you teach your own disciples[154] to avoid meats, lest they should eat some body covering a soul punished by the Demiurge. You dissolve marriages joined by God, [thus] following the teachings of Empedocles so that you may preserve the work of Love undissevered. For marriage according to Empedocles dissevers the One and creates many as we have shown.[155] [Sidenote: p. 382.] 31. The earliest and least altered[156] heresy of Marcion, comprising the mingling of good and evil, has been shown by us to be that of Empedocles. But since in our own time, a certain Prepon the Assyrian,[157] a Marcionite, in a book addressed to Bardesianes the Armenian, has undertaken discourses on this heresy, I will not keep silence about this either. Considering that there is a third principle, just and set between good and evil, Prepon also does not thus succeed in escaping the teaching of Empedocles. For Empedocles says that the cosmos is governed by wicked Strife, and the other conceivable [world] by Love, while between the two opposed[158] principles is a just Logos, by whom the things severed by Strife are brought together and are attached by Love to the One. But this same just Logos, [Sidenote: p. 383.] who fights on the side of Love, Empedocles proclaims as a Muse and invokes her to fight on his side, speaking somehow thus:--