Chapter IV. That From These Great Evils We Were Delivered by the Evangelic Teaching of Our Saviour

Now I think it is plain to every one that the proof of the matters before us will embrace not a small part, but a very great and at the same time very necessary part of the evangelic argument. For suppose it should b be shown that all men everywhere, both Greeks and Barbarians, before the advent of our Saviour Jesus Christ, had no knowledge of the true God, but either regarded ‘the things that are not as though they were,’ [1] or were led about hither and thither like blind men by certain wicked spirits fighting against God, and by evil and impure daemons, and were by them dragged down into an abyss of wickedness (for what else ailed them but possession by daemons?)----how can the great mystery of the Gospel dispensation fail to be seen in a higher light? I mean, that all men from all quarters have been sailed back by our Saviour’s voice from the delusion handed down from their fathers about the tyranny of daemons, and that the men who dwell as far off as the ends of the earth have been released from the deception which from the earliest age oppressed their whole life. For since His time and up to the present the antiquated seats of delusion in all the heathen nations have been broken up and destroyed----shrines and statues and all----and temples truly venerable, and schools of true religion have been raised up in honour of the Absolute Monarch and Creator of the universe in the midst of cities and villages by the power and goodness of our Saviour throughout the whole world. And by prayers of holy men the sacrifices which are worthy of God have been purified from all wickedness, and in freedom of soul from all passions, and in the acquirement of every virtue, according to the divine doctrines of salvation, are day by day continually offered up by all nations----those sacrifices which alone are acceptable and pleasing to the God who is over all?

Now if these things be so, how can we have failed to show at the same time, that with sound reason, arid without giving ourselves over to folly, we have turned away from the superstition handed down from our fathers, and with just and true judgement have chosen the better part, and become lovers of the inspired and true religion? But enough of this, and let us now take in hand the subjects before us.