he goodness of God. As beings
possessed of soul and body, men are neither mortal nor immortal, but
capable either of death or immortality.[438] The condition on which men
can attain the latter introduces us to ethics. The doctrines, that God
is also the absolute Lord of matter; that evil cannot be a quality of
matter, but rather arose in time and from the free decision of the
spirits or angels; and finally that the world will have an end, but God
can call the destroyed material into existence, just as he once created
it out of nothing, appear in principle to reconcile the dualism in the
cosmology. We have the less occasion to give the details here, because
they are known from the philosophical systems of the period, especially
Philo's, and vary in manifold ways. All the Apologists, however, are
imbued with the idea that this knowledge of God and the world, the
genesis of the Logos and cosmos, are the most essential part of
Christianity itself.[439] This conception is really not peculiar to the
Apologists: in the second century the great majority of Christians, in
so far as they reflected at all, regarded the monotheistic explanation
of the world as a main part of the Christian religion. The theoretical
view of the world as a harmonious whole, of its order, regularity and
beauty; the certainty that all this had been called into existence by an
Almighty Spirit; the sure hope that heaven and earth will pass away, but
will give place to a still more glorious structure, were always present,
and put an end to the bright and gorgeously coloured, but phantastic and
vague, cosmogonies and theogonies of antiquity.

2. Their clear system of morality is in keeping with their relatively
simple cosmology. In giving man reason and freedom as an inalienable
possession God destined him for incorruptibility ([Greek: athanasia,
aphtharsia]), by the attainment of which he was to become a being
similar to God.[440] To the gift of imperishability God, however,
attached the condition of man's preserving [Greek: ta tes athanasias]
("the things of immortality"), i.e., preserving the knowledge of God and
maintaining a holy walk in imitation of the divine perfection. This
demand is as natural as it is just; moreover, nobody can fulfil it in
man's stead, for an essential feature of virtue is its being free,
independent action. Man must therefore determine himself to virtue by
the knowledge that he is only in this way obedient to the Father of the