m they consider a logician
and not a philosopher. From analogies, they can draw many arguments
against the eternity of the world. The sun and the stars they, so to
speak, regard as the living representatives and signs of God, as the
temples and holy living altars, and they honour but do not worship them.
Beyond all other things they venerate the sun, but they consider no
created thing worthy the adoration of worship. This they give to God
alone, and thus they serve Him, that they may not come into the power of
a tyrant and fall into misery by undergoing punishment by creatures of
revenge. They contemplate and know God under the image of the Sun, and
they call it the sign of God, His face and living image, by means of
which light, heat, life, and the making of all things good and bad
proceeds. Therefore they have built an altar like to the Sun in shape,
and the priests praise God in the sun and in the stars, as it were His
altars, and in the heavens, His temple as it were; and they pray to good
angels, who are, so to speak, the intercessors living in the stars,
their strong abodes. For God long since set signs of their beauty in
heaven, and of His glory in the Sun. They say there is but one heaven,
and that the planets move and rise of themselves when they approach the
sun or are in conjunction with it.

They assert two principles of the physics of things below, namely, that
the Sun is the father, and the Earth the mother; the air is an impure
part of the heavens; all fire is derived from the sun. The sea is the
sweat of earth, or the fluid of earth combusted, and fused within its
bowels; but is the bond of union between air and earth, as the blood is
of the spirit and flesh of animals. The world is a great animal, and we
live within it as worms live within us. Therefore we do not belong to
the system of stars, sun, and earth, but to God only; for in respect to
them which seek only to amplify themselves, we are born and live by
chance; but in respect to God, whose instruments we are, we are formed
by prescience and design, and for a high end. Therefore we are bound to
no Father but God, and receive all things from Him. They hold as beyond
question the immortality of souls, and that these associate with good
angels after death, or with bad angels, according as they have likened
themselves in this life to either. For all things seek their like. They
differ little from us as to places of reward and punishment. They are in
d