Chapter 17.—Description of the Symbol of the Hands Among the Manichæans. 84 54.  We must now notice and discuss the symbol of the hands.  And, in the first place, your abstaining from the slaughter of animals and from injuring plants is shown by Christ to be mere superstition; for, on the ground that there is no community of rights between us and brutes and trees, He both sent the devils into an herd of swine,181 and withered by His curse a tree in which He had found no fruit.182  The swine assuredly had not sinned, nor had the tree.  We are not so insane as to think that a tree is fruitful or barren by its own choice.  Nor is it any reply to say that our Lord wished in these actions to teach some other truths; for every one knows that.  But assuredly the Son of God would not commit murder to illustrate truth, if you call the destruction of a tree or of an animal murder.  The signs which Christ wrought in the case of men, with whom we certainly have a community of rights, were in healing, not in killing them.  And it would have been the same in the case of beasts and trees, if we had that community with them which you imagine. 55.  I think it right to refer here to the authority of Scripture, because we cannot here enter on a profound discussion about the soul of animals, or the kind of life in trees.  But as you preserve the right to call the Scriptures corrupted, in case you should find them too strongly opposed to you,—although you have never affirmed the passages about the tree and the herd of swine to be spurious,—still, lest some day you should wish to say this of them too, when you find how much they are against you, I will adhere to my plan, and will ask you, who are so liberal in your promises of evidence and truth, to tell me first what harm is done to a tree, I say not by plucking a leaf or an apple,—for which, however, one of you would be condemned at once as having abused the symbol, if he did it intentionally, and not accidentally,—but if you tear it up by the root.  For the soul in trees, which, according to you, is a rational soul, is, in your theory, freed from bondage when the tree is cut down,—a bondage, too, where it suffered great misery and got no profit.  For it is well known that you, in the words of your founder, threaten as a great, though not the greatest punishment, the change from a man to a tree; and it is not probable that the soul in a tree can grow in wisdom as it does in a man.  There is the best reason for not killing a man, in case you should kill one whose wisdom or virtue might be of use to many, or one who might have attained to wisdom, whether by the advice of another without himself, or by divine illumination in his own mind.  And the more wisdom the soul has when it leaves the body, the more profit- able is its departure, as we know both from well-grounded reasoning and from wide-spread belief.  Thus to cut down a tree is to set free the soul from a body in which it makes no progress in wisdom.  You—the holy men, I mean—ought to be mainly occupied in cutting down trees, and in leading the souls thus emancipated to better things by prayers and psalms.  181 Matt. viii. 32. 182 Matt. xxi. 19. Description of the Symbol of the Hands Among the Manichæans. 145 Description of the Symbol of the Hands Among the Manichæans.