Or can this be done only with the souls which you take into your belly, instead of aiding them by your understanding? 56.  And you cannot escape the admission that the souls in trees make no progress in wisdom while they are there, when you are asked why no apostle was sent to teach trees as well as men, or why the apostle sent to men did not preach the truth to trees also.  Your reply must be, that the souls while in such bodies cannot understand the divine precepts.  But this reply lands you in great difficulties; for you declare that these souls can hear your voices and understand what you say, and see bodies and their motions, and even discern thoughts.  If this is true, why could they learn nothing from the apostle of light?  Why could they not learn even much better than we, since they can see into the mind?  Your master, who, as you say, has difficulty in teaching you by speech, might have taught these souls by thought; for they could see his ideas in his mind before he expressed them.  But if this is untrue, consider into what errors you have fallen. 57.  As for your not plucking fruits or pulling up vegetables yourselves, while you get your followers to pluck and pull and bring them to you, that you may confer benefits not only on those who bring the food but on the food which is brought, what thoughtful person can bear to hear this?  For, first, it matters not whether you commit a crime yourself, or wish another to commit it for you.  You deny that you wish this!  How then can relief be given to the divine part contained in lettuce and leeks, unless some one pull them and bring them to the saints to be purified.  And again, if you were passing through a field where the right of friendship permitted you to pluck anything you wished, what would you do if you saw a crow on the point of eating a fig?  Does not, according to your ideas, the fig itself seem to address you and to beg of you piteously to pluck it yourself and give it burial in a holy belly, where it may be purified and restored, rather than that the crow should swallow it 85 and make it part of his cursed body, and then hand it over to bondage and torture in other forms?  If this is true, how cruel you are!  If not, how silly!  What can be more contrary to your opinions than to break the symbol?  What can be more unkind to the member of God than to keep it? 58.  This supposes the truth of your false and vain ideas.  But you can be shown guilty of plain and positive cruelty flowing from the same error.  For were any one lying on the road, his body wasted with disease, weary with journeying, and half-dead from his sufferings, and able only to utter some broken words, and if eating a pear would do him good as an astringent, and were he to beg you to help him as you passed by, and were he to implore you to bring the fruit from a neighboring tree, with no divine or human prohibition to prevent your doing so, while the man is sure to die for the want of it, you, a Christian man and a saint, will rather pass on and abandon a man thus suffering and entreating, lest the tree should lament the loss of its fruit, and you should be doomed to the punishment 146 Description of the Symbol of the Hands Among the Manichæans.