3. Here let us remind ourselves that we were examining the words, "Let the lights be for signs" when we came upon this discussion. They who learn the truth about things, have either been eye-witnesses and therefore give a good account of what takes place because they have beheld the suffering and the doing of those who do or suffer, or they get to know the circumstances by hearsay from informants not at all responsible for what has occurred. For we will agree on the present occasion to exclude the |176 possibility that the doers or sufferers may themselves relate what they have done and suffered, and may acquaint any one who did not happen to be present with the facts. If, then, any one who gets the information from a person no way responsible for the events, on hearing that certain things have befallen or will befall certain individuals, does not bear in mind that his informant as to the past or future is no way answerable for any given occurrence, he will suppose that the informant has brought about or will bring about what he relates, but he will obviously be wrong in so doing; it is as though a man were to read a prophetic book in which the conduct of Judas the traitor is foretold, and having learnt what was to happen, were, on seeing it accomplished, to think that the book was the cause of what afterwards occurred, because the book showed him the future conduct of Judas; or, again, should imagine that not the book was the cause, but he who first wrote it, or He Who had the book written, God Himself, if we may so speak. Just as in the case of the prophecies concerning Judas, the passages themselves on investigation show that God did not produce the treachery of Judas, but that, foreknowing what would result from the wickedness of the traitor through his own fault, He only made it known: so also, if any one would go deep into the discussion of God's universal foreknowledge, and into those things whereon, as it were, God stamps the proofs of His own foreknowledge, he would understand that neither is He Who foreknows at all the cause of what is foreknown, nor are those things which were stamped with the proofs of the foreknowledge of Him Who did foreknow.