does the wine itself, as already mentioned, become purer and brighter when the light has gone, and more wholesome by the loss of the beneficial substance? 45.  What are we to say of wood and leaves, which in course of time become dry, but cannot be the worse on that account in your estimation?  For while they lose that which produces smoke, they retain that from which a bright flame arises; and, to judge by the clearness, which you think so much of, there is more good in the dry than in the green.  Hence you must either deny that there is more of God in the pure light than in the smoky one, which will upset all your evidences; or you must allow it to be possible that, when plants are plucked up, or branches plucked off, and kept for a time, more of the nature of evil may 82 escape from them than of the nature of good.  And, on the strength of this, we shall hold that more evil may go off from plucked fruits; and so more good may remain in animal food.  So much on the subject of time. 46.  As for motion, and tossing, and rubbing, if these give the divine nature the oppor- tunity of escaping from these substances, many things of the same kind are against you, which are improved by motion.  In some grains the juice resembles wine, and is excellent when moved about.  Indeed, as must not be overlooked, this kind of drink produces intox- ication rapidly; and yet you never called the juice of grain the poison of the princes of darkness.  There is a preparation of water, thickened with a little meal, which is the better of being shaken, and, strange to say, is lighter in color when the light is gone.  The pastry cook stirs honey for a long time to give it this light color, and to make its sweetness milder and less unwholesome:  you must explain how this can come from the loss of good.  Again, if you prefer to test the presence of God by the agreeable effects on the hearing, and not sight, or smell, or taste, harps get their strings and pipes their bones from animals; and these become musical by being dried, and rubbed, and twisted.  So the pleasures of music, which you hold to have come from the divine kingdom, are obtained from the refuse of dead an- imals, and that, too, when they are dried by time, and lessened by rubbing, and stretched by twisting.  Such rough treatment, according to you, drives the divine substance from living objects; even cooking them, you say, does this.  Why then are boiled thistles not unwhole- some?  Is it because God, or part of God, leaves them when they are cooked? 47.  Why mention all the particulars, when it is difficult to enumerate them?  Nor is it necessary; for every one knows how many things are sweeter and more wholesome when cooked.  This ought not to be, if, as you suppose, things lose the good by being thus moved about.  I do not suppose that you will find any proof from your bodily senses that flesh is unclean, and defiles the souls of those who eat it, because fruits, when plucked and shaken about in various ways, become flesh; especially as you hold that vinegar, in its age and fer- mentation, is cleaner than wine, and the mead you drink is nothing else than cooked wine, which ought to be more impure than wine, if material things lose the divine members by being moved about and cooked.  But if not, you have no reason to think that fruits, when 141 Disclosure of the Monstrous Tenets of the Manichæans.