It was necessary, therefore, that man should first be put to the test (for man untried and unproved ἀδοκιμος; in Cod. R. 2 ἀδοκίμαστον. would be worth nothing This parenthesis is absent in almost all codices and in the translations of Faber, &c.), and being made perfect by the trial through the observance of the command should thus receive incorruption as the prize of his virtue. For being intermediate between God and matter he was destined, if he kept the command, to be delivered from his natural relation to existing things and to be made one with God’s estate, and to be immoveably established in goodness, but, if he transgressed and inclined the rather to what was material, and tore his mind from the Author of his being, I mean God, his fate was to be corruption, and he was to become subject to passion instead of passionless, and mortal instead of immortal, and dependent on connection and unsettled generation. And in his desire for life he would cling to pleasures as though they were necessary to maintain it, and would fearlessly abhor those who sought to deprive him of these, and transfer his desire from God to matter, and his anger from the real enemy of his salvation to his own brethren. The envy of the Cf. Greg. Naz., Orat. 38 and 42; Cyril Alex., Cont. Anthrop., I. 8; Anast. II. Antioch., Hexaëm. vi; Chrysost., Hom. 10 in Ep. ad Rom., Hom. 5 in Ep. ad Epes., &c. devil then was the reason of man’s fall. For that same demon, so full of envy and with such a hatred of good, would not suffer us to enjoy the pleasures of heaven, when he himself was kept below on account of his arrogance, and hence the false one tempts miserable man with the hope of Godhead, and leading him up to as great a height of arrogance as himself, he hurls him down into a pit of destruction just as deep.