על השכר והעונש ד׳On Rewards and Punishments 4
א׳
1[22] After the contest won by repentance come a third set of rewards offered for justice. He who attains to justice receives two prizes, one his salvation amid the general destruction, the other his appointment to take into his charge and protection the specimens of each kind of living creatures, mated in couples to produce a second creation to make good the annihilation of the first.
ב׳
2[23] For the Creator judged it right that the same man should end the condemned and begin the innocent generation, thereby teaching by deeds and not by words those who deny that the world is governed by providence, that, under the law which He established in universal nature, all the myriads of the human race, if they have lived a life of injustice, are not worth a single man who has not departed from justice. This person, in whose day the great deluge took place, is called by the Greeks Deucalion and by the Hebrews Noah.
ג׳
3[24] After this Trinity comes another Trinity holier and dearer to God, all belonging to one family. For it was a Father, a Son, a Grandson who pressed forward to the same goal of life, namely to be well pleasing to the Maker and Father of all. All that the multitudes admire, glory, wealth and pleasure, they despised, and laughed at vanity, that web woven of lies and cunningly devised to deceive the beholders.
ד׳
4[25] Vanity is the impostor who deifies lifeless objects, the great and formidable engine of aggression who with its scheming and trickery beguiles every city and loses no time in capturing the souls of the young. For it sets up its abode in them and remains there from earliest infancy to old age, save in the cases where God illumines them with a ray of truth—truth the antagonist of vanity who retreats before it though slowly and reluctantly vanquished by its superior power.
ה׳
5[26] This kind is few in number but in power so manifold and mighty that it cannot be contained by the whole compass of the earth but reaches to Heaven, possessed with an intense longing to contemplate and for ever be in the company of things divine. After investigating the whole realm of the visible to its very end, it straightway proceeds to the immaterial and conceptual, not availing itself of any of the senses but casting aside all the irrational part of the soul and employing only the part which is called mind and reasoning.
ו׳
6[27] The leader in adopting the godly creed, who first passed over from vanity to truth, came to his consummation by virtue gained through instruction, and he received for his reward belief in God. To him who happily gifted by nature has acquired the virtue which listens to no other than itself, learns from no other, is taught by no other, the prize awarded is joy. The man of practice who by unwearied and unswerving labour has made the excellent his own has for his crown the vision of God. Belief in God, life-long joy, the perpetual vision of the Existent—what can anyone conceive more profitable or more august than these?
