Against Celsus 4.69

After this he says: "Nor were visible things given to man, but each thing comes into being and perishes for the sake of the preservation of the whole, according to the exchange I spoke of before, from one to another." It is superfluous to spend more time refuting these things, as we have already set out our view as best we could. It has also been said in answer to this: "Neither goods nor evils could become fewer or more among mortals." An answer has also been given to this: "Nor does God need new correction." But God does not bring correction to the world as a man who has built something defectively and made it unskilfully, cleansing it by flood or conflagration; rather he prevents the spread of vice from ranging further, and I think he also does away with it altogether, in an orderly way, to the benefit of the whole. Whether after the abolition of vice there is reason for it to come into being again or not will be examined in the fundamental treatise. God, then, does will always to take up errors by new correction. For even if everything has been ordered by him most beautifully and most securely in the creation of the universe, he nonetheless needed some healing art for those sick with vice and for the whole world, defiled as it were by it; and nothing has been or will be neglected by God, who at each time does what it befits him to do in a world that is changeable and mutable. And as a farmer does different farm work on the land and on what grows on it according to the different seasons of the year, so God administers whole ages as if they were years, so to speak, doing in each of them whatever reason concerning the universe requires, which is most clearly understood and carried out, as the truth holds, by God alone.