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The Second Apology
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Chapter 7: The World Maintained for Christians: Human Accountability.
GOD DELAYS BRINGING CONFUSION AND DESTRUCTION TO THE WHOLE WORLD: where wicked angels, demons, and humans will cease to exist, because of the presence of Christians. They are the reason for preservation in the world. If this weren't the case, you would not be able to do these things or be driven by evil spirits; the fire of judgment would come down and destroy everything, much like the flood that spared only Noah and his family, whom you call Deucalion.
From them, many have descended, some evil and others good. We believe there will be a great fire, but unlike the Stoics, we do not believe everything changes into one another, which we find degrading. We also do not believe that fate controls human actions or suffering, but that each person, through free will, chooses to act rightly or sin. Wicked demons cause earnest men like Socrates to suffer persecution and bondage, while people like Sardanapalus and Epicurus seem to prosper in wealth and glory.
The Stoics, not noticing this, claim everything happens due to the necessity of fate.
But God created angels and humans with free will from the beginning, so they rightly suffer eternal fire for their sins. Everything created has the potential for vice and virtue, for nothing is praiseworthy unless there is the ability to choose between them. This is evident from everyone who has made laws or philosophized according to right reason, by commanding some actions and prohibiting others. Even the Stoic philosophers, in their moral teachings, honor the same values, showing they are not very consistent in their principles and incorporeal matters.
If they claim human actions happen by fate, they imply either that God is merely things constantly changing, and dissolving, focusing only on destructible things, and seeing God as part of every wickedness; or that vice and virtue are nothing, which contradicts every sound idea, reason, and sense.