[127] Was it not owing to this, that, when Cain imagined that he had presented faultless sacrifices, a divine intimation was made to him not to be confident that his offering had met with God’s favour; for that the conditions of his sacrifice had not been holy and perfect? The divine message is this: “〈All is〉 not 〈well〉, if thou offerest rightly, but dost not rightly distinguish” (Gen. 4:7).
[128] So the honour paid to God is a right act, but the failure to divide is not right. What this means, let us see. There are some whose definition of reverence is that it consists in saying that all things were made by God, both beautiful things and their opposites.
[129] We would say to these, one part of your opinion is praiseworthy, the other part on the contrary is faulty. It is praiseworthy that you regard with wonder and reverence that which is alone worthy of honour; on the other hand, you are to blame for doing so without clear-cut distinctions. You ought never to have mixed and confused the matter by representing Him as Author of all things indiscriminately, but to have drawn a sharp line and owned Him Author of the good things only.
[130] It is a senseless thing to be scrupulous about priests being free from bodily defect or deformity and about animals for sacrifice being exempt from the very slightest blemish, and to appoint inspectors (called by some “flaw-spiers”) on purpose to provide that the victims may be brought to the altar free from flaw or imperfections; and at the same time to suffer the ideas about God in their several souls to be in confusion, with no distinctions made between true and false by the application to them of the rule and standard of right principles.