And yet perhaps it is going too far, after believing that God has sojourned in human life, to criticize His presence as though it had not taken place with wisdom and reason fitting to the higher nature. For to those who are not excessively opposed to the truth, there is no small proof of the divine sojourn already manifested in this present life, even before the life to come: I mean the testimony of the events themselves.
For who does not know how the deception of demons had filled every part of the inhabited world, mastering human life through the frenzy of idolatry; and how it was customary among all the nations of the world to worship demons through idols, with animal sacrifices and defilements upon the altars?
But from the time when, as the Apostle says, ‘the saving grace of God appeared to all people,’ having made its sojourn through human nature, all these things passed like smoke into non-being: the frenzies of oracles and divinations ceased; the annual processions and the blood-pollutions of the hecatombs were abolished; and among most nations altars, gateways, sacred precincts, images, and everything else practiced by the servants of demons for the deception of themselves and those who encountered them disappeared altogether, so that in many places it is no longer even remembered whether such things once existed. In their place, throughout the whole inhabited world, there arose in the name of Christ churches and altars, the solemn and bloodless priesthood, and the lofty philosophy practiced more in deed than in word, together with disregard for bodily life and contempt for death. Those whom rulers tried to compel to abandon the faith plainly demonstrated this, counting as nothing the tortures of the body and the sentence of death. Clearly they would not have endured these things unless they possessed a clear and indisputable proof of the divine sojourn.
This same fact, he says, is also a sufficient sign in addressing the Jews of the presence of the One in whom they do not believe. For until the manifestation of Christ, the royal establishments in Jerusalem were splendid among them, as was that renowned temple, the customary sacrifices throughout the year, and everything the Law set out in figures for those who knew how to understand these things mystically; until then all these continued unhindered according to the form of pious worship established for them from the beginning.
But when they saw the One who was expected, about whom they had been taught beforehand through the prophets and the Law, and preferred that now-mistaken superstition to faith in the One who had appeared—misunderstanding it, preserving the words of the Law, and serving custom rather than understanding—they did not receive the grace that had appeared. And the venerable things of their worship were left only in narratives: the temple can no longer be recognized even from its traces; that splendid city was left in ruins; nothing of the practices formerly customary among the Jews remained; and even the place in Jerusalem that they held in reverence became inaccessible to them by command of those in power.