849. After this I heard a threatening murmur from the underworld, and in it these words: 'Do some miracles, and we shall believe.' 'Are these not miracles?' I asked in reply. 'No,' they answered. 'What miracles then?' I asked. 'Make plain and reveal the future,' they said, 'and we shall have faith in you.' But I answered them: 'Such things are not granted by the Lord, because to the extent that a person knows the future, to that extent his reason and understanding, together with his prudence and wisdom, fall into disuse, he becomes dull and loses his grip.'
Then I asked again, 'What miracles am I to do?' Then a shout went up: 'Do ones like those Moses did in Egypt.' 'Perhaps,' I replied, 'you might harden your hearts at them, as Pharaoh and the Egyptians did.' They replied that they would not. So I said again: 'Promise me that you will not dance around the golden calf and worship it, as Jacob's descendants did within the space of a month after seeing the whole of Mount Sinai ablaze, and hearing Jehovah Himself speaking out of the fire, so after the greatest of all miracles.' (The golden calf in the spiritual sense is the pleasure of the flesh.) I received the reply from the underworld: 'We shall not be like the descendants of Jacob.'
But then I heard this message given them from heaven: 'If you do not believe Moses and the Prophets, that is, the Word of the Lord, you will no more be made to believe by miracles than were Jacob's descendants in the desert. Nor will you believe any more than those believed who saw with their own eyes the miracles performed by the Lord Himself, when He was in the world.'
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