535. After this I heard a threatening murmur coming from the underworld, accompanied by these words, 'Perform 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 revelations from heaven are impossible, because in so far as a person knows the future, so far does his reason and intellect, together with his prudence and wisdom, fall into disuse, become inactive and collapse.'
I asked again, 'What miracles am I to perform?' Then a shout went up, 'Do ones like Moses did in Egypt.' 'Perhaps,' I replied, 'you might harden your hearts at them, like Pharaoh and the Egyptians.' They replied that they would not. But I said again, 'Promise me that you will not dance around the golden calf and worship it like the descendants of Jacob, as they did within the space of a month after seeing the whole of Mount Sinai ablaze, and hearing Jehovah Himself speaking out of the fire; that is to say, after the greatest of miracles. (The golden calf in the spiritual sense is the pleasures of the flesh.) A reply came from below, 'We shall not be like the descendants of Jacob.'
But then I heard this message given to 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 sons in the desert. Nor will you believe any more than those did who saw with their own eyes the miracles performed by the Lord Himself, when He was in the world.'
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