Can anyone be proved innocent, if it be enough to have accused him? - Julian

Men's works also are naturally perishable and mutable and subject to every kind of alteration. But since God is eternal, it follows that of such sort are his ordinances also. And since they are such, they are either the natures of things or are accordant with the nature of things. For how could nature be at variance with the ordinance of God? How could it fall out of harmony therewith?

Wherefore should I mention to you Horus, and the other names of gods, all of them belonging in reality to the Sun? For we men have gained our notion of the god from the works which the same god actually works — he that hath made the universal heaven perfect through his Intelligible blessings, and given to the same a share of his Intelligible beauty. And beginning from that point, himself wholly and partially by the giving of good men … for they superintend every motion as far as the extremest limits of the universe. And Nature and Soul, and all that at any time exists, all these, and in all places, does he bring to perfection; and after having marshalled so vast a host of deities into one governing unity, he has given to them Athene, or Providence; who, mythology says, sprung forth out of the head of Jupiter; but whom we assert to have been projected entire out of the entire Sovereign Sun, for she was contained within him, in this particular dissenting from the legend, in that we do not hold her to have sprung out of the topmost part, but all entire, and out of the entire god.

Nature loves to hide her secrets, and she does not suffer the hidden truth about the essential nature of the gods to be flung in naked words to the ears of the profane…