storehouse, and not cast into the Fire. For the fruit, he says, is
produced to be placed in the storehouse, but the husk to be
committed to the Fire; that is to say, the trunk, which is
generated not for its own sake but for that of the fruit.

10. And this he says is what is written in the scripture: "For the
vineyard of the Lord Sabaôth is the house of Israel, and a man of
Judah a well-beloved shoot."[14] And if a man of Judah is a
well-beloved shoot, it is shown, he says, that a tree is nothing
else than a man. But concerning its sundering and dispersion, he
says, the scripture has sufficiently spoken, and what has been said
is sufficient for the instruction of those whose imaging has been
perfected, viz.: "All flesh is grass, and every glory of the flesh
as the flower of grass. The grass is dried up and the flower
thereof falleth, but the speech of the Lord endureth for the
eternity (aeon)."[15] Now the Speech of the Lord, he says, is the
Speech engendered in the mouth and the Word (Logos), for elsewhere
there is no place of production.

11. To be brief, therefore, the Fire, according to Simon, being of
such a nature--both all things that are visible and invisible, and
in like manner, those that sound within and those that sound aloud,
those which can be numbered and those which are numbered--in the
_Great Revelation_ he calls it the Perfect Intellectual, as (being)
everything that can be thought of an infinite number of times, in
an infinite number of ways, both as to speech, thought and action,
just as Empedocles[16] says:

"By earth earth we perceive; by water, water; by aether [divine],
aether; fire by destructive fire; by friendship, friendship; and