immutable and incorporeal, invisible, infinite, incomprehensible,
alone good and righteous, who created all things out of nothing,
whether visible or invisible. First, he made the heavenly and
invisible powers, countless multitudes, immaterial and bodiless,
ministering spirits of the majesty of God. Afterward he created
this visible world, heaven and earth and sea, which also he made
glorious with light and richly adorned it; the heavens with the
sun, moon and stars, and the earth with all manner of herbs and
divers living beasts, and the sea in turn with all kinds of
fishes. `He spake the word and these all were made; he commanded
and they were created.' Then with his own hands he created man,
taking dust of the ground for the fashioning of his body, but by
his own in-breathing giving him a reasonable and intelligent
soul, which, as it is written, was made after the image and
likeness of God: after his image, because of reason and free
will; after his likeness, because of the likeness of virtue, in
its degree, to God. Him he endowed with free will and
immortality and appointed sovran over everything upon earth; and
from man he made woman, to be an helpmeet of like nature for him.

"And he planted a garden eastward in Eden, full of delight and
all heart's ease, and set thereto the man whom he had formed, and
commanded him freely to eat of all the heavenly trees therein,
but forbade him wholly the taste of a certain one which was
called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thus saying,
'In the day that ye eat thereof ye shall surely die.' But one of
the aforesaid angel powers, the marshall of one host, though he
bore in himself no trace of natural evil from his Maker's hand
but had been created for good, yet by his own free and deliberate
choice turned aside from good to evil, and was stirred up by