25. See Acts 12:6-9.
Book XII 479 true and makes useful announcements, transforming itself, as it is written, like an angel oflight (2 Cor 11:14), with the intention offirst winning people' s confi dence in manifestly good matters and then seducing them to its own ends.
This sort, l consider, can only be discerned by the gift of which the apostle said, when talking about the variety of God's graces, to another the distin guishing ofspirits (1 Cor 12:10).
14. It is no great thing, after all, to tell such a spirit apart when it does things or leads people to do them that are against good morals or the rule of faith; then it can be discerned by many people. But by this gift it is distinguished from the outset, while it is still striking many people as being good.
29. Nonetheless while good spirits instruct and evil ones deceive by means both of bodily vision and of the images of bodily realities which are exhibited in the spirit, the intellectual kind ofvision on the other hand cannot be deceived; for either the one who supposes it means something different from what it actually does fails to understand,24 or else if he does understand then it is ipsofacto true. The eyes, you see, have nothing they can do when they see something like a body which they cannot distinguish from another, and the spiritual vision has nothing it can do when the likeness of a body is produced in the spirit which it is not capable of distinguishing from a real body. But then the intellect is applied, asking what those things signify or what useful lesson they are teaching, and it either finds the answer and attains its object, or it does not find it and holds itself in suspense, in order not to lapse by some perniciously rashjudgment into a fatal error.
30. The sober intellect, assisted by God, makes a judgment about which and how many are the matters where it does the soul no harm to treat them as other than they really are. Thus good people may think a bad person is good, his badness being concealed; this is disastrous for him but does no damage to their integrity, if they are not mistaken about what the real goodness is that makes anyone good. Again, when people are asleep it does them no harm ifthey reckon that those things are real bodies which they see the likenesses of in their dreams. Nor did it do Peter any harm, when he was released from his shackles and led out by an angel, that he happened to think in this unexpected miracle that he was seeing a vision,25 or when he answered in that ecstasy: Certainly not, Lord, because l have never eaten anything common or unclean (Acts 10:10-14), thinking that the things being shown him in the dish were real animals.
When we find such things to be other than we thought they were as we were seeing them, we do not think we have to repent of their having seemed like that to us, if some obstinate infidelity is not being brought to light, or a vain, a sacrile
24. And hence there is no intellectual vision. Not, 1 think, a very convincing line of argument. 25. See Acts 12:6-9.