CHAPTER V

HE REIGNED ABOVE THIRTY YEARS, AND LIVED ABOVE SIXTY

WITH respect to the duration of his reign, God honoured him with three complete periods of ten years, and rather more, and limited the whole term of his mortal life to twice this number of years. And being pleased to make him a representative of His own sovereign power, He displayed him as the conqueror of the whole race of tyrants, and the destroyer of those godless great ones of the earth who had ventured with desperate audacity to raise their impious arms against Him, the supreme King of the universe. They appeared indeed but for a very little space, and were destroyed together: while the one and only true God, when He had enabled His servant, clad in heavenly panoply, to stand singly against many foes, and by his means had relieved mankind from the multitude of the ungodly, constituted him a teacher of His worship to all nations, to testify with a loud voice in the hearing of all, that he acknowledged the true God, and turned with abhorrence from the error of them that are no gods.