true European remained either profane or ridiculous.  But Vespasian’s last joke, “Voe! puto Deus fio!” would not sound comic in Greek.  The associations of the word [Greek:  theos] were not sufficiently venerable to make the idea of deification ([Greek:  theopoiesis]) grotesque.  We find, as we should expect, that this vulgarisation of the word affected even Christians in the Greek-speaking countries.  Not only were the “barbarous people” of Galatia and Malta ready to find “theophanies” in the visits of apostles, or any other strangers who seemed to have unusual powers, but the philosophers (except the “godless Epicureans”) agreed in calling the highest faculty of the soul Divine, and in speaking of “the God who dwells within us.”  There is a remarkable passage of Origen (quoted by Harnack) which shows how elastic the word [Greek:  theos] was in the current dialect of the educated.  “In another sense God is said to be an immortal, rational, moral Being.  In this sense every gentle ([Greek:  asteia]) soul is God.  But God is otherwise defined as the self-existing immortal Being.  In this sense the souls that are enclosed in wise men are not gods.”  Clement, too, speaks of the soul as “training itself to be God.”  Even more remarkable than such language (of which many other examples might be given) is the frequently recurring accusation that bishops, teachers, martyrs, philosophers, etc., are venerated with Divine or semi-Divine honours.  These charges are brought by Christians against pagans, by pagans against Christians, and by rival Christians against each other.  Even the Epicureans habitually spoke of their founder Epicurus as “a god.”  If we try to analyse the concept of [Greek:  theos], thus loosely and widely used, we find that the prominent idea was that exemption from the doom of death was the prerogative of a Divine Being (cf. 1 Tim. vi. 16, “Who only hath immortality"), and that therefore the gift of immortality is itself a deification.  This notion is distinctly adopted by several Christian writers.  Theophilus says (ad Autol. ii. 27) “that man, by keeping the commandments of God, may receive from him immortality as a reward ([Greek:  misthon]), and become God.” And Clement (Strom. v. 10. 63) says, “To be imperishable ([Greek:  to me phtheiresthai]) is to share in Divinity.”  To the same effect Hippolytus (Philos. x. 34) says, “Thy body shall be immortal and incorruptible as well as thy soul.  For thou hast become God.  All the things that follow upon the Divine nature God has promised to supply to thee, for thou wast deified in being born to immortality.”  With regard to later times, Harnack says that “after Theophilus, Irenaeus, Hippolytus, and Origen, the idea of deification is found in all the Fathers of the ancient Church, and that in a primary position.  We have it in Athanasius, the Cappadocians, Apollinaris, Ephraem Syrus, Epiphanius, and others, as also in Cyril, Sophronius, and late Greek and Russian theologians.  In proof of it, Ps. lxxxii. 6 (’I said, Ye are gods’) is very often quoted.”  He quotes from Athanasius, “He became man that we might be deified”; and from Pseudo-Hippolytus, “If, then, man has become immortal, he will be God.”