The heretics against whom this work is directed, were the same who maintained that the demiurge, or the god who created this world and gave the Mosaic dispensation, was opposed to the supreme God. Hence they attached an idea of inherent corruption and worthlessness to all his works--amongst the rest, to the flesh or body of man; affirming that it could not rise again, and that the soul alone was capable of inheriting immortality.

Tertullian, a native of Carthage in North Africa, was an Early Church writer who lived between 155 and 240 A.D. A Treatise on the Soul is a fascinating, philosophical work which reads much like Plato or Greek philosophers of antiquity.

Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus was born at Carthage of heathen parentage probably about A.D. 160. Shortly after 190 he became a Christian. As a man of excellent education and a ready writer in both Greek and Latin, a practicing barrister also, skillful in the presentation of a case, he began at once to write in defense of the faith.