Second Apology 6

Therefore God delays bringing about the confusion and dissolution of the whole world, by which the evil angels and demons and men would be no more, because of the seed of the Christians, which he knows is the cause in nature. For if it were not so, it would not even be possible for you to do these things any longer and to be driven by the evil demons, but the fire of judgment would come down and freely separate all things, just as formerly the flood left no one but the one man, with his family, whom we call Noah and you call Deucalion, from whom again so many have come, some of them wicked and others good. For in this way we say the conflagration will come, and not, as the Stoics say, according to the principle of the change of all things into one another, which seemed most shameful. Nor do we say that men do what they do or suffer what happens by fate; but that each does right or sins by free choice, and that by the working of the evil demons good men, such as Socrates and those like him, are persecuted and imprisoned, while Sardanapalus and Epicurus and those like them seem to be happy in abundance and glory. Not understanding this, the Stoics declared that all things happen by the necessity of fate. But since God in the beginning made the race of angels and of men with free will, they will justly receive the punishment in eternal fire for whatever wrongs they commit. And this is the nature of everything that has come into being: to be capable of vice and virtue; for none of them would be praiseworthy if it did not also have the power to turn either way. This is shown also by those men everywhere who have made laws and practiced philosophy according to right reason, by their prescribing that some things be done and others avoided. And the Stoic philosophers too, in their teaching on ethics, strongly honor the same things, so that it is plain that in their teaching on first principles and incorporeal things they do not go the right way. For if they say that what men do happens by fate, or that God is nothing other than things that turn and change and dissolve into the same things forever, they will appear to have a conception only of perishable things, and to hold that God himself, both in his parts and in the whole, comes to be in every vice; or else that there is no such thing as vice or virtue; which is contrary to every sound notion and reason and mind.