"For what I say is this, that the repentance which, being shown us and commanded us through
God's grace, recalls us to grace with the Lord, when once learned and undertaken by us ought
never afterward to be cancelled by repetition of sin. No pretext of ignorance now remains to
plead on your behalf; in that, after acknowledging the Lord, and accepting His precepts--in short
, after engaging in repentance of (past) sins--you again betake you self to sins. Thus, in as
far as you are removed from ignorance, in so far are you cemented to contumacy. For if the
ground on which you had repented of having sinned was that you had begun to fear the Lord, why
have you preferred to rescind what you did for fear's sake, except because you have ceased to
fear? For there is no other thing but contumacy which subverts fear.
Since there is no exception
which defends from liability to penalty even such as are ignorant of the Lord--because ignorance
of God, openly as He is set before men, and comprehensible as He is even on the score of His
heavenly benefits, is not possible--how perilous is it for Him to be despised when known? Now,
that man does despise Him, who, after attaining by His help to an understanding of things good
and evil, often an affront to his own understanding--that is, to God's gift--by resuming what he
understands ought to be shunned, and what he has already shunned: he rejects the Giver in
abandoning the gift; he denies the Benefactor in not honouring the benefit. How can he be
pleasing to Him, whose gift is displeasing to himself? Thus he is shown to be not only
contumacious toward the Lord, but likewise ungrateful.
Besides, that man commits no light sin
against the Lord, who, after he had by repentance renounced His rival the devil, and had under
this appellation subjected him to the Lord, again upraises him by his own return (to the enemy),
and makes himself a ground of exultation to him; so that the Evil One, with his prey recovered,
rejoices anew against the Lord. Does he not--what is perilous even to say, but must be put
forward with a view to edification--place the devil before the Lord? For he seems to have made
the comparison who has known each; and to have judicially pronounced him to be the better whose
(servant) he has preferred again to be. Thus he who, through repentance for sins, had begun to
make satisfaction to the Lord, will, through another repentance of his repentance, make
satisfaction to the devil, and will be the more hateful to God in proportion as he will be the
more acceptable to His rival."
