So says Deuteronomy. But in Exodus, even if someone finds what belongs to his enemy, not just his brother, it says, Turn and take them back to their owner’s house.^[1]

Scripture teaches us by means of natural fellowship to treat the object found as a trust and not to hold hatred of an enemy.

You are commanded to pull out the ass or the ox which is lying in the mud. Do you then see a Christian like yourself, who was redeemed by the blood of Christ, lying in the sewer of drunkenness and wallowing in the mud of dissipation, and remain silent? Do you pass by and not stretch forth the hand of mercy? Do you merely shout at him or rebuke him or instill fright in him?

If you consider it truly, there is an incongruity that nature itself abhors. For why, man, do you not want to appear to be what you were born as? Why do you put on a strange guise? Why do you ape a woman? Or why do you, woman, ape a man? Nature arrays each sex with its own garments. Men and women have different customs, different complexions, gestures and gaits, different sorts of strength, different voices.

When you build a house, you do not quit before building the protective parapet of the house. It is this parapet that prevents one who has ascended onto the house from falling. So it is with the house of the Word. Consequently those who fall because of unfinished buildings fall only from houses which lack the parapet. Those architects and builders bear the blame for such slaughters and falls.

There it is perhaps guessing at the disparity between the animals. It is at the same time showing clearly that we must not wrong any of those from other races by bringing them under the same yoke when we have nothing against them apart from their foreignness, for which they are not responsible, which is not an immoral trait and does not spring from one. It is my view that this is an allegory, meaning that we should not share the cultivation of the Logos on equal terms between pure and impure, faithful and faithless, as the ox is accounted a clean animal and the donkey unclean.

What does Scripture mean by these riddles? That it is not right for evil and virtue to grow together in the same soul. Nor is it right, dividing one’s life between opposites, to reap thorns and grain from the same soul. Nor is it right for the bride of Christ to commit adultery with the enemies of Christ or to bear light in the womb and beget darkness.

Man is forbidden to plow with an ox and an ass at the same time. This is as if to say you should not bring together fools and the wise to hear your teaching. Otherwise you will cause the one who cannot fulfill your words to stand in the way of the one who can.

At any rate [Scripture] says openly, You shall not loathe Egyptians, since you lived as strangers in Egypt. By Egyptian it means Gentile, in fact anyone from anywhere in the world. It is further forbidden to think of enemies as enemies, even if they are presently besieging your walls in the effort to capture your city, until you have sent them an envoy to invite them to peace.^[1]