Is it not true that from the beginning and long before today you lived with countless transgressions of the law? Did not the prophet Ezekiel accuse you ten thousand times when he brought in the two harlots, Oholah and Oholibah, and said, You built a brothel in Egypt, you passionately loved barbarians, and you worshiped strange gods.

It is this truth that we shall realize perfectly when we shall be perfectly at rest and perfectly see that it is he who is God.

For indeed the sabbath did at first confer many and great benefits; for instance, it made them gentle toward their household and humane; it taught them God’s providence in the creation; as Ezekiel says, it trained them by degrees to abstain from wickedness and disposed them to regard the things of the Spirit.

But, why should I not say that the requirements of ancient ceremonies are not good because people are not justified by them; they are figures that foreshadow the grace, by which we are justified. . . . They are not bad, because they were precepts of divine origin, adapted to times and people, although in this estimate I am supported by the prophetic statement in which God said that he had given to that people statutes that were not good. It happens that he did not say that they were bad but only that they were not good: that is, such that with them, people become good; without them, they do not. I would like your kind sincerity to inform me whether any oriental saint who comes to Rome and fasts on Saturday—except the eve of Easter—is acting deceitfully. If we say that is wrong, we shall condemn the Roman church and also many places near it and others somewhat further away, where the same custom continues to be observed.

He cannot impart perfect precepts to an imperfect age, because it cannot bear them.

Whoever lives under the light of the grace of the gospel and overcomes evil not by resisting it but by bearing it and who does not hesitate of his own free will to give his other cheek to one who strikes his right cheek, who gives his cloak also to one who wants to raise a lawsuit against him for his coat, and who loves his enemies and prays for those who slander him, this man has broken the yoke of sin and burst its chains. For he is not living under the law, which does not destroy the seeds of sin.

To convince you that these laws contribute not to any virtue but were given to them as a sort of curb, providing them with an occasion of perpetual labor, hear what the prophet says concerning them: I gave them statutes that were not good. What does not good mean? Statutes that did not contribute greatly toward virtue. Therefore he adds also, and ordinances whereby they shall not live.

[Israel] received statutes that were not good and commandments that were altogether evil whereby it should not live but should be punished through them.

God finds fault with the commandments of the Old Testament, for he says, I gave them statutes that were not good and ordinances by which they could not have life, because of their hardness of heart.

Having forgotten the benefits and marvels performed by God, they set up the head of a calf. For this reason, therefore, precepts are given to them by which they are tested. Hence it is that through the prophet Ezekiel the Lord says to them, I gave you precepts and ordinances that were not good, by which you will not live. For when they were tested in the precepts of the Lord, they were not found faithful.

We hold, then, that the law has a twofold sense—the one literal, the other spiritual—as has been shown by some before us. Of the first or literal sense it is said, not by us but by God, speaking in one of the prophets, that the statutes are not good, and the judgments not good; whereas, taken in a spiritual sense, the same prophet makes God say that his statutes are good, and his judgments are good.

The first Passover belongs to the first people; the second Passover is ours. For we were impure in soul,^[1] who used to worship wood and stone and not knowing God, we used to serve those things that by nature were not gods.^[2]

He commands us to be completely separated from idolatry and have no close dealing with it, because even the earthly serpent sucks people into its jaws at a distance with its breath.

Here is a clear witness that but few will come under God’s staff and that this will be when the rest of Israel has fallen away from the promises. I have proved that the divine prophecies did not foretell good things to all the members of the Jewish race universally and indiscriminately whatever happened, to the evil and unholy and those who were the reverse, but to few of them and those easily numbered, in fact to those of them who believed in our Lord and Savior or those justified before his coming. I, therefore, consider that I have shown sufficiently that the divine promises were fulfilled not indiscriminately to all the Jews and that the oracles of the prophets are not more applicable to them than to those of the Gentiles who have received the Christ of God.

Admittedly the divine, because it is without a body, is untouchable and entirely intact, because the divine is beyond every creature, both visible and intelligible, and in nature it is incorporeal, immaculate, untouchable and incomprehensible. Since the only-begotten Word of God, having taken a body from the holy virgin, and, as I already said over and over again, having made it his own, offered himself in an odor of sweetness to God the Father as a spotless sacrifice, in this way it is asserted that he endured on our behalf what happened to his flesh. Everything that happened to flesh would rightly be attributed to him, sin alone excepted, for it is his own body. Accordingly, since God the Word became man, he remained impassible as God, but, because he necessarily made the things of his flesh his own, it is asserted that he endured what is according to flesh, although he is without experience of suffering in so far as he is thought of as God.

Consider yourselves as having been transferred from prison to what we may call a place of safety. Darkness is there, but you are light; chains are there, but you are free before God. It breathes forth a foul smell, but you are an odor of sweetness.

We are thus taught by the words of the Lord himself: everything is granted to us by God, and that the whole of our salvation is to be ascribed not to the merit of our own works but to heavenly grace.