that has been humbled."[1] To this end, therefore, brethren, He is long-suffering, foreseeing how the people whom He has prepared shall with guilelessness believe in His Beloved. For He revealed all these things to us beforehand, that we should not rush forward as rash acceptors of their laws.[2]
Chap. iv.—Antichrist is at hand: let us therefore avoid Jewish errors.
It therefore behoves us, who inquire much concerning events at hand,[3] to search diligently into those things which are able to save us. Let us then utterly flee from all the works of iniquity, lest these should take hold of us; and let us hate the error of the present time, that we may set our love on the world to come: let us not give loose reins to our soul, that it should have power to run with sinners and the wicked, lest we become like them. The final stumbling-block (or source of danger) approaches, concerning which it is written, as Enoch[4] says, "For for this end the Lord has cut short the times and the days, that His Beloved may hasten; and He will come to the inheritance." And the prophet also speaks thus: "Ten kingdoms shall reign upon the earth, and a little king shall rise up after them, who shall subdue under one three of the kings."[5] In like manner Daniel says concerning the same, "And I beheld the fourth beast, wicked and powerful, and more savage than all the beasts of the earth, and how from it sprang up ten horns, and out of them a little budding horn, and how it subdued under one three of the great horns."[6] Ye ought therefore to understand. And
- ↑ Isa. lviii. 6–10.
- ↑ The Greek is here unintelligible: the Latin has, "that we should not rush on, as if proselytes to their law."
- ↑ Or it might be rendered, "things present." Cotelerius reads, "de his instantibus."
- ↑ The Latin reads "Daniel" instead of "Enoch;" comp. Dan. ix. 24–27.
- ↑ Dan. vii. 24, very loosely quoted.
- ↑ Dan. vii. 7, 8, also very inaccurately cited.
