On Repentance
[175] Our most holy Moses, who so dearly loved virtue and goodness and especially his fellowmen, exhorts everyone everywhere to pursue piety and justice, and offers to the repentant in honour of their victory the high rewards of membership in the best of commonwealths and of the felicities both great and small which that membership confers.
[176] For in the scale of values the primary place is taken in bodies by health free from disease, in ships by travelling happily free from danger and in souls by memory of things worth remembering without lapse into forgetfulness. But second to these stands rectification in its various forms, recovery from disease, deliverance so earnestly desired from the dangers of the voyage, and recollection supervening on forgetfulness. This last has for its brother and close kinsman repentance, which though it does not stand in the first and highest rank of values has its place in the class next to this and takes the second prize.
[177] For absolute sinlessness belongs to God alone, or possibly to a divine man; conversion from sin to a blameless life shows a man of wisdom who has not been utterly ignorant of what is for his good.
[178] And, therefore, when Moses convokes such people and would initiate them into his mysteries, he invites them with conciliatory and amicable offers of instruction, exhorting them to practise sincerity and reject vanity, to embrace truth and simplicity as vital necessaries and the sources of happiness, and to rise in rebellion against the mythical fables impressed on their yet tender souls from their earliest years by parents and nurses and tutors and the multitude of other familiars, who have caused them to go endlessly astray in their search for the knowledge of the best.
[179] And what is the best of all that is but God, whose honours they have assigned to those who were no gods and glorified them beyond measure, while Him in their senseless folly they forgot? So therefore all these who did not at the first acknowledge their duty to reverence the Founder and Father of all, yet afterwards embraced the creed of one instead of a multiplicity of sovereigns, must be held to be our dearest friends and closest kinsmen. They have shown the godliness of heart which above all leads up to friendship and affinity, and we must rejoice with them, as if, though blind at the first they had recovered their sight and had come from the deepest darkness to behold the most radiant light.