were alienated and separated from thee, because thou wert falling
into plain and manifest destruction, and wouldst constrain us
also to descend into like peril. But as long as we were tried in
the warfare of this world, we failed in no point of duty. Thou
thyself will bear me witness that we were never charged with
sloth or heedlessness.

"But when thou hast endeavoured to rob us of the chiefest of all
blessings, our religion, and to deprive us of God, the worst of
deprivations, and, in this intent, dost remind us of past honours
and preferments, how should I not rightly tax thee with ignorance
of good, seeing that thou dost at all compare these two things,
righteousness toward God, and human friendship, and glory, that
runneth away like water? And how, in such ease, may we have
fellowship with thee, and not the rather deny ourselves
friendship and honours and love of children, and if there be any
other tie greater than these? When we see thee, O king, the
rather forgetting thy reverence toward that God, who giveth thee
the power to live and breathe, Christ Jesus, the Lord of all;
who, being alike without beginning, and coeternal with the
Father, and having created the heavens and the earth by his word,
made man with his own hands and endowed him with immortality, and
set him king of all on earth and assigned him Paradise, the
fairest place of all, as his royal dwelling. But man, beguiled
by envy, and (wo is me!) caught by the bait of pleasure,
miserably fell from all these blessings. So he that once was
enviable became a piteous spectacle, and by his misfortune
deserving of tears. Wherefore he, that had made and fashioned
us, looked again with eyes of compassion upon the work of his own
hands. He, not laying aside his God-head, which he had from the