You were angry, and we sinned

Cyril went on: And more clearly the divine Isaiah sets it down, saying, as from the person of the sons of Israel, or of those who have slipped into sins: 'Behold, you were angry, and we sinned.'

Palladius said: Tell me, then: when we grow slack about what is fitting and are caught by sins, shall we throw the cause upon God, and accuse him of the anger, as if we had sinned because of this?

Cyril: We will not bring a charge — for that is madness — but when we say, 'You were angry, and we sinned,' we mean something like this: that if we do not have your goodwill, Master, there is nothing to keep us from being tyrannized by sin, because of the weakness of our nature, and from being liable thereafter to every evil.

Palladius: I understand what you say.

Cyril: So then, stripped of the care from above and of the sparing, and paying the penalties of extreme fading and of the unchecked turnings-aside toward what is cheap, we are shown weak and easy to catch, and sick with everything of that kind. And you may look at these things brightly, if you meet Jeremiah's words. For the wild crowd of the Jews, though they were reveling very richly and going wide in the honors from God, and had already mastered all their enemies, and had driven on perhaps to the very highest of glory among men, practiced a hard and unbroken unbelief. And having all but said farewell to the commandments through Moses, and counting what was decreed worth little account at all, they were carried by unhindered impulses into ruin and destruction. For under an oak, and a white poplar, and a shading tree, according to the prophet's voice, they built altars, and in the groves densest with trees, having fixed precincts for the demons, they thought it right to honor them with sacrifices of cattle and frankincense and all the rest, not blushing to call the things crafted by their own hands gods and saviors and everything of that kind. And they came at times to this folly, as thereafter to make unholy child-slaughters a matter of boasts, and to think they were kindling in this way a very rich sacrifice for them. And the things of impiety were not practiced by those from Israel only up to this. Always bringing as it were an addition to the daring deeds, the unbridled departure toward anything out of place, they provoked him not moderately to angers against themselves, though the lawgiver is kind. And when they shook off the slavery to him in a youthful way, he thereafter let them also be defrauded even by enemies, and be carried already toward a necessary bondage, I mean the one under Chaldeans and Babylonians. For these came, leaving their own homes, enslaved them, and burned the holy and famous city, and it seemed the people being warred on barely asked the prophet Jeremiah where the evil would end for them.