New virtue not yet battle-ready; apostles spare new gentile believers

equity in these—is it sufficient unto being tested and tried? and having met those who twist the right things, will the one who has newly cohabited with wisdom not rather be twisted, or rather prevail and beat off those ones’ harms, not yet stepped and fixed sufficiently toward understanding?

Palladius: It seems so.

Cyril: And when someone is spurring, will the one practicing gentleness, if he is not yet somehow trained toward this, not easily go off toward anger?

Palladius: I think so.

Cyril: And an practiced wise man will fight through against wise men, and will lead out young-heartedly against those ones’ knaveries the things from rightness of reasonings?

Palladius: Truly.

Cyril: And what—will the one who has succeeded at gentleness not be hard toward angers, even if some should sometimes sharpen him toward this?

Palladius: I say so.

Cyril: Rightly therefore the law, having shaped elegantly as in a form of a woman the virtue cohabiting with the saints, ‘If someone takes a woman freshly,’ it says, ‘he will not go out unto war, and no deed will be cast upon him; he will be guiltless in his house. One year he will gladden the woman whom he took.’ For it does not allow the as-it-were newly fixed, and having a fresher eagerness unto the good, to be loaded with toils and persecutions, but as it were leisurely and remaining upon himself, and being warmed to be bound with the affections unto virtue. Some such thing we will find the holy apostles to have done, who to those turning from the nations, and newly called unto knowledge of God, clearly write: ‘For it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to cast upon you no further burden, except that you abstain from fornication and strangled, and blood.’ For having economically let go the more burdensome of the commandments, they were ordering to keep few and necessary things, not having been ignorant of the unenduring of hardship of those newly brought in unto the need to be pious. And indeed the God of the wholes remits such ones both anger and charges, even if they should fall into small-soulednesses, stepping through the unaccustomed road of the toils. And after this he exacts justices, and thereafter brings under the motions from anger, those no longer weak through the unaccustomed in the toils, but rather falling back unto the sweet and unsmooth, and most readily dissolving unto what is dissonant with them. Or is virtue not uphill, and the going unto it rough, and must the one who has chosen to succeed sweat?

Palladius: I say so.

Cyril: But it was somewhere not unlikely, or rather, not holy and fitting, that those just now led toward this be trained with pardons, not yet fixed with the very eagernesses, yet going as with soft