Cloud shelter; fire for apostasy; manna scorned; snakes; slackness

ble: ‘We bore the burden of the day, and the heat,’ naming, I think somewhere, the fierce and at-its-peak unto burning—of the pleasures from untamed things, or perhaps even of temptations—both heat and the day’s burden; helper therefore and shelterer unto salvation Christ has come to be for us. Whenever therefore some of those counted worthy of God-vision, and whoever would become hearers of the divine proclamations, and through the confession upon believing having somehow already promised the well-hearing, set aside by changes unto the worse the one going forward and leading—I mean Christ—who reconnoiters the rest for them, who mediates as in a mediator’s rank, who is understood as shelterer as in a cloud’s type, then indeed then very fittingly being exacted accounts of their own simplicity, they undergo the wild justice through fire; and this, I think, is what wise Paul himself also said: ‘For of us sinning willingly after receiving the recognition of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice concerning sins, but a certain fearful expectation of judgment, and zeal of fire about to eat the opposing ones.’

Palladius: Those therefore who from sin have set aside the whole economy understood in Christ will be fire’s food. And the murmuring makes clear, as it seems, the apostasy and the not wishing to make acceptable the salvation from beside him, although having tasted the grace, and having as secure pledge of the things about to be the experience upon the things already passed.

Cyril: So I say; yet others also having grown small-souled were making the same cry-down, and were whispering weakly against God and Moses, naming the manna from heaven empty bread. Yet they were being destroyed by the snakes. For those who by ungratefulnesses dishonor the Savior and Redeemer of all, and set in no word the grace of the freedom, and besides these still tear down as useless his life-giving Word, and the gift through the Spirit, will fall around the bites of the murderous dragon. Yet those at least who have not fallen into so out-of-place stumblings will escape together with the baseness also the punishment and justice hung over it, and will be better than the enemies: ‘For upon asp and basilisk they will tread, and they will trample lion and dragon.’ It has been fixed therefore already, and has been witnessed to us from the deeds themselves, that it is precarious for those already trained, and not having unpracticed the being well-approved through toils, and somehow already practiced and well-worn the sweating for virtue, to be slack, and to fall back into unmanlinesses.

Palladius: It has been fixed indeed and is true.

Cyril: And the word was confirming to us that not only is murmuring against God God-hated and under justice, and making the faint-soulness as it were some abuse or cry-down of the Savior’s gentleness, even if short toils should appear through the middle, yet no less accursed is loving to be let loose, and when it is possible for them to revel blamelessly in the divine gifts themselves, and to be turned by the words from above and through the Spirit