Death for apostasy; love God above kin; broken cisterns

and he votes the equal penalty also upon the easily-carried and light mind of those subjected to such things. For when it was possible easily to flee, he says, waking up toward the true, for what did he make the voluntary running-off unto what wrongs? ‘And if there should be found among you in one of your cities which the Lord your God gives you, a man or woman who will do the evil opposite the Lord your God, to pass by his covenant, and going away they should serve other gods, and worship them—the sun or the moon, or any of those from the cosmos of the heaven, which he did not command you—and it was not announced to you, and you will seek very much, and behold the word has become true, this abomination has come to be in Israel; and you will lead out that human, or that woman, who did this evil deed, and you will stone them with stones, and they will die; upon two witnesses or upon three witnesses the one dying will die; he will not die upon one witness; and the hand of the witnesses will be upon him first to put him to death, and the hand of all the people at the last; and you will lift out the evil from yourselves;’ For when God has been wronged concerning his own worship, to pity is not secure. And altogether harmful is not to be soft at the right time toward unmanly mutual-affections; and this, I think, is what the Lord said: ‘The one loving father or mother above me is not worthy of me.’ For let even then a law of affection go away, and let a power of natural love depart, and every thing whatever of the things coming unto love-of-humanity, and that we may speak thus, let God be served through a pious hardness. Or do you not say it is holy that those having unexcused the apostasy must be punished without pity, as grieving the glory beyond all, and not declining to insult without guard him whom it was somehow better to gladden with eagernesses unto steadfastness?

Palladius: Holy—for how not?

Cyril: And I will remember him saying through to those more ancient: ‘What wrong did your fathers find in me, that they stood away from me far, and went behind the vain things, and were made vain?’ And as it were astonished at the undiluted unlearnings of those from Israel, he says somehow thus: ‘Heaven was astonished upon this, and the earth shuddered still more very much, says the Lord; because my people did two evil things. Me they left—a spring of living water—and they dug for themselves crushed cisterns, which will not be able to hold water.’ For I would think, and very reasonably, that those standing off from the worship unto God, serving the creation beside the Creator and Maker, or still leaping down toward a more shameful wandering, worshiping the works of their own hands, miss every good-counsel; although it was easy, if indeed they should choose to think rightly, to look down upon the beauty of the nature above all and unspeakable from the creation of a world, and from the good-order of the things come to be to understand the orderer and leader and craftsman of this all. Yet having spat upon the so reverend and admirable judgment, some of the