To Florus 2.151

Writing to the Romans at the time when the Gentiles had begun to be brought in, and churches were therefore being filled with Jews and Gentiles alike, he calms the disturbances of both peoples. He insists that the Gentiles cannot wash away their impiety—their exchanging God’s glory for a likeness of the image of a human being, birds, four-footed animals, and reptiles (Romans 1:23)—by pleading ignorance of the law. Through their inborn power of reason they could know God from what he had made: God disclosed through his works, though hidden in the depth of his substance, even if they did not know the observance of Jewish ceremonies (Romans 1:20). Each person’s own feeling suggested the rule of the law insofar as it concerns upright living: namely, to inflict on a neighbor nothing of the kind he would be unwilling to suffer himself (compare Matthew 7:12; Luke 6:31; Tobit 4:15). He thus proves that the Gentiles’ impiety can quite rightly be condemned, even if not through the law, then through the justice that established the law. By its judgment, those who sinned without the law will also perish without the law (Romans 2:12). The Jews, however, had even more at stake. They were especially swollen with contempt for the Gentiles, claiming honor for themselves from the law’s purifications. They therefore supposed that Christ’s sin-forgiving grace had not benefited them as it benefited the Gentiles, since they had avoided those sins through the law’s instruction. He shatters this claim with powerful arguments, maintaining that they received all the more through forgiveness precisely because, after the law’s warning, they sinned without any ignorance. By this he proves that they were guilty and could have been severely condemned at justice’s examination, where those who sinned under the law will be judged through the law (Romans 2:12): ‘For it is not hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but doers of the law who will be justified’ (Romans 2:13). Arguing with this purpose throughout the book, he both restrains the Jews’ pride and removes the Gentiles’ excuse for their folly, to teach that Christ’s medicine benefited both peoples equally.