To Florus 3.13

‘You shall not distort justice for the foreigner, orphan, or widow. You shall not take a widow’s garment as security, because you were a servant in the land of Egypt and the Lord your God freed you from there. That is why I command you to do this’ (Deuteronomy 24:17–18).

When God established the pattern for judging, he immediately took care to decree that neither parents should be struck down for their children’s crimes nor children for their parents’. He showed, then, that the first principle and starting point of the justice he commanded judges to maintain was this: family ties must not burden the innocent, and the hatred an individual had deserved must not spread to the family itself. In matters of conduct, justice therefore distinguishes those whom kinship joins. It certainly would not do so if will and reproductive seed operated on the same principle, or if an act of choice passed to descendants through reproduction. With this single testimony we have shown, more than sufficiently, that the ancient authority of the enacted law crushes the utterly repulsive corruption of judgment embraced by this new error. This pronouncement bears on the case in a way that leaves no room for doubt.