1   But thou, our God, art kind and true and patient, a merciful ruler of all that is. 2   For even if we sin, we are thine; we acknowledge thy power. But we will not sin, because we know that we are accounted thine. 3   To know thee is the whole of righteousness, and to acknowledge thy power is the root of immortality. 4   We have not been led astray by the perverted inventions of human skill or the barren

The evils of idolatry labour of painters, 5   by some gaudy painted shape, the sight of which arouses in fools a passionate desire for a mere image without life or breath. 6   They are in love with evil and deserve to trust in nothing better, those who do these evil things or hanker after them or worship them.

7   For a potter kneading his clay laboriously moulds every vessel for our use, but out of the self-same clay he fashions without distinction the pots that are to serve for honourable uses and the opposite; and what the purpose of each one is to be, the moulder of the clay decides. 8   And then with ill-directed toil he makes a false god out of the same clay, this man who not long before was himself fashioned out of earth and soon returns to the place whence he was taken, when the living soul that was lent to him must be repaid. 9   His concern is not that he must one day fall sick or that his span of life is short; but he must vie with goldsmiths and silversmiths and copy the bronze-workers, and he thinks it does him credit to make counterfeits. 10   His heart is ashes, his hope worth less than common earth, and his life cheaper than his own clay, 11   because he did not recognize by whom he himself was moulded, or who it was that inspired him with an active soul and breathed into him the breath of life. 12   No, he reckons our life a game, and our existence a market where money can be made; ‘one must get a living’, he says, ‘by fair means or foul’. 13   But this man knows better than anyone that he is doing wrong, this maker of fragile pots and idols from the same earthy stuff.

14   The greatest fools of all, and worse than infantile, were the enemies and oppressors of thy people, 15   for they supposed all their heathen idols to be gods, although they have eyes that cannot see, nostrils that cannot draw breath, ears that cannot hear, fingers that cannot feel, and feet that are useless for walking. 16   It was a man who made them; one who draws borrowed breath gave them their shape. But no human being has the power to shape a god like himself: 17   he is only mortal, but what he makes with his impious hands is dead; and so he is better than the objects of his worship, for he is at least alive—they never can be.

18   Moreover, these men worship animals, the most revolting animals. Compared with the rest of the brute creation, their divinities are the least intelligent. 19   Even as animals they have no beauty to make them desirable; when God approved and blessed his work, they were left out.

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