Wisdom 14

¹ Or someone else, taking ship to cross the raging sea, invokes a log[*a] even frailer than the vessel that bears him.

² No doubt that ship is the product of a craving for gain, its building embodies the wisdom of the shipwright,

³ but your providence, Father, is what steers it, you having opened a pathway even through the sea, a safe way over the waves,

⁴ showing that you can save, whatever happens, so that even without skill a man may sail abroad.

⁵ It is not your will that the works of your Wisdom lie idle, and hence men entrust their lives to the smallest piece of wood, cross the high seas on a raft and come safe to port.

⁶ Why, in the beginning even, while the proud giants were perishing, the hope of the world took refuge on a raft[*b] and, steered by your hand, preserved the germ of a new generation for the ages to come

⁷ For blessed is the wood which serves the cause of virtue,

⁸ but accursed that hand-made thing and its maker, he for having made it, the perishable thing itself because it has been called god.

⁹ Yes, God holds the godless and his godlessness in equal hatred;

¹⁰ work and workman alike shall be punished.

¹¹ Hence judgement shall fall on the idols themselves of the heathen, since, although part of God’s creation, they have become an abomination, snares for the souls of men, a pitfall for the feet of the reckless.

¹² The invention of idols was the origin of fornication,[*c] their discovery the corrupting of life.

¹³ They did not exist at the beginning, they will not exist for ever;

¹⁴ through human vanity they came into the world and hence a sudden end has been designed for them.

¹⁵ A father afflicted by untimely mourning makes an image of his child so swiftly taken, and now he honours as a god what yesterday had only been a dead man, bequeathing mysteries and initiations to his dependents.

¹⁶ Then in the course of time the godless custom hardens, and is observed as law

¹⁷ and, by command of princes, the carved images receive worship. Of those who lived too far away to be honoured in person men would make a portrait from a distance and produce a visible image of the king they honoured, meaning, by such zeal, to flatter the absent as if he were with them.

¹⁸ Even people who did not know him were stimulated into spreading his cult by the idealism of the artist;

¹⁹ for the latter, doubtless wishing to please the ruler, exerted all his skill to make the likeness finer than reality

²⁰ and the crowd, carried away by the beauty of the work, accorded divine honours to him whom only recently they had honoured as a man.

²¹ And this became a pitfall for life, that men, whether slaves to misfortune or princely power, should have bestowed the incommunicable name on sticks and stones.

²² Soon it is not enough for them that their knowledge of God should be at fault; in the great struggle to which ignorance condemns their lives they next give such massive ills the name of peace.

²³ With their child-murdering initiations, their secret mysteries, their orgies with outlandish ceremonies,[*d]

²⁴ they no longer retain any purity in their lives or their marriages, one treacherously murdering the next or doing him injury by adultery.

²⁵ Everywhere a welter of blood and murder, theft and fraud, corruption, treachery, riots, perjury,

²⁶ disturbance of decent people, forgetfulness of favours, pollution of souls, sins against nature, disorder in marriage, adultery, debauchery.

²⁷ For the worship of unnamed[*e] idols is the beginning, cause, and end of every evil.

²⁸ Either that, or they rave in ecstasy, or utter false oracles, or lead lives of great wickedness, or perjure themselves without hesitation;

²⁹ for since they put their trust in lifeless idols they do not reckon their false oaths can harm them.

³⁰ But justice will overtake them on two counts: as idolaters, for degrading the concept of God, as frauds, for swearing in despite of truth, in defiance of all that is holy.

³¹ For it is not the power of the things by which men swear but the retribution due to sinners that always overtakes the offence of the guilty.