1. But you, our God, are good and true,slow to anger, and governing all with mercy.
2. For even if we sin, we are yours, and know your might;but we will not sin, knowing that we belong to you.
3. For to know you well is complete righteousness,and to know your might is the root of immortality.
4. For the evil creation of human fancy did not deceive us,nor the fruitless labor of painters,A form smeared with varied colors,
5. the sight of which arouses yearning in a fool,till he longs for the inanimate form of a dead image.
6. Lovers of evil things, and worthy of such hopesare they who make them and long for them and worship them.
7. For the potter, laboriously working the soft earth,molds for our service each single article:He fashions out of the same clayboth the vessels that serve for clean purposesand their opposites, all alike;As to what shall be the use of each vessel of either classthe worker in clay is the judge.
8. With misspent toil he molds a meaningless god from the selfsame clay,though he himself shortly before was made from the earth,And is soon to go whence he was taken,when the life that was lent him is demanded back.
9. But his concern is not that he is to dienor that his span of life is brief;Rather, he vies with goldsmiths and silversmithsand emulates molders of bronze,and takes pride in fashioning counterfeits.
10. Ashes his heart is! more worthless than earth is his hope,more ignoble than clay his life;
11. Because he knew not the one who fashioned him,and breathed into him a quickening soul,and infused a vital spirit.