, he enabled my mind to overcome
the law of sin, and opened mine eyes to discern good from evil.
Thereupon I perceived and looked, and behold! all things present are
vanity and vexation of spirit, as somewhere in his writings saith
Solomon the wise. Then was the veil of sin lifted from mine heart, and
the dullness, proceeding from the grossness of my body, which pressed
upon my soul, was scattered, and I perceived the end for which I was
created, and how that it behoved me to move upward to my Creator by the
keeping of his Commandments. Wherefore I left all and followed him,
and I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord that he delivered me out
of the mire, and from the making of bricks, and from the harsh and
deadly ruler of the darkness of this world, and that he showed me the
short and easy road whereby I shall be able, in this earthen body,
eagerly to embrace the Angelic life. Seeking to attain to it the
sooner, I chose to walk the strait and narrow way, renouncing the
vanity of things present and the unstable changes and chances thereof,
and refusing to call anything good except the true good, from which
thou, O king, art miserably sundered and alienated. Wherefore also we
ourselves were alienated and separated from thee, because thou wert
falling into plain and manifest destruction, and wouldst constrain us
also to descend into like peril. But as long as we were tried in the
warfare of this world, we failed in no point of duty. Thou thyself
will bear me witness that we were never charged with sloth or
heedlessness.

"But when thou hast endeavoured to rob us of the chiefest of all
blessings, our religion, and to deprive us of God, the worst of
deprivations, and, in this intent, dost remind us of past honours and
preferments, how should I not rightly tax thee with ignorance of good,
seeing that thou dost at all compare these two things, righteousness
toward God, and human friendship, and glory, that runneth away like
water? And how, in such ease, may we have fellowship with thee, and
not the rather deny ourselves friendship and honours and love of
children, and if there be any other tie greater than these? When we
see thee, O king, the rather forgetting thy reverence toward that God,
who giveth thee the power to live and breathe, Christ Jesus, the Lord
of all; who, being alike without beginning, and coeternal with the
Father, and having created the heavens and the earth by his word, made
man with his own han