Wisdom 15:1–9

¹But you, our God, are gracious and true, patient, and in mercy ordering all things.↗

²For even if we sin, we are yours, knowing your dominion; but we will not sin, knowing that we have been accounted yours.↗

³For to be acquainted with you is perfect righteousness, and to know your dominion is the root of immortality.↗

⁴For we weren’t led astray by any evil plan of men’s, nor yet by painters’ fruitless labor, a form stained with varied colors,↗

⁵the sight of which leads fools into lust. Their desire is for the breathless form of a dead image.↗

⁶Lovers of evil things, and worthy of such hopes, are those who make, desire, and worship them.↗

⁷For a potter, kneading soft earth, laboriously molds each article for our service. He fashions out of the same clay both the vessels that minister to clean uses, and those of a contrary sort, all in like manner. What shall be the use of each article of either sort, the potter is the judge.↗

⁸Also, laboring to an evil end, he molds a vain god out of the same clay, he who, having but a little before been made of earth, after a short space goes his way to the earth out of which he was taken, when he is required to give back the soul which was lent him.↗

⁹However he has anxious care, not because his powers must fail, nor because his span of life is short; But he compares himself with goldsmiths and silversmiths, and he imitates molders in brass, and considers it great that he molds counterfeit gods.↗