על השכר והעונש כ״טOn Rewards and Punishments 29
א׳
1[165] When they have gained this unexpected liberty, those who but now were scattered in Greece and the outside world over islands and continents will arise and post from every side with one impulse to the one appointed place, guided in their pilgrimage by a vision divine and superhuman unseen by others but manifest to them as they pass from exile to their home.
ב׳
2[166] Three intercessors they have to plead for their reconciliation with the Father. One is the clemency and kindness of Him to whom they appeal, who ever prefers forgiveness to punishment. The second is the holiness of the founders of the race because with souls released from their bodies they show forth in that naked simplicity their devotion to their Ruler and cease not to make supplications for their sons and daughters, supplications not made in vain, because the Father grants to them the privilege that their prayers should be heard.
ג׳
3[167] The third is one which more than anything else moves the loving kindness of the other two to come forward so readily, and that is the reformation working in those who are being brought to make a covenant of peace, those who after much toil have been able to pass from the pathless wild to the road which has no other goal but to find favour with God, as sons may with their father.
ד׳
4[168] When they have arrived, the cities which but now lay in ruins will be cities once more; the desolate land will be inhabited; the barren will change into fruitfulness; all the prosperity of their fathers and ancestors will seem a tiny fragment, so lavish will be the abundant riches in their possession, which flowing from the gracious bounties of God as from a perennial fountain will bring to each individually and to all in common a deep stream of wealth leaving no room for envy.
ה׳
5[169] Everything will suddenly be reversed, God will turn the curses against the enemies of these penitents, the enemies who rejoiced in the misfortunes of the nation and mocked and railed at them, thinking that they themselves would have a heritage which nothing could destroy and which they hoped to leave to their children and descendants in due succession; thinking too that they would always see their opponents in a firmly established and unchanging adversity which would be reserved for the generations that followed them.
ו׳
6[170] In their infatuation they did not understand that the short-lived brilliance which they had enjoyed had been given them not for their own sakes but as a lesson to others, who had subverted the institutions of their fathers, and therefore grief—the very painful feeling aroused by the sight of their enemy’s good fortune—was devised as a medicine to save them from perdition.
ז׳
7So then those of them who have not come to utter destruction, in tears and groans lamenting their own lapse, will make their way back with course reversed to the prosperity of the ancestral past.
ח׳
8[171] But these enemies who have mocked at their lamentations, proclaimed public holidays on the days of their misfortunes, feasted on their mourning, in general made the unhappiness of others their own happiness, will, when they begin to reap the rewards of their cruelty, find that their misconduct was directed not against the obscure and unmeritable but against men of high lineage retaining sparks of their noble birth, which have to be but fanned into a flame, and from them shines out the glory which for a little while was quenched.
ט׳
9[172] For just as when the stalks of plants are cut away, if the roots are left undestroyed, new growths shoot up which supersede the old, so too if in the soul a tiny seed be left of the qualities which promote virtue, though other things have been stripped away, still from that little seed spring forth the fairest and most precious things in human life, by which states are constituted manned with good citizens, and nations grow into a great population.
