Now that you may not have any excuse for saying that it was necessary for Christ to be crucified, or, again, that it was necessary for the transgressors to belong to your race, and that it could not have been otherwise, I have already forestalled. For I said briefly, that although God desired angels and men to follow His will, He desired to make them persons possessed of Freewill to practise righteousness, and possessed of the sense of Reason, that they might know by Whom they have come into being, and because of Whom they exist, though once they were not, and of a Law, that they should be judged by Him, if they act contrary to sound reason. And so we, whether men or angels, shall be convicted because of what we are, if we have done evil, unless we have repented first.
But if the word of God foretells that assuredly such persons, both angels and men, are to be punished, He said this beforehand because He already knew that they would become unchangeably evil; not however because God made them so. So that, if they repent, all who wish can obtain the mercy that comes from God, and the word says beforehand that they are blessed, saying: Blessed, is he to whom the Lord imputeth not sin.Psalms 32:2 That is to say, that when one repents for his sins he receives remission of his sins from God. Yet not, as you and others like you in this respect deceive yourselves, who say that even though they be sinners and yet know God, the Lord will not impute to them sin.
Now as witnesses of this we have the first transgression of David that took place because of his boasting, which was forgiven when he wept and wailed in the way that is written.2 Samuel 12:13 But if to such a man forgiveness was not given before he repented, but only when this great King, and Anointed one, and Prophet, thus wept and acted, how can the unclean and utterly abandoned, except they wail and lament and repent, have any hope that the Lord will not impute to them sin?
Now this first act of transgression by David with the wife of Uriah shows, Gentlemen, I said, it was not as committing fornication that the patriarchs had many wives, but that a certain Dispensation and mysteries of all kinds were being performed by them. Since if it had been permitted to take wives, whom each man would, and as each would, and as many as he would, as the men of your race do in every land wherever they sojourn or are sent, taking women under the name of marriage, much more would David have been permitted to do this.
When I had said this, my dear friend, Marcus Pompeius, I ceased speaking.