ℹ️ This corpus has no verse-level morphological tagging. Lemmas come mainly from word-level tagging of other books in the same language (not from this verse), falling back to dictionary form-matching for the rest. Rare homographs can still be misread; verify against the original and a specialist lexicon where precision matters.
ℹ️ The Chinese and English alongside are this site's own translation, made directly from the original text on this page (not the CUV or the WEB, which follow the Masoretic Text and a different textual tradition).
But lest someone should say what is said by those reputed to be philosophers—that the things said by us, that the unjust are punished in eternal fire, are bombast and bugbears, and that we want men to live virtuously through fear and not because it is good and pleasing—I will answer this briefly: that, if this is not so, either there is no God, or, if there is, he does not care about men, and there is no such thing as virtue or vice, and, as we said before, the lawgivers unjustly punish those who transgress the good things ordained. But since those lawgivers and their Father are not unjust—teaching, as he does, the same conduct through the Word—those who agree with these are not unjust. And if anyone should bring forward the differing laws of men, saying that among some men these things are deemed good and those shameful, while among others the things deemed shameful by the former are deemed good, and the good shameful, let him also hear what is said in answer to this. We know that the wicked angels ordained laws resembling their own wickedness, in which men who have become like them delight; and right reason, when it comes upon them, does not approve all opinions nor all doctrines as good, but some as base and some as good. So that to such men also the same and similar things will be said by me, and will be expounded at greater length, if there be need. But for now I return to the subject before me.