Miscellanies 7.14.85

It is good, then, that they too should gain a right mind through the repentance that leads to faith. For even if the truth seems to have enemies in those who are jealous of it, it is not itself hostile to anyone. For “God makes his sun shine on the just and the unjust,” and he sent the Lord himself to the just and the unjust. And the one who strives to be made like God, through his great freedom from grudges “forgiving seventy times seven” (meaning, as it were, through the whole of life and the whole cycle of the world, which is signified by the numbering in sevens), is kind to everyone, even if someone wrongs the one who knows for the whole time he lives in the flesh. For he thinks it right for the good man not only to leave to others the judgment of those who have wronged him; he wants the righteous man even to ask those judges for the forgiveness of sins for those who have offended against him. And reasonably so, since those who try to do him wrong gain an advantage only over what is external and bodily, even if it goes as far as death, and none of this belongs to the one who knows. How could anyone judge the apostate angels, if he himself has become an apostate from the freedom from grudges that the gospel teaches? “Why do you not rather suffer wrong?” he says; “why do you not rather let yourselves be defrauded? But you do wrong,” clearly by praying against those who offend through ignorance, “and you defraud” those against whom you pray, as far as it depends on you, of God's love for humanity and his goodness. “And that brothers,” meaning not only those in the faith but also proselytes. For whether the one who is now hostile will later believe,