Near road is faith in Christ; Law is the long circuit

hope that is with God, faith that is in Christ, and the justification according to him, according at least to what has been said wisely by Paul: ‘Near you is the word, in your mouth and in your heart—that is, the word of faith which we proclaim, that if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved; for with the heart it is believed unto righteousness, and with the mouth it is confessed unto salvation.’ This road then, thus near and contracted, God was not letting those of old step through; but he was devising as it were some circuit not having the straight way—the law in turns of words and in enigmas, having a longer and not untroubled pedagogy—so that, having the things in shadows as a kind of practice of the more perfect, and being catechized beforehand into the mystery, they would not be simply terrified by whatever frights into flight and apostasy from Christ, but having been trained beforehand as it were and learning thoroughly what truly benefits, they would be readier toward desire and eagerness for the truth, and would have love toward God fixed and unshakeable. Through a long and as it were not straight road, then—the worship according to the letter—the law was pedagogue. But Christ is not so. For he showed us the straight and near one—that is, the one through faith—reforging into boldness, and into the need thereafter to play the man against those who stand opposed; and to love most of all to endure hardship for the good, and to set oneself nobly against the devil’s methods, saying perhaps that word in the prophet: ‘Behold the Lord helps me; who will mistreat me?’ And what produces in us such admirable boldness would surely be nothing other than the power from on high—that is, the sharing and communion of the Holy Spirit.

Palladius: I understand what you say, and I admire you for the keenness.

Cyril: And the time of the salvation through Christ the accompanying text would also mark at once. For ‘In the fifth generation,’ it says, ‘the sons of Israel went up from the land of Egypt.’ For we have been redeemed from slavery, and indeed also from toils in vain distractions, and from misery concerning earth and dust (and you understand what I say), according to the evangelical parable, as in a fifth generation, at the fifth time. For ‘The kingdom of the heavens is like a man, a householder, who went out together with early morning to hire workers into his vineyard.’ And this he also said he does around the sixth and the ninth: ‘And around the eleventh, he found others idle, and said to those: Why have you stood here idle the whole day? Go, you also work into my vineyard.’ Observe then how in a fifth generation the last ones are being sent into the vineyard, and in the times that are