Clement of Alexandria · a new plain-English translation from the original language
This one, then, he exhorts the man who is to live the true life to come to know first — him "whom none know but the Son, and any to whom the Son chooses to unveil him." Then, after him, to learn the greatness of the Savior and the newness of his grace, since indeed, according to the apostle, "the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ"; and the things given through a faithful servant are not equal to those bestowed by the true son. If, then, the law of Moses were sufficient to furnish eternal life, it would be in vain that the Savior himself came and suffered for our sake, running the course of humanity from birth to the sign of the cross, and it would be in vain that a man who had done all the commandments of the law "from his youth" should fall on his knees and beg immortality from another. For he had not merely fulfilled the law, but had begun to do so from his very first years; since indeed what is great or exceedingly splendid about an old age barren of the wrongs that youthful desires beget, or boiling anger, or the love of money? But if someone, amid the leaping of youth and the heat of that age, has shown forth a mind ripened and older than his years, this man is a wondrous contestant, distinguished, and gray-haired in judgment. Yet even such a man as this is exactly persuaded that, while he lacks nothing for righteousness, he is wholly in need of life; and so he asks for it from the one alone able to give it, and toward the law he shows confidence, but the Son of God he supplicates. He is transferred "from faith to faith"; as one who, tossing precariously in the law and riding at anchor dangerously, shifts his moorings to the Savior.
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