Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
What I mean, then, is this: that the repentance which, shown and enjoined on us through God's grace, calls us back into the Lord's favor, once known and undertaken, ought never afterward to be undone by a repetition of the offense. No plea of ignorance can now be your defense, seeing that, once the Lord is acknowledged and his precepts embraced — and repentance for your offenses already performed — you go back and reinstate yourself in offenses all over again. To exactly the degree you have separated yourself from ignorance, to that same degree you are glued fast to obstinacy; for if the reason you repented of offending in the first place was that dread of the Lord had taken hold of you, on what ground do you now unravel what that dread produced, unless the dread itself has faded? For nothing but obstinacy overturns fear. Now, if even those ignorant of the Lord find no exemption from punishment — since it is not permitted to be ignorant of a God set out in the open, comprehensible even from the very goods of heaven itself — how much more dangerous is it to despise him once known? And despise him he certainly does, the man who, having received from him the understanding of good and evil, takes up again what he understands must be fled and has already fled, and so commits an outrage against his own discernment — against, that is, the gift God gave him: he spits back at the giver when he abandons the gift; he denies the benefit when he fails to honor the benefactor! How can he possibly be pleasing to the one whose very gift displeases him? So he shows himself toward the Lord not merely obstinate but actually ungrateful. Moreover, it is no light sin against the Lord for a man who, by his own repentance, had renounced the Lord's rival the devil, and on that ground had subjected him to the Lord, then by his own relapse to raise that same devil up again and make himself the man's occasion for rejoicing, so that the evil one, having recovered his lost prize, may gloat once more against the Lord. Is this not — and it is dangerous even to say it, but it must be said for the sake of edification — is this not setting the devil above the Lord? For the man seems to have made a comparison, having come to know both, and to have pronounced judgment that the one he preferred to belong to again is the better of the two! So then, the man who had set out, through repentance for his offenses, to satisfy the Lord, will instead satisfy the devil through a further repentance of his repentance, and will be all the more hateful to God for being all the more welcome to God's rival. But some say it is enough for the Lord if he is received in heart and mind, even if less is done in act; and so, they say, they sin with their fear and their faith intact — that is, they violate a marriage with their chastity intact, they mix poison for a parent with their filial piety intact! So then they too, with their 'pardon' intact, will be thrust down into hell, all while sinning with their 'fear' intact. What a marvelous example of perversity: they offend because they fear — I suppose they would not offend if they did not fear! So then, a man who does not want to offend God need not revere him at all, if the fear of offending is itself his excuse for offending! But this kind of cleverness springs, as a rule, from a hypocrite's stock — a breed bound to the devil by an unbreakable bond, whose repentance is never genuine.