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CHAPTER XL, 12-XLI, 5.
owing thereto, and what does the sin owing thereto, as regards those of the same foreign religion, amount to? 2. Or order some one then to tell us clearly concerning it, how it is, and how is the disobedience due to this sin.
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3. The reply is this, that an adult is worthy of death' on account of the good religion they would abandon, on account also of the adopted law of the foreign faith he is worthy of death, in whose reliance upon the improper law is also the sin which they3 maintain and practise by law, and through being in the same law he is equally sinful with them. 4. And also when any one is on that course, and his wish is for the same protection, of which a similitude is in the enduring words of that good law they would forsake, and he adopts that which is vile, even through that impropriety he is equally sinful.
5. When he dies, without renunciation of that sin and impenitently, in that improperly-constituted law, the position of his soul is then in the worst
'That is, he commits a mortal sin, for which he could have formerly been condemned to death by the high-priest (see Sls. VIII, 2, 5-7, 21).
The teachers of infidelity.
$ The foreigners.
The probable meaning is that if he conforms to the foreign faith merely from politic motives, while retaining a belief in his own religion, he is still equally sinful.
5 This renunciation is effected by the recitation of a particular formula called the Patit, in which every imaginable sin is mentioned with a declaration of repentance of any such sins as the reciter may have committed. But this formal renunciation must be accompanied by atonement and true repentance; and in order to ascertain the proper atonement all serious sins must be confessed to the high-priest (see Sls. IV, 14, VIII, 1, 2, 8-10).
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