If Flight Is Wrong, Persecution Is Worse

But though they have done all this, they are not ashamed of the evils they have already plotted against me. Now they go on to accuse me because I have managed to escape their murderous hands. Indeed, they bitterly lament that they have not succeeded in putting me out of the way. So they pretend to reproach me with cowardice, not seeing that by grumbling against me in this way they turn the blame back on themselves. For if it is a bad thing to flee, it is much worse to persecute. The one hides himself to escape death; the other persecutes because he wants to kill. And it is written in the Scriptures that we ought to flee, but the one who seeks to destroy breaks the law, and is himself the cause of the other’s flight. If, then, they reproach me with my flight, let them be more ashamed of their own persecution. Let them stop conspiring, and those who flee will at once stop fleeing. [a]

But instead of giving up their wickedness, they are using every means to get me into their hands, not seeing that the flight of the persecuted is a strong argument against those who persecute. For no one flees from the gentle and the kind, but from the cruel and the evil-minded. “Everyone who was in distress, and everyone who was in debt,” fled from Saul and took refuge with David. This is why these men want to cut off those who are in hiding: so that no evidence of their wickedness may be left. But in this their minds seem blinded by their usual error. For the more the flight of their enemies becomes known, the more notorious will be the death or the banishment that their treachery has brought on them. So if they kill them outright, their death will be talked of all the more loudly against them; and if they drive them into banishment, they will only be sending out everywhere monuments of their own wickedness.