On the Origins or the Antiquity of the Hebrew Language

These things also contribute to our argument. How could it have happened, if the histories of the Christians and Hebrews are histories simply and with rare truth, just like those of the Greeks and heathens, that so many thousands of men, both before and after Christ, should have wanted to testify to the matter itself written in the law of the Christians and Hebrews with their own blood and most cruel death, and have it held as ratified? Unless that good of virtue were such that it is better to die for it than to commit an act against it (which constancy is certainly implanted in the souls of mortal men elected for themselves not by nature or simple opinion, but by the First Cause and God, the author of nature itself). Nowhere have any Greeks or Latins of their own accord wanted to undergo even the slightest loss of fame for the most truthful opinion, laws, or history of their own people, whence it must be believed by reason, since all things are done for the sake of life and that is the only usufruct of nature, that that firm persuasion, which ought to be kept rather than life itself and the composite of nature, has been sent by God alone, the parent of nature, and shifting our spirit into a use more excellent than bodily life itself. For He wishes that most happy creature, for whose sake He seems to have created all things, to live so holily, and to represent His image by the very equity and innocence of life, that he would prefer, if the matter demanded, to destroy the organs of nature than to live beyond the rule of the just and the equitable. For although Plato and Aristotle differed to a great extent and with the greatest eloquence about virtue and the highest good original: "Summum Bonum", and promised with the most ample arguments eternal happiness and immortality to those endowed with virtue, yet no one anywhere received the slightest detriment for asserting even one word of Aristotle or Plato.