fidelity, and natural affection; implacable, and unmerciful:

(I allude to civil affairs, because of your unacquaintedness with spiritual matters:) as then you made your natural faculties subservient to impurity, and all manner of vice; make them now subservient to virtue and holiness.

that is, the children by natural descent are not thereby the children of God: but the children of the promise are alone considered as his posterity.

lest God should not spare you, since he did not spare even the natural branches.

for if you were taken from the wild olive, which was natural to you, to be grafted into a good olive-stock of a different nature, with how much greater reason shall these who are the natural branches, be grafted into their own olive-tree?