For if these things are in you and abound, they make you neither inactive nor unfruitful in gaining the full knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.

and in covetousness will they with feigned words make merchandise of you; for whom the judgment long ago ordained lingereth not, and their destruction slumbereth not.

but chiefly those who walk after the flesh in the lust of uncleanness, and despise dominion. Presumptuous, selfwilled, they are not afraid to rail at dignities;

but these, as brute beasts, by nature born to be taken and destroyed, railing at things which they understand not, shall even perish in their own corruption,

receiving the wages of unrighteousness. Counting it pleasure to riot in the daytime, spots and blemishes, reveling in their deceits while they feast with you,

they have forsaken the right way, and have gone astray, following the way of Balaam the son of Bosor, who loved the wages of unrighteousness,

For speaking great swelling words of vanity, they allure in the lusts of the flesh, by dissolute ways, such as were in some measure escaping from those who live in error;

promising them liberty, while they themselves are slaves of corruption; for by what a man is overcome, by the same is he also brought into bondage.

For if after they have escaped the pollutions of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, they are again entangled therein and overcome, the last state is worse with them than the first.

and saying, Where is his promised coming? for, from the time when the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as then, and as they have continued from the beginning of the creation.

For of this they are willingly ignorant, that of old by the word of God there were heavens, and an earth formed out of the water and by the water,

as also in all his letters, speaking in them of these things; in which things are some that are hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as also the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.