For if these be in you and abound, they will not suffer you to be idle, nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.

for prophecy was not delivered of old at the will of man, but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the holy Spirit.

and by artful speeches they will make sale of you for gain. Whose judgement is long since hastening, and their destruction doth not slumber.

But these men, like brute beasts naturally produced to be taken and destroyed, speaking evil of things which they do not understand, shall perish by their own corruption; receiving the reward of their unrighteousness:

who account it a pleasure to riot even in the day; spots and disgraces; revelling in their frauds, while they partake of your feasts:

For when they speak swelling words of vanity, they ensnare in the lusts of the flesh, through their lasciviousness, those who had indeed withdrawn from such as deal in error;

promising them liberty, while they themselves are the slaves of corruption: for by whom any one is vanquished, by him he is also enslaved.

For if, after they had escaped the pollutions of the world, through the knowledge of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, they are again entangled and vanquished by them, their last state is worse than the first;

for it had been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than when they knew it, to turn from the holy commandment delivered to them.

walking after their own lusts, and saying, Where is the declaration of his coming? for except that the fathers are fallen asleep, all things remain as they were from the beginning of the creation.

For they are willingly ignorant of this, that by the Word of God the heavens were made of old, and the earth too from the water, and subsisting on the water.

as also in all his epistles, speaking in them of these things: in which are some things hard to be understood, which the illiterate and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, to their own destruction.