You did not come down from the cross when they shouted to you, mocking and reviling you: “Come down from the cross and we will believe that it is you.”25 You did not come down because, again, you did not want to enslave man by a miracle and thirsted for faith that is free, not miraculous. You thirsted for love that is free, and not for the servile raptures of a slave before a power that has left him permanently terrified. But here, too, you overestimated mankind, for, of course, they are slaves, though they were created rebels.
