22. The punishment of those who die in error. — By that very people of heretics, being left behind, 「they are buried in destruction,」 because while they do not return to the light of truth, they are assuredly overwhelmed in eternal punishment, with an earthly understanding. And because sometimes, while the author of many that err is snatched away to punishment, the seduced peoples are reformed to the knowledge of truth — and then the subjects return to true knowledge, when those who had been evilly set over them come to eternal torments — it is fitly subjoined: 23. When the teachers of error are snatched to punishment, the deceived peoples often come to their senses. Whom do we take to be his widows, but the subject peoples happily bereft by his death?
Because often, as has been said, while the preacher of error is snatched to eternal torments, the peoples subject to him return to the grace of true knowledge. For to those peoples the perverse preacher presided as it were as a husband, because being evilly joined to them, he clung as a corrupter of the mind. By no means, therefore, do they weep as widows or as bereft, because by the death of the depraved teacher they find the way of truth, by whose destruction they seemed capable of being afflicted. Or else the widows certainly do not weep, who, remaining in their error, while they esteem their preacher to have been holy, console themselves with a false hope that they may not mourn. There follows: