[So because of their breaking their covenant, We cursed them and made their hearts] hard: these [hearts] hardened as a result of the soul's attributes holding sway over them and because of their inclination towards solid and hardened earthly affairs, and so they have become veiled from the lights of the angelic realm and the realm of the divine attributes, which constitute the words of God; they exchanged the faculties of their souls for these [affairs] and implemented their illusions and imaginations instead of their gnoses and realities in the way of intelligible concepts, or they mixed them together, which is [what is meant by] the distortion of words from their contexts; and they have forgotten a share, that is, a substantial portion of what they were given in a former covenant in terms of the latent perfections within their preparedness [that reside therein] in potentiality and they were therefore reminded of this [share] in the subsequent covenant; and you will never cease to discover some treachery on their part, that is, some infraction of the covenant or the withholding of some trust because of the sway acquired over them by the attributes of the soul and by Satan and because of the hardness of their hearts [except for a few of them. Yet pardon them, and forgive; surely God loves] the virtuous, who witness such folk as they endure God's trial but do not counter them with requital; rather they treat them with forgiveness and pardon.
