Every sedition and every schism was abominable to you. Ye mourned over the transgressions of your neighbors: ye judged their shortcomings to be your own. (1 Clement 2:6)
This is profound by itself. They had such love for one another that they counted each other's failings as their own. This is a difficult thing. It is uncomfortable. It may hurt someone's feelings.
The Romans would do no less. The letter continues:
All glory and enlargement was given unto you, and that was fulfilled which is written My beloved ate and drank and was enlarged and waxed fat and kicked. Hence come jealousy and envy, strife and sedition, persecution and tumult, war and captivity. So men were stirred up, the mean against the honorable, the ill reputed against the highly reputed, the foolish against the wise, the young against the elder.For this cause righteousness and peace stand aloof, while each man hath forsaken the fear of the Lord and become purblind in the faith of Him, neither walketh in the ordinances of His commandments nor liveth according to that which becometh Christ, but each goeth after the lusts of his evil heart, seeing that they have conceived an unrighteous and ungodly jealousy, through which also death entered into the world.
They call to repentance those that are falling away. They take seriously the warning passages in Hebrews. How shall we escape if we neglect such a great salvation?
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