Preces Quotidianae
No One Can Stand Before You
The soul acknowledges its inability to stand before God because of sin.
A Confession Beyond Number
The soul confesses sins as countless as the sand, pleads for forgiveness, and trusts in God's mercy to the repentant.
I have sinned more than the sand of the sea; my iniquities have multiplied, and I am not worthy to look up and gaze on the height of heaven because of the multitude of my iniquities, and there is no relief for me, because I have stirred up your anger and done evil before you—not doing your will, not keeping your commandments. And now I bend the knee of my heart, begging for your goodness.3 I have sinned, Lord, I have sinned, and I acknowledge my iniquities. Therefore I plead: Forgive me, Lord, forgive me.4 |//id.]5 And do not destroy me together with my iniquities, nor in anger store up evils against me forever, nor condemn me to the lowest places of the earth.6 For you are God, the God of those who repent, and in me you will show all your goodness, because you will save me, though unworthy, according to your great mercy, and I will praise you always.
Read the original Latin
Nec star potest coram te
super hoc.
Peccavi super numerum aren:z maris, multiplieatze sunt iniquitates mese, et non sum dignus intueri, et aspicere altitudinem coeli, pra multitudine iniquitatum mearum, et non est respiratio mihi, quia excitavi iracundiam tuam, et malum coram te feci, non facta voluntate tua, mandatis tuis non custoditis, Et nunc flecto genu cordis mei, precans a te bonitatem. Peccavi, Domine, peccavi, Et iniquitates meas agnosco, Quare peto rogans, Remitte mihi, Domine, remitte mihi. |//id.] Et ne simul perdas me cum iniquitatibus meis, neque in zeternum iratus reserves mala mihi, neque damnes me in infima terre loca. Quia tu es Deus, Deus poenitentium, et in me ostendes omnem bonitatem tuam, quia indignum salvabis me secundum magnam misericordiam tuam, et laudabo te semper.
Scripture echoes
- ↩Ps.130.3;Ps.76.7 — If you kept watch over iniquities, O LORD, who could stand? Ps.76.7 — At your rebuke, O God of Jacob, both chariot and horse are cast into a deep sleep.
Notes
- 1 ↩Latin surface star is not a viable form here; read as stare (to stand), yielding Nec stare potest coram te.
- 2 ↩Fragment only: Latin is the phrase 'super hoc.' Neighboring previous line ends mid-clause ('Nec star potest coram te'), so the section is almost certainly a clause-final continuation rather than a free-standing sentence. Rendered as the causal/ground sense of super + hoc common in prayer Latin ('on account of this' / 'because of this').
- 3 ↩Normalized OCR corruptions to the standard Prayer of Manasseh reading: aren:z→arenæ; multiplieatze→multiplicatae; mese→meae; pra→prae.
- 4 ↩Quare rendered as 'Therefore' (reason-from-foregoing), not interrogative 'Why?', matching the petitionary force of the Manasseh confession.
- 5 ↩Source string '|//id.]' is non-Latin print/OCR debris, not a translatable sentence; left empty rather than invented.
- 6 ↩Normalized zeternum→aeternum and terre→terrae.
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