St.John's real mind. Gnostics made patchwork out of Scripture.31

8

§ 3.

μένως.

Learn therefore, O ye fools, that Jesus Who suffered for us, Who dwelt among us, This same is the Word of God. For had any other of the Eons become flesh for our proper salvation, it was natural for the Apostle to have spoken of another. But if the Word of the Father Who descended, is the same also Who ascended, the Only-Begotten Son of the Only God, by the Father's good pleasure incarnate in men's behalf; not of any other, nor of any company of Eight, did he introduce that discourse, but only of the Lord Jesus Christ. For in fact the Word, by their account, was not in any proper sense made Flesh; but the Saviours, they ponyou say, clothed Himself with an animal body, framed according to His dispensation with ineffable foresight, that He might become visible and palpable. But Flesh means the old formation, that which God made out of the dust of the earth, as we read concerning Adam; which flesh John hath told us that the Word of God truly became. So is there an end of their first and aboriginal Eight. For when we have shewn that one and the same Person is the Word, and the Only-Begotten, and Life, and Light, and the Saviour and Christ, and the Son of God, and He too incarnate for us, the framework of their Ogdoad is done away. And on its dissolution, their whole system falls to pieces; the system of their own invention, which they falsely dreaming of, inveigh against the Scriptures.

Then, collecting phrases and terms that lie here and there, § 4. they transfer them, as we said before, from the natural to the unnatural; doing much the same as those who at their own pleasure express any given meaning, and then endeavour to make it out from the poems of Homer: whereupon uereтậy the less informed sort imagine, that Homer made his verses on that subject, thus freshly wrought out; and many, by the connected run of the verses, are surprised into a thought, whether this as they find it be not indeed Homer's composition as he who in Homeric verses thus describes Hercules sent by Eurystheus for the dog in hell:-(for there is nothing to forbid our rehearsing these too, for example's sake, the endeavour being in both cases alike and the same.)

§ 5.

32

Homer sometimes used, as Gnostics use Scripture.

He spake; and forth with many a deep groan went
Bold Hercules, for mighty deeds renown'd,
By Perseus' offspring, proud Eurystheus, sent

To drag from Erebus stern Pluto's hound:
As mountain lion fearless, on he moved,-

Swift through the town; and with him troops of friends,
Nymphs, maidens, sires in many a peril proved,—

With plaintive wail, as who to death descends:
But Hermes, with Minerva, watch'd his way,

For in his heart he mourn'd his brother's evil day".—

Which of the simple ones would not be carried away by these verses, and imagine that Homer had so composed them on this very subject? whereas he who is versed in Homer's subject will recognize the verses, but the subject he will not recognize; aware that one portion of them is spoken of Ulysses, another of Hercules himself, another of Priam, another of Menelaus and Agamemnon. And by removing them and restoring each to its own place, he will quite make the subject disappear.

And so too, he that keeps unswerving in himself the rule of the Truth which he received by his Baptism, will recognize the names out of the Scriptures, and the sayings, and the parables, but this blasphemous argument he will not recognize. For though he acknowledge the gems, yet the Fox instead of the royal Image he will not receive. But, by assigning every statement to its proper place, and adapting it to the body of the truth, he will expose their fiction and exhibit its unreality.

Since however this stage-play wants the regular words of Dismissal, that having finished their plot, one may subjoin the

These Verses are in the original a cento from the following places in the Iliad and Odyssey. Od. 10. 76; 21. 26; Ib. 19. 123; 9. 368. Od. 6. 130; II. 24. 327; Od. 11. 38; Il. 24. 328; Od. 11. 625; 11. 2. 409.

ènιyvwσetaι, will know better, that is, more accurately. St. Luke i. 4, It is an Ecclesiastical word used of the fuller and instinctive knowledge of truth of the convert who has passed through the catechumen stage.

b There seems here to be an allusion to some proverb or anecdote, of which however the Translator has been unable to find any illustration. See c. viii. §. 1.

cowμarel, the diminutive which Irenæus uses, perhaps reverently to signify so much of the truth as is made known to us.

d "Vos valete et plaudite;" the regular form with which all Latin plays concluded.

Rule of Faith throughout the Catholic Church. 33

refutation; we have thought it well to point out first, wherein the parents themselves of this fable vary from each other, as being of various spirits of Error. For indeed one may hereby accurately discern, even before our proof, the certainty of the truth proclaimed by the Church, and their rapareperverted1 and false statement.

παραπε

ποιημέ

νην.

15.

X.

§ 1.

φαλαι

ώσασθαι

Eph.i.10.

For, as to the Church, dispersed as she is through the whole CHAP. world unto the ends of the earth, yet having received from the Apostles and their disciples the Faith in One God the Father Almighty, Who made the Heaven and the earth and Acts xiv. the seas and all that is therein; and in one Christ Jesus, the Son of God, Who was made flesh for our salvation; and in the Holy Ghost, Who by the Prophets declared the Economies, and the Advents, and the Birth of a Virgin, and the Passion, and the Rising from the dead, and the bodily Ascension into Heaven of the Beloved, CHRIST JESUS Our LORD, and His 2 ȧvakeComing from the Heavens in the glory of the Father, to sum up all things and to raise up all flesh of all human nature; that rà Távτα, to CHRIST JESUS, our LORD and GOD, and Saviour and King, according to the good pleasure of the Invisible Father, every 1011. knee may bow, of things in Heaven and in Earth and under the Earth, and that every tongue may confess to Him, and He may administer just judgment to them all; that is, may both send into the everlasting fire the spiritual things of Eph. vi. wickedness, as well angels that have transgressed and passed into revolt, as the ungodly and unjust and lawless and blasphemous among men; and also to the righteous and holy, and to such as have kept His commandments and persevered in His love, whether from the first or after penitency, may freely give life, grant incorruption, and compass for them eternal glory :

:

Phil. ii.

12.

6.

This preaching and this faith, the Church, as we said § 2. before, dispersed as she is in the whole world, keeps diligently, as though she dwelt but in one house: and her belief herein Ps. lxviii. is just as if she had one only soul, and the same heart, and LXX. she proclaims and teaches and delivers these things harmoniously, as possessing one mouth. Thus, while the languages of the world differ, the tenor of the tradition is one

D

34

Hidden depths of Holy Scripture,

Book 1. and the same. And neither have the Churches situated in the regions of Germany believed otherwise, nor do they hold any other tradition, neither in the parts of Spain, nor among the Celts, nor in the East, nor in Egypt, nor in Libya, nor those which are situate in the middle parts of the world. But as the Sun, the creature of God, is in all the world one and the same; so also the preaching of the Truth shines every where, and enlightens all men who wish to come to the knowledge of the Truth. And neither he who is altogether mighty in speech among those who preside in our Churches, will utter any thing different from this (for no S. Matt. man is above his Master); nor will he who is weak in discourse abate aught of the Tradition. Yea, the Faith being one and the same, neither he that is able to speak much of it hath any thing over, nor hath he that speaks but little, any lack.

x. 24.

Conf. Exod. xvi. 18.

§ 3.

And as to some knowing more, some less, in the way of understanding, this happens not by any change in the subject itself, nor by any additional device of another god, besides the Artificer, and Maker, and Nourisher of this universe, as if men were not satisfied with This One; nor of another Christ, or another Only-Begotten but by their working out such things as are uttered in Parables, and fitting them to the scheme of the Faith or again, by their fuller deal- expression of the conduct3 and dispensation of God, such Yuarela as it hath been towards human nature; or in setting out

3

от

ings, πρα

God's long-suffering, both towards the revolt of the Angels who transgressed, and towards the disobedience of men: or in declaring why some things were made temporal and some eternal, some earthly and some heavenly, by one and the same God: or in perceiving why God, being invisible, shewed Himself to the Prophets, not in one form only, but diversely to divers: or in pointing out why more than one Testament has been made with mankind and teaching what is the special mark of each of these Testaments: or in searching out Rom. xi. why God shut up all things in unbelief, that He might have

32.

• ἀρκουμένους τούτους: Lat. " quasi if the reading was τουτῷ. non ipse sufficiat nobis," which seems as

Távтα, not Távras: Lat. "omnia."

permitted to be explored by the Church's children. 35

6.

54.

mercy on all men: or in thanking Him for the purpose of the WORD of GOD in becoming flesh and suffering or in declaring why the coming of the Son of GOD is made manifest in the last times, that is, in the end, being as it is the Beginning; or in unfolding whatever is contained in the Scriptures concerning the end, and the things to come; also in not keeping silence as to the cause of God's making the rejected nations to be fellow-heirs and of one body, and Ephes.iii. partakers with the saints: or in proclaiming how this poor mortal flesh shall put on immortality and the corruptible 1 Cor. xv. incorruption: and in proclaiming how He saith, That which Rom. ix. is not a people, is a people, and she who is not beloved is 25. beloved; and how the children of the desolate are more than Isa. liv. 1. of her that hath an husband. For in regard of these things, and such as are like them, did the Apostle exclaim, Oh the Rom. xi. depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are His judgements, and His ways past finding out!—and not as perversely devising one above the Creator and Artificer, their own Mother and His, the mental Fruit of a stray on, and in proceeding to such voúuna point of blasphemy: nor in feigning again the Pleroma above her, sometimes thirty ons, sometimes an innumerable tribe: as these teachers affirm, who are truly void of Divine understanding; whereas the real Church hath all one and the same faith throughout the world, as we have said before.

4

33.

σις

XI.

$ 1.

Let us now take a view also of the unstable mind of CHAP. these men being as they are some two or three, how they make not the same statements on the same subjects, but in their matter and their terms contradict one another.

Thus he who first adapted his principles, from the heresy called Gnostic, to the peculiar stamp of his school, namely Valentinus, bare his dry fruit" as follows. He defined that there is a Duad which cannot be named, whereof the one part is called Ineffable, the other Silence. Then that from this

Thirty is the Latin reading, the Greek has One, but it is conjectured that the error arose from the A=30 being accidentally changed into A = 1.

· ἐξηροφόρησεν, a word not used else where, but translated thus, according to the analogy of other compounds from φορέω.