CHAPTER I

ARTIFICE BY WHICH THE DEVIL ATTEMPTS TO SUBVERT THE PURITY OF THE FAITH

SCARCE had the impiety of Julian been flooded over by the blood of the martyrs, and the frenzy of Arius been bound fast in the fetters forged at Nicæa, and, moreover, Eunomius and Macedonius, by the agency of the Holy Spirit, had been swept as by a blast to the Bosphorus, and wrecked against the sacred city of Constantine; scarce had the holy church cast off her recent defilement, and was being restored to her ancient beauty, robed in a vesture inwrought with gold, and in varied array, and becoming meet for the bridegroom, when the demon enemy of good, unable to endure it, commences against us a new mode of warfare, disdaining idolatry, now laid in the dust, nor deiguing to employ the servile madness of Arius. He fears to assault the faith in open war, embattled by so many holy fathers, and he had been already shorn of nearly all his power in battling against it: but he pursues his purpose with a robber’s stealth, by raising certain questions and answers; his new device being to turn the course of error towards Judaism, little foreseeing the overthrow that hence would befall the miserable designer. For the faith which formerly was alone arrayed against him, this he now affects: and, no longer exulting in the thought of forcing us to abandon the whole, but of succeeding in corrupting a single term, while he wound himself with many a malignant wile, he devised the change of merely a letter, tending indeed to the same sense, but still with the intention of severing the thought and the tongue, that both might no longer with one accord offer the same confession and glorification to God. The manner and result of these transactions I will set forth, each at its proper juncture; giving at the same time a place in my narrative to other matters that may occur to me, which, though not belonging to my immediate subject, are worthy of mention, laying up the record of them wherever it shall please our compassionate God.