Prescription against Heretics

The character of the present times prompts this warning of ours as well: that we ought not to be astonished at these heresies, either because they exist, for they were foretold as coming, or because they overturn the faith of some, for they exist for this very purpose, that faith, by having temptation, might also have its testing. Idly, then, and thoughtlessly are many scandalized by this very fact, that heresies are so strong. How strong would they be if they had not existed? When something has been allotted to exist by all means, it receives the cause for which it exists. This secures for it the power by which it exists, so that it cannot fail to exist.

Fever, for example, is assigned among the other deadly and tormenting ends for the destruction of man, and we are not astonished that it exists, for it does exist, nor that it destroys a man, for that is what it exists for. Likewise, if we are terrified that heresies, produced for the weakening and death of faith, have this power, we should first be terrified that they exist at all; for while they exist they have the power, and while they have the power they exist. But fever, as an evil both in its cause and in its power, as is well known, we loathe rather than admire, and, so far as we can, we guard against it, since its removal is not in our power. Yet heresies, which bring eternal death and the burning of a greater fire, some prefer to admire for having this power rather than to avoid, so that they may not have it, though they do have the power to avoid them. Otherwise they will have no strength, if people are not astonished that they are so strong. For either people are led on into stumbling while they admire them, or because they stumble, they admire them, as though their great strength came from some truth. A marvel, of course, that evil should have its own strength! Except that heresies are very strong among those who are not strong in faith. In a fight of boxers and gladiators, a man often wins not because he is strong or because he cannot be beaten, but because the one who was beaten had no strength at all; so true is this that the same victor, matched afterwards against a truly strong man, even goes away defeated. In the same way heresies have their strength from the weaknesses of some, and have no strength if they run up against a faith that is truly strong.

These weaker ones are commonly built up to their ruin even by certain persons captured by heresy. Why did this woman or that man, most faithful, most prudent, most experienced in the church, cross over to that side? Who says this without answering himself that those whom heresies could change should not be reckoned prudent or faithful or experienced? And is it a marvel, I suppose, that someone formerly approved should afterwards fall away? Saul, good above the rest, is afterwards overthrown by envy. David, a good man after the Lord's heart, is afterwards guilty of murder and debauchery. Solomon, endowed by the Lord with every grace and wisdom, is led into idolatry by women. For to remain without sin was reserved for the Son of God alone. What then? If a bishop, a deacon, a widow, a virgin, a teacher, even a martyr, has fallen from the rule, will heresies therefore seem to possess the truth? Do we test the faith by persons, or persons by the faith? No one is wise, no one faithful, no one greater, except the Christian; and no one is a Christian except him who has persevered to the end. You, as a man, know each person from the outside. You think what you see; and you see only as far as you have eyes. But “the eyes of the Lord,” it says, “are lofty.” “Man looks on the face, God on the heart.” And so “the Lord” sees, and so he “knows those who are his,” and “the plant which he has not planted he uproots,” and he shows the last from among the first, and he carries “the winnowing fork in his hand to clear his threshing floor.” Let the chaff of light faith fly off as far as it will at every gust of temptation; so much the purer will the heap of wheat be stored in the Lord's granaries. Did not certain disciples, scandalized, turn away from the Lord himself? Yet the rest did not therefore think that they too must leave his footsteps; but those who knew that he was the Word of life and had come from God persevered in his company to the end, although he had gently offered them the chance to leave too, if they wished. It is a lesser thing if a Phygelus, a Hermogenes, a Philetus, and a Hymenaeus deserted his apostle: the betrayer of Christ was himself one of the apostles. We are astonished about his churches if they are deserted by some, when the things we suffer after the example of Christ himself are what show us to be Christians. “They went out from us,” it says, “but they were not of us. If they had been of us, they would surely have remained with us.”

Rather let us remember both the sayings of the Lord and the letters of the apostles, which both foretold to us that heresies would come and laid down in advance that they must be shunned; and as we are not terrified that they exist, so let us not be astonished that they have the power on account of which they must be shunned. The Lord teaches that many ravening wolves will come in sheep's clothing. What are these sheep's clothes but the outward surface of the Christian name? Who are the ravening wolves but deceitful thoughts and spirits lurking within to harass the flock of Christ? Who are the false prophets but false preachers? Who the false apostles but adulterous evangelists? Who are the antichrists, both now and always, but the rebels against Christ? Such will heresies be, assailing the church by the perversity of their doctrines no less than the Antichrist will then persecute it by the savagery of persecution; except that persecution makes even martyrs, heresy only apostates. And so “there had to be heresies too, so that those who are approved might be made manifest,” both those who stood firm in persecutions and those who did not swerve into heresies. For it does not help to regard as approved those who change their faith into heresy, though they interpret it the other way for themselves, because he said elsewhere, “Test all things; hold fast what is good.” As if it were not possible, when everything is tested badly, to stumble by error into choosing something bad.

Further, if he rebukes dissensions and schisms, which are without doubt evils, he immediately adds heresies too. What he joins to evils he certainly declares to be an evil, and indeed a greater one, since he says he believed what he had heard about schisms and dissensions because he knew that there must also be heresies. For he shows that, in view of the graver evil, he readily believed the lighter ones; not, surely, that he believed the evils because heresies were good, but to warn beforehand that one should not be astonished even at temptations of a worse kind, which he said served to make manifest all who are approved, that is, those whom they had not been able to corrupt. In short, if the whole passage is aimed at keeping unity and curbing separations, and heresies tear men away from unity no less than schisms and dissensions, without doubt he places heresies under the same condemnation as schisms and dissensions. And so he does not make those approved who have turned aside into heresies, since he rebukes above all turning aside to such things, teaching that all should speak one thing and think the same, which heresies do not allow.

No more on this, if it is the same Paul who elsewhere, writing to the Galatians, counts heresies among the sins of the flesh, and who advises Titus that a heretical man should be refused after a first rebuke, because such a man is perverted and sins, being self-condemned. Indeed, in almost every letter, pressing that adulterous doctrines be shunned, he censures heresies. Their works are adulterous doctrines, called heresies by a Greek word, in the sense of the choice that a person makes either in founding them or in taking them up. That is why he called the heretic self-condemned: because he has chosen for himself that in which he is condemned. For us, however, it is not lawful to indulge anything of our own choosing, nor to choose what someone else has introduced of his own choosing. We have the apostles of the Lord as our authorities, who did not themselves choose anything of their own will to introduce, but faithfully delivered to the nations the teaching they had received from Christ. So even if an angel from heaven preached a different gospel, he would be called anathema by us. The Holy Spirit had already foreseen that there would be, in a certain virgin Philumene, an angel of seduction transforming himself into an angel of light, led by whose signs and illusions Apelles introduced a new heresy.

These are the doctrines of men and of demons, born for itching ears from the cleverness of worldly wisdom, which the Lord called foolishness, choosing the foolish things of the world to confound even philosophy itself. For this is the stuff of worldly wisdom, a rash interpreter of the divine nature and arrangement. In short, heresies themselves are equipped by philosophy. From there come the aeons, and I know not what infinite forms, and the trinity of man in Valentinus: he had been a Platonist. From there comes Marcion's better god, praised for his tranquillity: he had come from the Stoics. And when the soul is said to perish, the Epicureans are followed; and when the restoration of the flesh is denied, it is taken from the single school of all the philosophers; and where matter is made equal with God, it is the teaching of Zeno; and where something is alleged about a fiery god, Heraclitus comes in. The same subject matter is turned over among heretics and philosophers; the same inquiries are entangled: Whence is evil, and why? And whence is man, and how? And, what Valentinus lately proposed: Whence is God? From “enthymesis” and “ectroma,” no doubt! Wretched Aristotle, who devised dialectic for them, an art of building up and pulling down, shifty in its propositions, forced in its conjectures, harsh in its arguments, a laborer of contentions, troublesome even to itself, reconsidering everything so as never to have treated anything at all. Hence those fables and endless genealogies and fruitless questions and words that creep like a cancer, from which the apostle, restraining us, testifies by name that philosophy must be guarded against, writing to the Colossians, “See that no one circumvents you through philosophy and empty seduction, according to the tradition of men,” beside the providence of the Holy Spirit. He had been at Athens and had come to know from his encounters this human wisdom, which apes and corrupts the truth, itself divided into many parts by the variety of its mutually hostile sects. What then has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What has the Academy to do with the church? What have heretics to do with Christians? Our instruction comes from the porch of Solomon, who had himself taught that the Lord must be sought in simplicity of heart. Let those see to it who have brought forth a Stoic and Platonic and dialectical Christianity. We have no need of curiosity after Christ Jesus, nor of inquiry after the gospel. When we believe, we desire nothing further to believe. For this we believe first: that there is nothing further that we ought to believe.

I come, then, to that point which our own people put forward as a license for curiosity and the heretics press to import scrupulosity. It is written, they say, “Seek, and you will find.” Let us remember when the Lord uttered this saying. I think it was at the very beginning of his teaching, when all still doubted whether he was the Christ, when not even Peter had yet declared him the Son of God, when even John had ceased to be sure of him. Rightly, then, was it said, “Seek, and you will find,” when he who was not yet recognized still had to be sought. And this as regards the Jews. For the whole word of this reproach belongs to them, who had somewhere to seek Christ. “They have,” he says, “Moses and Elijah,” that is, the law and the prophets, which proclaim Christ, as he says openly elsewhere: “Search the Scriptures, in which you hope for salvation; for they speak of me.” This is what “Seek, and you will find” means. For it is clear that what follows also applies to the Jews: “Knock, and it will be opened to you.” The Jews had formerly been with God; afterwards, cast out for their sins, they began to be outside God. But the nations were never with God, except as “a drop from a bucket” and “dust from the threshing floor,” and always outside. How then shall one who was always outside knock at a place where he never was? What door does he know, through which he was never either received or cast out? Is it not rather he who knows he was once inside and was driven out who knocks and knows the door? “Ask, and you will receive” likewise suits him who knew from whom he must ask, and by whom something had been promised him, namely the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, whom the nations knew no more than any promise of his. And so he spoke to Israel: “I was not sent,” he says, “except to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” He had not yet thrown the children's bread to the dogs; he did not yet command them to go into the way of the nations. Only at the end does he command them to go and teach and baptize the nations, since they would soon receive the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, who would lead them into all truth. And this too tends to the same point. If the apostles, the appointed teachers of the nations, were themselves to receive the Paraclete as their teacher, much more was “Seek, and you will find” idle for us, to whom the teaching was to come freely through the apostles, and to the apostles themselves through the Holy Spirit. All the Lord's words, indeed, are set down for all; through the ears of the Jews they have passed to us. But many of them, being directed to particular persons, have established for us not a warning that is ours in its own right, but an example.

I now yield this point of my own accord. Let it be said to all, “Seek, and you will find”; still, even here the sense must be settled under the helm of interpretation. No divine saying is so loose and diffuse that the words alone are defended while their meaning is not established. But first I lay this down: that there is some one and definite thing taught by Christ which the nations must by all means believe, and for that reason must seek, so that when they have found it they may believe. Now of one and definite teaching there cannot be endless inquiry. You must seek until you find, and believe when you have found; and nothing more, except to keep what you have believed, while you believe this besides: that nothing else is to be believed, and therefore nothing else sought, once you have found and believed what was taught by him who bids you seek nothing other than what he has taught. If anyone doubts about this, it will be shown that what was taught by Christ is with us. Meanwhile, trusting in the proof, I anticipate it, warning some that nothing is to be sought beyond what they have believed, which is what they ought to have sought, lest they interpret “Seek, and you will find” without the discipline of reason.

Now the meaning of this saying consists in three points: in the matter, in the time, in the measure. In the matter, that you consider what is to be sought; in the time, when; in the measure, how long. What must be sought, then, is what Christ taught, of course as long as you do not find it, of course until you find it. And you have found it when you have believed. For you would not have believed if you had not found, just as you would not have sought except to find. So you seek in order to find, and you find in order to believe. By believing you have fixed a limit to all prolonging of seeking and finding. The very fruit of seeking has set you this measure. He himself has marked out this boundary for you who does not want you to believe anything other than what he taught, and so not to seek anything else either. Otherwise, if, because so many other things have been taught by others, we must therefore seek as long as we can find, we shall always be seeking and never believe at all. For where will be the end of seeking? Where the resting place of believing? Where the completion of finding? With Marcion? But Valentinus too puts forward “Seek, and you will find.” With Valentinus? But Apelles too will knock at my door with this saying, and Ebion and Simon and all of them in turn have no other way to worm their way into my favor and win me over to themselves. So I shall be nowhere, while I meet everywhere “Seek, and you will find,” and as good as nowhere, as one who has never grasped what Christ taught, what ought to be sought, what must be believed.

One errs without penalty, if one does not sin; although to err is also to sin. He wanders without penalty, I say, who deserts nothing. But if I have believed what I ought to have believed, and think that something else must be sought afresh, I certainly hope that something else is to be found; and I would in no way hope so unless either I had not believed, though I seemed to have believed, or I had ceased to believe. So, deserting my faith, I am found a denier. Let me say it once for all: no one seeks except one who either did not have or has lost. That old woman had lost one of her ten drachmas, and so she was seeking; but when she found it, she stopped seeking. The neighbor had no bread, and so he knocked; but when the door was opened to him and he received, he stopped knocking. The widow asked the judge to be heard, because she was not admitted; but when she was heard, she pressed no further. So there is an end to seeking and knocking and asking. “For to him who asks,” it says, “it will be given, and to him who knocks it will be opened, and by him who seeks it will be found.” Let him look to it who always seeks, because he does not find; for he seeks where it will not be found. Let him look to it who always knocks, because it will never be opened; for he knocks where no one is. Let him look to it who always asks, because he will never be heard; for he asks of one who does not hear.

Even if we must still seek, and always, where ought the seeking to be done? Among the heretics, where everything is foreign and hostile to our truth, and whom we are forbidden to approach? What slave expects his rations from a stranger, not to say from his master's enemy? What soldier looks for a bounty and pay from kings who are not allies, not to say enemies, unless he is plainly a deserter, a turncoat, and a rebel? Even that old woman searched for her drachma inside her own house; even that man who knocked beat on his neighbor's door; even that widow appealed to a judge who was harsh, but not an enemy. No one can be built up from the source that tears him down; no one is enlightened by the one who darkens him. Let us seek, then, in what is our own, and from our own people, and concerning what is our own, and only that which can come into question without harm to the rule of faith.

Now the rule of faith (so that we may state here and now what we defend) is that by which it is believed: that there is one God only, and no other besides the maker of the world, who brought forth all things out of nothing through his Word, sent forth first of all; that this Word, called his Son, was seen in various ways in the name of God by the patriarchs, was always heard in the prophets, and at last was brought down by the Spirit and power of God the Father into the virgin Mary, was made flesh in her womb, and, born of her, came forth as Jesus Christ; that he then preached a new law and a new promise of the kingdom of heaven, worked miracles, was crucified, rose again on the third day, was caught up into heaven, and sat down at the right hand of the Father; that he sent in his place the power of the Holy Spirit to guide believers; that he will come with glory to take the saints into the enjoyment of eternal life and of the heavenly promises, and to judge the profane with everlasting fire, after the raising of both groups has taken place, with the restoration of the flesh. This rule, taught by Christ, as will be proved, raises no questions among us except those which heresies bring in and which make heretics.

For the rest, as long as its form remains in its proper order, you may seek and discuss as much as you like and pour out all your appetite for curiosity, if anything seems to you either to hang in ambiguity or to be overshadowed by obscurity. There is surely some brother, a teacher endowed with the grace of knowledge; there is someone among the well practiced; someone who has lived with you, curious like you, yet, though seeking with you, he will know in the end that it is better for you not to know, lest you come to know what you ought not, since you know what you ought. “Your faith,” it says, “has saved you,” not your practice in the Scriptures. Faith is set in the rule; it has a law, and salvation from keeping the law. Practice, however, consists in curiosity and has its only glory from zeal for skill. Let curiosity give way to faith; let glory give way to salvation. At least let them not make a din, or let them be quiet. To know nothing against the rule is to know everything. Even if the heretics were not enemies of the truth, even if we had not been warned beforehand to shun them, what is the use of conferring with men who themselves admit that they are still seeking? For if they are still truly seeking, they have not yet found anything certain; and so whatever they seem to hold for the time being shows their doubt, as long as they seek. So you, seeking in the same way, looking to those who are themselves seeking, doubtful to the doubtful, uncertain to the uncertain, must necessarily be led, blind by the blind, into the pit. But since, in order to deceive, they pretend that they are still seeking, so as to slip their treatises into us by injecting anxiety, and in the end, once they have gained access to us, at once defend what they said was to be sought, we must refute them in such a way that they know that we deny, not Christ, but them. For when they are still seeking, they do not yet hold anything; and when they do not hold, they have not yet believed; and when they have not yet believed, they are not Christians. But when they do hold and believe, they still say that one must seek, in order to defend it. Before they defend it, they deny it, confessing that they have not yet believed while they are seeking. Those who are not Christians even in their own eyes, how much less in ours? Those who come by deceit, what faith do they argue for? What truth do they champion, who introduce it by a lie? But they deal with the Scriptures and argue from the Scriptures! Of course: from what other source could they speak about matters of faith, except from the writings of faith?

We come, then, to the point at issue. This is what we were aiming at, and what we were preparing for in the preface of our address, so that we may now join battle on the ground to which our adversaries challenge us. They put forward the Scriptures, and by this boldness of theirs they at once move some people. In the actual encounter they wear out the strong, catch the weak, and send away the wavering with a scruple. So we block this position above all: they are not to be admitted to any dispute about the Scriptures. If these are their strength, then before they can use them it must be examined to whom the possession of the Scriptures belongs, so that no one may be admitted to them to whom they in no way belong.

I might seem to have brought this in from a lack of confidence or from a desire to enter on the case some other way, were it not that reason first of all establishes that our faith owes obedience to the apostle, who forbids us to enter into questions, to lend our ears to novel words, and to meet with a heretic after one rebuke, not after a dispute. So thoroughly did he forbid disputing that he names rebuke as the reason for meeting a heretic, and that only once, because he is not a Christian, so that he might not seem to deserve correction, like a Christian, once and again and under two or three witnesses, since he is to be corrected for the very reason that one must not dispute with him; and then, because a contest over the Scriptures achieves nothing, unless it be to upset one's stomach or one's brain.

This heresy does not accept certain Scriptures; and if it accepts some, it perverts them by additions and subtractions to fit the plan of its own system; and if it accepts them, it does not accept them whole; and if it does present them whole to some extent, it nevertheless twists them by devising different interpretations. An adulterated sense is as much opposed to the truth as a corrupting pen. Empty presumptions inevitably refuse to acknowledge the means by which they are refuted. They rely on what they have composed falsely and what they have seized from ambiguity. What will you gain, you who are most practiced in the Scriptures, when whatever you affirm is denied by the other side, and whatever you deny is affirmed? You will lose nothing, indeed, but your voice in the quarrel, and you will gain nothing but bile at the blasphemy.

And as for the person, if there is one, for whose sake you go down into a contest over the Scriptures, to strengthen him in his doubt: will he incline to the truth, or rather to the heresies? Moved by this very fact, that he sees you have gained nothing, since the other side denies and affirms with equal footing and certainly on an equal standing, he will go away from the wrangling more uncertain than before, not knowing which he should judge to be heresy. For they too can of course turn these same things back on us. They must say that it is rather we who introduce adulterations of the Scriptures and false interpretations, since they defend the truth for themselves just as we do.

So appeal must not be made to the Scriptures, nor the contest set on ground where victory is either impossible or uncertain or not certain enough. For even if a comparison of Scriptures did not turn out so as to leave both sides equal, the order of things would require that this question be put first, which is now the only one to be disputed: to whom does the faith itself belong? Whose are the Scriptures? By whom, and through whom, and when, and to whom was the teaching handed down by which people become Christians? For wherever it appears that the truth of the Christian teaching and faith is, there will be the truth of the Scriptures and of their interpretation and of all Christian traditions.

Christ Jesus our Lord (let him permit me to speak so for the moment), whoever he is, of whatever God the Son, of whatever substance man and God, of whatever faith the teacher, of whatever reward the promiser, declared himself, while he lived on earth, what he was, what he had been, what will of the Father he was carrying out, what he laid down that man must do; he declared it either to the people openly or to his disciples privately, of whom he had chosen twelve chief ones to be at his side, appointed as teachers for the nations. So, when one of them had been struck off, he commanded the remaining eleven, as he was departing to the Father after the resurrection, to go and teach the nations, baptizing them into the Father and into the Son and into the Holy Spirit. At once, then, the apostles (whom this name interprets as “sent”), having taken Matthias by lot as the twelfth in place of Judas, on the authority of the prophecy in David's psalm, and having received the promised power of the Holy Spirit for miracles and speech, first bore witness to faith in Jesus Christ throughout Judea and founded churches there; then, going out into the world, they proclaimed the same teaching of the same faith to the nations. And likewise they founded churches in every city, from which the other churches have since borrowed, and borrow every day, the shoot of faith and the seeds of doctrine, so that they may become churches. And for this reason they too will be counted apostolic, as the offspring of apostolic churches. Every kind must be reckoned by its origin. So the churches, many and great as they are, are that one first church from the apostles, from which all come. Thus all are first and all are apostolic, while all together prove their unity: the fellowship of peace, the title of brotherhood, and the token of hospitality; and these rights are governed by no other principle than the one tradition of the same sacrament.

From here, then, we draw up our prescription: if the Lord Christ Jesus sent the apostles to preach, no preachers other than those Christ appointed are to be received, because “no one knows the Father except the Son and him to whom the Son has revealed him,” and the Son is not seen to have revealed him to any others than the apostles, whom he sent to preach, of course what he revealed to them. And what they preached, that is, what Christ revealed to them, I will here also prescribe must be proved in no other way than through those same churches which the apostles themselves founded, preaching to them themselves, both by the living voice, as they say, and afterwards by letters. If this is so, it is equally clear that every doctrine which agrees with those apostolic churches, the wombs and origins of the faith, must be reckoned as truth, as holding without doubt what the churches received from the apostles, the apostles from Christ, and Christ from God; and that every doctrine must be judged beforehand to be falsehood which savors of what is contrary to the truth of the churches and of the apostles of Christ and of God. It remains, then, for us to show whether this doctrine of ours, whose rule we set out above, is to be reckoned as coming from the tradition of the apostles, and by that very fact whether the others come from falsehood. We are in communion with the apostolic churches, because our doctrine differs in nothing from theirs. This is the testimony of truth.

But since the proof is so ready to hand that, if it is brought forward at once, nothing further needs discussion, let us for the moment give place to the other side, as if we had not brought it forward, in case they think they can do anything to weaken this prescription. They are accustomed to say that the apostles did not know everything; and, driven by the same madness, they turn the matter upside down again and say that the apostles did know everything, but did not hand everything on to everyone. In either case they expose Christ to reproach, for having sent apostles either too little instructed or too little straightforward. Who of sound mind, then, can believe that those were ignorant of anything whom the Lord gave as teachers, keeping them inseparable in his company, his discipleship, and his daily life, to whom he explained privately whatever was obscure, telling them that it had been given to them to know the secrets which the people were not permitted to understand? Was anything hidden from Peter, who was called the rock on which the church was to be built, who received the keys of the kingdom of heaven and the power of loosing and binding in heaven and on earth? Was anything hidden from John, most beloved of the Lord, who leaned on his breast, to whom alone the Lord pointed out Judas the betrayer beforehand, whom he entrusted to Mary as a son in his own place? What did he mean them not to know, to whom he even displayed his glory, and Moses and Elijah, and besides that the Father's voice from heaven? Not that he rejected the others, but because “every word shall stand on three witnesses.” So, then, those were ignorant too, to whom after the resurrection he deigned, on the road, to expound all the Scriptures! He had indeed once said, “I have many things still to say to you, but you cannot bear them now”; yet he added, “When that Spirit of truth has come, he will lead you into all truth.” He shows that those were ignorant of nothing whom he had promised would attain all truth through the Spirit of truth. And he certainly fulfilled the promise, as the Acts of the Apostles prove by the descent of the Holy Spirit. Those who do not accept this Scripture can neither belong to the Holy Spirit, since they cannot yet acknowledge that the Holy Spirit was sent to the disciples, nor claim to defend the church, since they have no means of proving when and in what cradle this body was founded. So important is it to them to have no proofs of what they defend, lest proofs be admitted too that expose what they falsely assert.

To accuse the apostles of some ignorance, then, they put forward the fact that Peter and those with him were rebuked by Paul. “So something was lacking in them,” they say; and from this they also build the claim that fuller knowledge could have come later, such as came to Paul when he rebuked his predecessors. Here too I can say to those who reject the Acts of the Apostles: first you must show who this Paul is, and what he was before he was an apostle, and how he became an apostle, since they make great use of him for their other questions as well. For if he declares himself an apostle, turned from a persecutor, that does not suffice for everyone who believes with examination, since not even the Lord bore witness of himself. But let them believe without the Scriptures, so that they may believe against the Scriptures; still, let them show, from their claim that Peter was rebuked by Paul, that another form of the gospel was brought in by Paul besides the one Peter and the rest had already proclaimed. On the contrary, changed from persecutor into preacher, he is brought to the brothers by brothers, as one of the brothers, and to them by those who had put on the faith from the apostles. Then, as he himself relates, he went up to Jerusalem to get to know Peter, as the duty and right of the same faith and preaching required. For they would not have marveled that the persecutor had become a preacher if he preached something contrary, nor would they have glorified the Lord because Paul, his adversary, had come over to them. So they even gave him the right hand, the sign of concord and agreement, and arranged among themselves a division of labor, not a separation of the gospel, not that each should preach something different, but that each should preach to different people, Peter to the circumcision, Paul to the nations. Further, if Peter was rebuked because, having lived with Gentiles, he afterwards separated himself from their company out of regard for persons, that was certainly a fault of conduct, not of preaching. For it did not result in proclaiming another God than the Creator, another Christ than the one born of Mary, or another hope than the resurrection.

I am not so well off, or rather not so badly off, as to set the apostles against each other. But since these most perverse people put forward that rebuke in order to make the earlier teaching suspect, I will answer as if for Peter: Paul himself said that he had become all things to all, a Jew to the Jews, not a Jew to those who were not Jews, in order to win all. So they rebuked certain things according to times, persons, and circumstances, which they themselves likewise did according to times, persons, and circumstances; just as if Peter had also rebuked Paul because, while forbidding circumcision, he himself circumcised Timothy. Let those look to it who sit in judgment on the apostles. It is well that Peter is made Paul's equal in martyrdom too. But even though Paul, caught up to the third heaven and carried into paradise, heard certain things there, they cannot be thought to have been things that would equip him for another, better-instructed doctrine, since their character was such that they were not to be disclosed to any man. And if that something, whatever it was, leaked out to someone's knowledge, and some heresy claims to follow it, either Paul is guilty of betraying a secret, or someone else must be shown to have been caught up into paradise later, who was allowed to speak out what Paul was not permitted even to mutter.

But, as we said, it is the same madness when they admit that the apostles were ignorant of nothing and did not preach different things from one another, yet will not have it that they revealed everything to everyone: some things, they say, they delivered openly and to all, others in secret and to a few, because Paul used this word to Timothy: “O Timothy, guard the deposit,” and again, “Keep the good deposit.” What is this deposit, so secret that it is to be reckoned another doctrine? Is it that charge of which he says, “This charge I commit to you, my son Timothy”? Or that command of which he says, “I charge you before God, who gives life to all things, and Jesus Christ, who witnessed the good confession under Pontius Pilate, that you keep the command”? What command, and what charge? From what is written before and after, it will be understood that this saying does not hint at some more remote doctrine, but rather presses that no other be admitted besides the one he had heard from Paul himself, and, I think, openly: “before many witnesses,” he says. If they do not want these many witnesses understood as the church, it makes no difference, since nothing could have been secret that was brought forward before many witnesses. Nor, because he wanted him to entrust these things to faithful men who would be able to teach others also, is that to be interpreted as evidence of some hidden gospel. For when he says “these things,” he speaks of the things he was writing about at the time. Of hidden things, as of things absent, known only in his mind, he would have said not “these things” but “those things.”

Further, it followed naturally that when he entrusted to Timothy the administration of the gospel, not to be administered indiscriminately or thoughtlessly, he should add, according to the Lord's saying, that he should not throw a pearl to swine or what is holy to dogs. The Lord spoke openly, without any hint of a hidden mystery. He himself had commanded that whatever they had heard in darkness and in secret they should preach in the light and on the housetops. He himself had prefigured by a parable that they should not keep a single mina, that is, a single word of his, hidden away without fruit. He himself taught that a lamp is not usually hidden under a bushel but set on a lampstand, to give light to all who are in the house. These things the apostles either neglected or did not understand at all, if they did not fulfill them by hiding something of the Light, that is, of the word of God and the mystery of Christ. They feared no one, as far as I know, neither the violence of the Jews nor of the heathen; all the more, then, did they preach freely in the church, who did not keep silent in synagogues and public places. Indeed they could neither have converted Jews nor brought in heathen unless they set out in order what they wanted them to believe. Much less would they have withheld anything from churches that already believed, to entrust it privately to a few others. Even if they discussed certain things among intimates, so to speak, it is still not to be believed that these were things that would bring in another rule of faith, different from and contrary to the one they set forth publicly to all, so that they spoke of one God in the church and another at home, described one substance of Christ in the open and another in secret, announced one hope of resurrection before all and another before a few; since they themselves implored in their letters that all should speak one and the same thing, and that there should be no schisms and dissensions in the church, because whether Paul or others, they preached the same things. Besides, they remembered, “Let your word be: yes, yes; no, no; for whatever is more than this is from the evil one,” so that they should not handle the gospel in contradictions.

If, then, it is incredible either that the apostles were ignorant of the fullness of the preaching or that they did not set out the whole order of the rule to all, let us see whether perhaps the apostles did indeed proclaim it simply and fully, but the churches, by their own fault, received it otherwise than the apostles delivered it. You will find all these incitements to scruple put forward by the heretics. They seize on the churches rebuked by the apostle: “O foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you?” and “You were running so well; who hindered you?” and the very opening, “I am astonished that you are so quickly being transferred from him who called you in grace to another gospel.” Likewise what was written to the Corinthians, that they were still carnal, to be brought up on milk, not yet fit for solid food; that they thought they knew something, when they did not yet know as they ought to know. When they bring up the rebuked churches, let them believe that they were corrected. But let them also acknowledge those churches in whose faith and knowledge and conduct the apostle rejoices and gives thanks to God, and which today share the rights of one institution with those that were rebuked.

Suppose now that all have erred; that the apostle too was mistaken in giving his testimony; that the Holy Spirit had regard to no church so as to lead it into truth, though he was sent by Christ for this, and asked of the Father for this, to be the teacher of truth; that the steward of God, the vicar of Christ, neglected his office, letting the churches for a time understand otherwise and believe otherwise than what he himself was preaching through the apostles: is it likely that so many churches, and so great, should have erred into one faith? Among many, no outcome is one and the same. The error of the churches' doctrine would have had to vary in its results. But what is found as one among many is not error but tradition. Will anyone dare to say, then, that those who handed it down erred?

However the error came about, error reigned for as long as there were no heresies. Truth was waiting for some Marcionites and Valentinians to set it free. In the meantime the gospel was preached wrongly, believed wrongly; so many thousands of thousands were baptized wrongly, so many works of faith performed wrongly, so many miracles, so many spiritual gifts worked wrongly, so many priesthoods, so many ministries exercised wrongly, so many martyrdoms, in short, crowned wrongly. Or, if not wrongly nor in vain, how could it be that the things of God were in progress before it was known which God they belonged to? That there were Christians before Christ was found? Heresies before true doctrine? But in all things the truth precedes the image; the likeness follows after. Besides, it is quite absurd that heresy should be held to be the earlier doctrine, if only because it is that very doctrine which foretold that heresies to come must be guarded against. To the church of that doctrine it was written, or rather that doctrine itself writes to the church: “Even if an angel from heaven preaches a gospel other than we have, let him be anathema.”

Where was Marcion then, the shipmaster of Pontus, the devotee of Stoicism? Where was Valentinus then, the follower of Platonism? For it is well known that they lived not so very long ago, about the reign of Antoninus, and that at first they believed the catholic doctrine in the church of Rome under the episcopate of the blessed Eleutherus, until, because of their ever restless curiosity, with which they corrupted the brothers too, they were expelled once and again (Marcion, indeed, with the two hundred sesterces he had brought to the church), and at last, banished to permanent separation, they spread the poisons of their doctrines. Afterwards Marcion professed repentance and accepted the condition set him, that he would receive peace if he restored to the church the others whom he had trained for perdition; but he was overtaken by death. For there had to be heresies. Yet heresies are not good because there had to be heresies; as if there did not also have to be evil! For the Lord too had to be betrayed, but woe to the betrayer; so let no one defend heresies on this ground either. If the pedigree of Apelles also must be traced, he too is no more ancient than Marcion, his founder and model; but, having fallen with a woman, a deserter from Marcionite continence, he withdrew from the sight of his most holy master to Alexandria. Returning from there years later no better, except that he was no longer a Marcionite, he ran into another woman, that virgin Philumene whom we mentioned above, who afterwards became a monstrous prostitute herself; ensnared by her energy, he wrote down what he learned from her as “Revelations.” There are still people in the world who remember them, even their own disciples and successors, so that the later ones cannot deny it. Besides, they are convicted by their own works, as the Lord said. For if Marcion separated the New Testament from the Old, he is later than what he separated, since he could not separate what had not been united. What was united before it was separated, being afterwards made separate, shows that the separator is later. Likewise Valentinus, by expounding differently and without doubt correcting, proves by this very name that whatever he corrects, as faulty before, belonged to another. We name these as the more notable and more frequent adulterers of the truth. But also a certain Nigidius, and Hermogenes, and many others still walk about perverting the ways of the Lord. Let them show me by what authority they came forth! If they preach another God, how do they use the things and writings and names of the God against whom they preach? If the same, why differently? Let them prove that they are new apostles; let them say that Christ has come down again, taught again in person, been crucified again, died again, been raised again. For so the apostle has described him; for so is he accustomed to make apostles, giving them besides the power to perform the same signs as he himself. I want their miracles, then, to be produced too; except that I recognize their greatest miracle, by which they imitate the apostles in reverse: those made the dead alive; these make the living dead.

But let me return from this digression to argue the priority of truth and the lateness of falsehood, with the support also of that parable which puts first the good seed of wheat sown by the Lord, and brings in afterwards, from the enemy, the devil, the adulteration of barren wild oats. For it properly represents the distinction of doctrines, since elsewhere too the word of God is likened to seed. So from the very order it is made plain that what was handed down first is of the Lord and true, and what was brought in later is foreign and false. This judgment will stand against all later heresies, which have no settled consciousness of their own by which to defend the truth for themselves.

Further, if any heresies dare to plant themselves in the apostolic age, so that they may seem to have been handed down by the apostles because they existed under the apostles, we can say: let them produce the origins of their churches; let them unroll the list of their bishops, running down in succession from the beginning in such a way that their first bishop had as his founder and predecessor one of the apostles or of the apostolic men who nevertheless continued with the apostles. For this is how the apostolic churches present their records: as the church of the Smyrnaeans reports that Polycarp was placed there by John, as the church of the Romans reports that Clement was likewise ordained by Peter. In just the same way the other churches, too, show those whom they have as shoots of the apostolic seed, appointed to the episcopate by the apostles. Let the heretics invent something of the kind. For after blasphemy, what is forbidden to them? But even if they invent it, they will gain nothing. For their doctrine itself, compared with the apostolic, will declare by its difference and contrariety that it has no apostle or apostolic man as its author; because as the apostles would not have taught things differing among themselves, so the apostolic men would not have put forth things contrary to the apostles, unless those who learned from the apostles preached otherwise. To this test, then, they will be summoned by those churches which, though they cannot produce any apostle or apostolic man as their founder, being much later (indeed they are being founded every day), yet, agreeing in the same faith, are reckoned no less apostolic because of the kinship of their doctrine. So let all the heresies, challenged by our churches to both tests, prove themselves apostolic in whatever way they think. But in fact they neither are, nor can they prove what they are not; nor are they received into peace and communion by churches that are in any way apostolic, clearly because, owing to the difference of their sacrament, they are in no way apostolic.

In addition to this I bring forward a review of the very doctrines that existed then, under the apostles, and were both pointed out and denounced by those same apostles. For in this way they will be exposed more easily, when they are found either to have existed already then or to have taken their seeds from those that existed already then. Paul, in the first letter to the Corinthians, censures those who deny and doubt the resurrection. This opinion was the Sadducees' own. Part of it is taken up by Marcion and Apelles and Valentinus, and whoever else undermines the resurrection of the flesh. And writing to the Galatians he inveighs against those who observe and defend circumcision and the law. Such is the heresy of Ebion. Instructing Timothy, he also rebukes those who forbid marriage. So teach Marcion and Apelles, his follower. He likewise touches those who said that the resurrection had already taken place. The Valentinians assert this of themselves. And when he names endless genealogies, Valentinus is recognized, in whose system that Aeon, whoever he is, of a new and more than one name, begets from his own Grace Mind and Truth; and these likewise procreate from themselves Word and Life; then these beget Man and Church; and from this first ogdoad of Aeons ten others, and the twelve remaining Aeons, arise with marvelous names, in the pure fable of thirty Aeons. The same apostle, when he condemns those who serve the elements, points to something of Hermogenes, who, introducing matter as unborn, makes it the equal of the unborn God, and so, making the mother of the elements a goddess, can serve what he makes equal to God. John, in the Apocalypse, is ordered to rebuke those who eat things sacrificed to idols and commit fornication. There are Nicolaitans of another kind even now; it is called the Gaian heresy. And in his letter he calls antichrists above all those who denied that Christ had come in the flesh and those who did not think that Jesus was the Son of God. Marcion claimed the first; Ebion the second. The teaching of Simon's magic, which serves angels, was itself reckoned among idolatries and was condemned by the apostle Peter in Simon himself.

These, I think, are the kinds of adulterous doctrines that we learn from the apostles themselves existed under the apostles. And yet among so many varieties of perversity we find no system that raised a dispute about God, the Creator of all things. No one dared to imagine a second God. There was more hesitation about the Son than about the Father, until Marcion brought in, besides the Creator, another God of goodness alone; until Apelles made the Creator some glorious angel of the higher God, the God of the law and of Israel, declaring him fiery; until Valentinus scattered his Aeons and traced the origin of the Creator God to the fault of one Aeon. To these alone and to these first has the truth of the Godhead been revealed! They have obtained, no doubt, a greater favor and fuller grace from the devil, who wished to rival God in this way too, by making, through doctrines of poison, disciples above their master, which the Lord denied. Let all the heresies, then, choose for themselves the times when they existed, since it makes no difference which existed when, so long as they are not of the truth; and certainly those that did not exist under the apostles cannot have existed. If they had existed, they too would have been named, so that they too might be restrained. Those that did exist under the apostles are condemned in being named. So if the same heresies now exist, somewhat more polished, that were crude under the apostles, they have their condemnation from that time; or if there were some then and others arose later that took over certain opinions from them, then by sharing their preaching they must share their condemnation too, since the rule of lateness stated above comes first: even if they had no share in the condemned doctrines, they would be judged in advance by their date alone, all the more adulterous for not having been named even by the apostles. Hence it is all the more firmly established that these are the ones that were then being announced as coming.

Challenged and refuted by us on these definitions, let all the heresies, whether later than the apostles or contemporary with them, provided they differ from us, whether censured by them in general or in particular, provided they were condemned beforehand, dare to answer with some prescriptions of this kind against our teaching. For if they deny its truth, they must prove that it too is a heresy, refuted by the same test by which they are refuted, and at the same time show where the truth is to be sought, since it is now clear that it is not with them. Our position is not later; rather it is earlier than all; and this will be the testimony of truth, which everywhere holds first place. By the apostles it is nowhere condemned, but rather defended; this will be the proof that it is their own. For the doctrine that those do not condemn who condemned every foreign one, they show to be their own, and so they defend it.

Come now, you who would exercise your curiosity better in the business of your salvation: run through the apostolic churches, in which the very chairs of the apostles still preside in their places, in which their own authentic letters are read aloud, sounding the voice and bringing before us the face of each one. Achaia is very near you: you have Corinth. If you are not far from Macedonia, you have Philippi, you have the Thessalonians. If you can travel to Asia, you have Ephesus. And if you are near Italy, you have Rome, from which authority is ready at hand for us too. How happy is that church, into which the apostles poured out their whole teaching together with their blood; where Peter is made equal to the Lord's passion; where Paul is crowned with the death of John; where the apostle John, after being plunged into burning oil and suffering nothing, is banished to an island! Let us see what it learned, what it taught, what fellowship it shares with the churches of Africa too. It knows one God, the Lord, the Creator of the universe, and Christ Jesus, born of the virgin Mary, the Son of God the Creator, and the resurrection of the flesh. It joins the law and the prophets with the writings of the evangelists and apostles; from there it drinks in its faith. This faith it seals with water, clothes with the Holy Spirit, feeds with the Eucharist; it urges martyrdom; and against this institution it receives no one. This is the institution, I do not now say which foretold the heresies to come, but from which the heresies went out. But they are not of it, from the time they were made against it. Even from the kernel of the olive, mild, rich, and needful, the rough wild olive springs; even from the seed of the fig, most pleasant and sweet, the empty and worthless wild fig rises. So too the heresies come from our shrub, not of our kind: from a grain of the truth, but made wild by falsehood.

If this is so, so that the truth is adjudged to us, as many as walk by that rule which the church has handed down from the apostles, the apostles from Christ, Christ from God, then the reasoning of our proposition stands, which lays down that heretics are not to be admitted to a challenge concerning the Scriptures, since we prove, without the Scriptures, that they have nothing to do with the Scriptures. For if they are heretics, they cannot be Christians, since they do not have from Christ what, having pursued it by their own choice, they accept the name of heretics for. So, not being Christians, they acquire no right to Christian writings, and to them it may rightly be said: Who are you? When and from where did you come? What are you doing on my property, since you are not mine? By what right, Marcion, are you cutting down my wood? By what license, Valentinus, are you diverting my springs? By what authority, Apelles, are you moving my boundary markers? The possession is mine. Why are the rest of you sowing and grazing here at your own pleasure? The possession is mine; I have possessed it long; I possessed it first; I have firm title deeds from the very owners whose property it was. I am the heir of the apostles. As they provided in their will, as they committed it in trust, as they adjured, so I hold it. You, certainly, they have always disinherited and disowned as strangers, as enemies. And why are heretics strangers and enemies to the apostles, if not from the difference of doctrine, which each one has either brought forth or received by his own choice against the apostles?

There, then, must the adulteration of the Scriptures and of their interpretation be reckoned to be, where difference of doctrine is found. Those who purposed to teach otherwise were forced by necessity to arrange the instruments of doctrine otherwise. For they could not have taught otherwise unless they had otherwise that by which to teach. Just as the corruption of doctrine could not have succeeded for them without the corruption of its instruments, so for us the integrity of doctrine would not have been possible without the integrity of those means by which doctrine is handled. For what is there in our Scriptures contrary to us? What have we brought in of our own, so as to remedy by subtraction or addition or alteration something found contrary to it even in the Scriptures? What we are, the Scriptures are, from their beginning. We are from them, before anything was otherwise, before they were interpolated by you. And since every interpolation must be believed to be later, coming as it does from rivalry, which is never earlier than, nor at home with, what it rivals, it is as incredible to any wise man that we, who are from the beginning and first, should seem to have brought an adulterous pen to the Scriptures, as that they, who are both later and hostile, should not have done so. One perverts the Scriptures with his hand, another their sense by his interpretation. For even if Valentinus seems to use the whole instrument, he has nonetheless laid hands on the truth with a craftier mind than Marcion. Marcion openly and plainly used the knife, not the pen, since he made a slaughter of the Scriptures to suit his own material. Valentinus spared them, since he did not devise the Scriptures to suit his material, but his material to suit the Scriptures; and yet he took away more and added more, taking away the proper meanings of individual words and adding arrangements of things that do not appear.

These were the contrivances of the spiritual forces of wickedness with whom we wrestle, brothers: rightly to be considered, necessary to faith, so that the elect may be made manifest and the reprobate exposed. And so they have strength and facility in devising and equipping errors; not so much to be wondered at, as if it were difficult and inexplicable, since an example of such facility is at hand in secular writings too. You see today a wholly different story composed out of Virgil, the material fitted to the verses and the verses to the material. Hosidius Geta, for instance, sucked out a complete tragedy, Medea, from Virgil. A certain relative of mine, among other leisure products of his pen, unfolded the Tablet of Cebes from the same poet. Those too are usually called Homerocentones who, out of the poems of Homer, patch together works of their own into one body, in the manner of a patchwork, from many pieces taken here and there. And the divine writings are certainly more fertile for furnishing any material. Nor am I afraid to say that the Scriptures themselves were so arranged by the will of God as to supply material for heretics, since I read that there must be heresies, which cannot exist without the Scriptures.

It will be asked from whom comes the interpretation of the sense of the passages that serve heresies. From the devil, of course, whose part it is to pervert the truth, who rivals even the very things of the divine sacraments in the mysteries of idols. He too baptizes some, his own believers and faithful, of course; he promises the putting away of sins from a washing; and, if I still remember, Mithras there signs his soldiers on their foreheads; he celebrates also an offering of bread, and brings in an image of resurrection, and under the sword wins a crown. What of the fact that he also appoints a high priest who has married only once? He also has his virgins; he also has his continent. Further, if we unroll the superstitions of Numa Pompilius, if we consider the priestly offices, insignia, and privileges, the sacrificial services and instruments and vessels of the sacrifices themselves, and the elaborate rules of expiations and vows, has not the devil plainly imitated that meticulousness of the Jewish law? He who so jealously set out to copy, in the business of idolatry, the very things by which the sacraments of Christ are administered, surely, with the same mind, also desired and was able to adapt the instruments of divine things and of Christian holy things, sense from sense, words from words, parables from parables, to a profane and rival faith. So no one ought to doubt either that the spiritual forces of wickedness from which heresies too come were sent in by the devil, or that heresies are not far removed from idolatry, since they are of the same author and work as idolatry. They either invent another God opposed to the Creator, or, if they confess the one Creator, they describe him otherwise than he truly is. So every lie that they tell about God is in some way a kind of idolatry.

I will not omit a description of the heretics' way of life too: how futile, how earthly, how merely human it is, without seriousness, without authority, without discipline, as befits their faith. To begin with, it is uncertain who is a catechumen and who a believer; they come in alike, listen alike, pray alike, even heathen, if any happen to come in; they will throw what is holy to the dogs, and pearls, though not real ones, to the swine. They want the overthrow of discipline to be simplicity, and our care for it they call pandering. They make peace indiscriminately with everyone. For it makes no difference to them, though they hold different views, provided they conspire together to storm the one truth. All are puffed up; all promise knowledge. Their catechumens are perfect before they are taught. And the heretical women themselves, how forward they are! They dare to teach, to dispute, to perform exorcisms, to promise cures, perhaps even to baptize. Their ordinations are rash, careless, inconstant. Now they appoint novices, now men bound to the world, now our apostates, to bind them by honor, since they cannot by truth. Nowhere is promotion easier than in the camp of rebels, where merely to be there is a merit. So one man is bishop today, another tomorrow; he is a deacon today who is a reader tomorrow; he is a presbyter today who is a layman tomorrow. For they impose priestly functions even on laymen.

And what shall I say about their ministry of the word, since their business is not to convert the heathen but to overturn our people? They seek the greater glory in bringing about the fall of those who stand rather than the raising of those who lie fallen. Since their very work comes not from building anything of their own but from destroying the truth, they undermine our buildings in order to build their own. Take away from them the law of Moses and the prophets and God the Creator, and they have nothing to accuse. So it happens that they bring about the ruin of standing buildings more easily than the raising of fallen ruins. Only for these works do they act humble, smooth, and submissive. Otherwise they know no reverence even for their own leaders. And this is why there are hardly any schisms among heretics: because when there are, they do not show. For schism is their very unity. I am lying if they do not even differ among themselves from their own rules, since each one adjusts what he has received to his own choice, just as the one who handed it down composed it by his own choice. The development of the thing recognizes its nature and the character of its origin. What was permitted to Valentinus was permitted to the Valentinians, what to Marcion to the Marcionites: to innovate the faith by their own choice. In short, all the heresies, examined thoroughly, are found to disagree with their own founders in many points. Most of them do not even have churches: without mother, without see, bereft of faith, exiles, they wander in their own worthlessness.

The heretics' dealings with very many magicians, with charlatans, with astrologers, with philosophers have also been noted, as people devoted, of course, to curiosity. “Seek, and you will find” they everywhere remember. So the quality of their faith can be judged from their kind of life too. Discipline is the index of doctrine. They deny that God is to be feared. So all things are free and unrestrained for them. But where is God not feared, except where he is not? Where God is not, there is no truth either. Where there is no truth, such discipline is only fitting. But where God is, there is the fear of God, which is the beginning of wisdom. Where the fear of God is, there is seriousness, honorable and awed diligence, anxious care, tested selection, deliberate communion, earned promotion, religious submission, devoted service, modest bearing, a united church, and all things of God.

So these testimonies of the stricter discipline among us are added to the proof of the truth, from which it profits no one to turn aside who remembers the judgment to come, when we must all stand before the judgment seat of Christ, giving account first of all of faith itself. What then will they say who have defiled her by heretical adultery, the virgin handed down by Christ? They will allege, I suppose, that nothing was ever declared to them by him or by his apostles about perverse and crooked doctrines to come, and no command given that they be guarded against and abhorred. They will rather acknowledge that the fault was his and his apostles', for not having forearmed us. They will add besides much about the authority of each heretical teacher: that they most of all confirmed the credibility of their teaching, raised the dead, healed the sick, foretold the future, so that they deserved to be believed as apostles. As if it were not written that many would come who would work even the greatest miracles to fortify the deceit of a corrupt preaching! So they will deserve pardon! But if any, mindful of the Lord's and the apostles' writings and warnings, have stood firm in the whole faith, they will, I suppose, be in danger of not being pardoned, the Lord answering: “I had plainly foretold that there would be teachers of deceit in my name, and in that of the prophets and apostles too, and I had commanded my disciples to preach the same things to you; but of course you were not expected to believe it! Once for all I had entrusted the gospel and the teaching of the same rule to my apostles; afterwards it pleased me to change some of it. I had promised a resurrection, even of the flesh; but I thought better of it, in case I could not fulfill it. I had shown that I was born of a virgin; but afterwards it seemed shameful to me. I had called him Father who makes the sun and the rain; but another, better father adopted me. I had forbidden you to lend an ear to heretics; but I was wrong.” Such things those take it upon themselves to suppose who stray off course and do not guard against danger to the faith of the truth. But for now we have argued in general against all heresies, that they must be repelled from any comparison of Scriptures by sure, just, and necessary prescriptions. For the rest, if the grace of God grants it, we will also answer some of them in particular. To those who read this through at leisure in the faith of the truth, peace and the grace of our God Jesus Christ forever.