Miscellanies 7.16.97

For so one can see it in all the heresies, going through the depravity of their doctrines. For when they are overthrown by us, as we show clearly that they oppose the Scriptures, one of two things can be seen done by those who lead the doctrine: they despise either the consistency of their own doctrines or the prophecy itself, or rather their own hope; and each time they choose what seems to them more evident rather than what was spoken by the Lord through the prophets and attested and confirmed by the gospel, and by the apostles as well. Seeing, then, that the danger for them concerns not one doctrine but the preservation of their sects, not the discovery of the truth (for when they met with the things that lie in plain view among us, they despised them as cheap), and eager to go beyond the common faith, they departed from the truth. For not having learned the mysteries of the church's knowledge, nor having taken in the grandeur of the truth, too lazy to go down to the depth of things, they read the Scriptures superficially and passed them by.