On the Trinity 2.11

That the Holy Spirit sits on the throne of the Cherubim and sends forth power. And that Paul knows him to be the Lord of Sabaoth who appeared to Isaiah. And against the Macedonian mind. And that he dwells in us. And that the heretics tamper with the divine Scriptures.

In the most exact singer mentioned before, then, who abounds in all that is needful, in Psalm 109, which was spoken wholly in the person of the Father to the Son, the Holy Trinity is declared, equal in honor, and the Spirit as Lord sending forth power and sitting together with the Father and the Son, plainly rather than in riddles. It seemed good to me, for a ready proof, to write out in order the whole of the sacred [psalm] thus: “The Lord said to my Lord: Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies the footstool of your feet. The Lord will send forth to you a rod of power from Zion; rule in the midst of your enemies. With you is the dominion in the day of your power, in the splendors of the saints. From the womb, before the morning star, I begot you. The Lord has sworn, and will not repent: You are a priest for ever according to the order of Melchizedek. The Lord at your right hand.” For if the Father says to the Son, “Sit at my right hand,” and “The Lord will send forth to you a rod of power,” and “You will rule over your enemies,” and “The Lord has sworn,” and “The Lord at your right hand,” who is it who sends him the rod, and is Lord, if not, finally, the Holy Spirit? So that the Son is found to be at the right hand of the Father, and to have the Spirit of God at his right hand. And it must be remembered that here the Spirit also swears, as one who has none greater, as the Son does when he says, “I swear by myself,” as was mentioned in the first book. But in Psalm 61 too the same David is seen to announce the Holy Trinity, when he sings: “Once God has spoken; these two things I have heard.” And what two? He adds: “That power belongs to God, and to you, O Lord, mercy.” For who is the God who said, “That power belongs to God”? And to whom does he say, “And to you, O Lord, mercy”? And in the case of Daniel, too, in the judgment about Susanna, it says: “God stirred up the Holy Spirit, Daniel”; here too showing that the Holy Spirit is God. For it adds: “And he judged the elders, being filled with the Holy Spirit.”

We would find also Elisha, the most notable among the prophets, deeming it right to know the Holy Spirit as God. His request to Elijah, asking to inherit the Holy Spirit together with the sheepskin, runs thus: “Let the Spirit that is upon you be upon me doubly. And he said: You have asked a hard thing (that is, you have sought great things). Nevertheless, if you see me taken up, it shall be so for you; but if you do not see, it shall not be.” He saw him, then, and cried out: “Father, father, the chariot of Israel and its horseman.” When therefore he “struck” the Jordan with Elijah’s sheepskin, “and the water was not divided” as it had been for Elijah, seeking his own request and the promise given, he no longer said … “[Where is the God] of Elijah, apphō, the double …?” revealing that the Holy Spirit is God, and teaching at the same time that it is the same to say God or Holy Spirit, and conversely. Apphō is a brotherly form of address. And what does Ezekiel prophesy, when, the heavens having been opened to him, he saw a vision of God and the Cherubim? “And when the living creatures stood,” he says, “the wheels stood; and when they rose, they rose; for the Spirit of life was in the wheels”; that is, seated upon the Cherubim. And a little further down he says: “This is the living creature that I saw beneath the God of Israel, and I knew that they are Cherubim.” Having said above that the Spirit is above the Cherubim, further down he said that they are beneath God, that is, the Spirit … the Spirit of God [is] Lord, mighty, and helper. For having said of him that he went with Samson and prospered him, so that he displayed a power greater than human nature, they did not say afterward that the Spirit who empowered him had departed from him, and that for this reason he had grown weak, but the Lord. The passages read thus: “The Spirit of the Lord began to go with Samson”; and again: “The Spirit of the Lord leaped upon him, and a lion’s whelp [came] to meet him; and the Spirit of the Lord prospered him, and he tore it apart as a kid of the goats”; and again: “The foreigners,” it says, “shouted, and ran to meet him” (that is, Samson); “and the Spirit of the Lord prospered him, and the ropes became as when [flax] smells fire.” But when at last, together with his hair, he laid aside his strength too, and reaped from his folly his own ruin, loving beyond measure, as he should not, a foreign woman, Delilah, “He awoke,” it says, “from his sleep, and said: I will go out and shake myself, and do as always. And he did not know that the Lord had departed from him.” For Moses also, having experience of the might of this Lord, said: “How shall one pursue a thousand, and two put ten thousand to flight, unless the Lord had delivered them up, and God had given them over?”

And the King, the Lord of Sabaoth, who appeared to Isaiah seated on a throne high and lifted up, in a house filled with glory, and [hymned] by the Seraphim, … [Isaiah] knows to be the Father, and John the Son; but Paul in the Acts, because of the identity of the Godhead, declared him to be the all-wise Spirit, thus: “The Holy Spirit spoke well to your fathers through Isaiah the prophet, saying: Go to this people and say to them: You shall indeed hear and never understand,” and what follows. But the heretics, proceeding according to their purpose from the beginning, and leading their own aim and argument into the abyss, leap upon this oracle too, and contradict as usual, without good reason, and try to bind and join impiety to impiety, I mean their second and third words to their first, putting forward the argument that nothing wonderful, nothing proper to Godhead, is found concerning the Holy Spirit from Paul’s saying, “The Holy Spirit spoke well to your fathers through Isaiah the prophet, saying: Go to this people and say to them” this and that; because, he says, the same things are often reported as said now in the person of God, now in the person of the prophet or of an angel: as, he says, when John says of this passage, “These things Isaiah said when he saw his glory”; and as the Savior said in Matthew, “Isaiah prophesied well, saying: This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me”; and as Paul said in another chapter, “As David speaks of the blessedness: Blessed are those whose iniquities are forgiven and whose sins are covered”; but he did not say, he says, “As God says through David.” And elsewhere: “And God came to Balaam by night and said to him: If these men have come to call you, rise and follow these men; but the word that I speak to you, this you shall take care to do”; and he did not say to him, he says, “What God said to you,” but “What I say to you.”

Such are the evils in which their affairs stand; and let them not pride themselves as victors. But we, fearing that we might seem to some to use, as they do, the irony of a real sophist, shall take the greatest care for the truth, straight from almost the first syllable to the very end, in refuting them. Know, then, you who are familiar with the meaning of prophecy and with the … prophesied what he commanded him to say word for word; for he who prophesies [for] God is not his own prophet. So that through Isaiah, or from Isaiah (for it is the same thing to say), the mighty voice of him who appeared to him, whom Paul proclaimed to be the Holy Spirit, was announced, when he saw his glory; yet he did not utter it by his own authority, even if it was said somewhere that “Isaiah said,” and not “God the Father, or the Son, or his Spirit, through Isaiah.” Nor indeed were the apostles mistaken, who had been brought up in the Scriptures straight from childhood, and were entrusted with the preaching of the new grace, and who had, through the goodness of the Trinity in unity, what no other man [has] yet … But John too, as they say, is plain even to a blind man in having understood that the Son of God said these things; and Paul, the Holy Spirit. For these blessed hypostases command, and the nature of angels and of all things yields. … because of the unvarying Godhead in relation to the Father, from whom they came forth, and all things are referred to him. This one point, then, is held; and another, that what other could be seen … prophesied [in the] person of God the Father, could seem to be ascribed to him as the speaker? And of what condemnation is he not worthy, who dares to counterfeit the truth about the higher [nature], and wishes to outdo John and Paul, who were neither ignorant nor … wholly out of order with the universe, but ordered with and in harmony with the first, generative, and incomparable nature. For what good thing is not always through him and from him, and also from the only-begotten Son, by the good pleasure of God the Father? When, then, the Hymnist says, “Do not take your Holy Spirit from me”; and Paul, “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?” and adds, “Into what then were you baptized?” if indeed you were not baptized into the Holy Spirit; and the only-begotten God, “It is to your advantage that I go away. For if I do not go away, he will not come, the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father”; and “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you”; and God the Father in Haggai, “I am with you, says the Lord Almighty, and my Spirit stands in your midst”: what shall we say they are asserting, if not that they uttered these things handing down his divine nature and the participation in him, and sanctification, and creative power, which cleanses our life and, as it were, makes it shine, and helps in all things? And when again God the Father says, “Woe, children! You have made a counsel, not through me, and covenants, not through my Spirit,” does he not fittingly blame the wretchedness and misery of the Arians, Eunomians, and Macedonians in their heresy? Besides this we would say that “These things Isaiah said,” and “As David says,” were written so that the divine ordinance might be seen, through which saint it was proclaimed. And about the angel in the story of Balaam we shall say this much: what concerns him has no likeness to what was said properly of the divine Spirit, or of the Son, by Paul and John. For the angel who was sent announced what God had promised to make known to Balaam at a time to come; but he was not understood to be God himself, as the Son and the Holy [Spirit] … [what was revea]led to Isaiah by him who sits on the divine throne and is in light unspeakable and glory incomparable. Here too, then, they try to show that our views are worthless and theirs august, and worthy of more zeal and faith. They work a kind of mingling and concord of the Divine with creatures, and bring down together, without knowing it, the divine conceptions of him who is always the same, those of God the Father himself and of his only-begotten Son; and they hint that Isaiah perhaps sat on the heavenly throne and commanded himself, “Go to this people and say to them” what he was commanded to say. We for our part are frankly astonished if they do not yet perceive the absurdity and weakness of their own opinions, and how ridiculous they are to think such things about God and to twist plain things as though they were hard to decide. And we think we are not mistaken in holding that the long-suffering God, showing those of their sort that there remains to them neither ground for contradiction nor occasion for defense, said through Ezekiel: “If I am Father, where is my glory?” But so much for this; we must go on to what our discourse set out for.

Let us see what Paul says again, writing to the Philippians: “Look out for the mutilation; for we are the circumcision, who worship by the Spirit of God and boast in Christ Jesus.” The Holy Spirit, then, is God, receiving every sacrifice offered up, together with the Father and the Son; for it is plain that worship is owed to God alone. But see, you heretical crows, how they have tried to corrupt the divine sayings by the change of one letter: for some of them have made it “who worship God by the Spirit,” so that the worship might not be shown to be offered to the Spirit of … Just as also, when Paul wrote in the Epistle to the Corinthians, “But if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus Christ from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you,” they changed it and made it “because of his Spirit who dwells in you,” so that he might not be shown to be life-giving and creative. And when he wrote to the Romans, “His eternal power and divinity,” they made it “Godhead”; it is the same; but nevertheless, in order to narrow the proofs about the Spirit of great name, those that show him to be God from his being called a divine Spirit. And when the prophet Amos said in the person of the Holy Spirit, “Behold, I who make firm the thunder,” they removed the “I,” so that the voice might not be shown to be the Holy Spirit’s, but the Father’s, or the prophet’s. But it is not the Father and God’s, because it has “announcing his Christ to men,” and does not say “my Christ,” as he says in a psalm: “I have prepared a lamp for my Christ.” And in many places they are seen to have wounded [the text] on purpose, and thereby to have destroyed, as far as in them lies, the exact discernment of the corrupted places. And this would not yet be dreadful, though it is very dreadful, if books thus falsified by them had not come down [to us], and [books] of such tampering.

On the Holy Spirit's renewing us in baptism; and setting us free as Master; and making us partakers of divine glory, and sons and heirs of the Father; and the rest. And on baptism being of no profit to those who do not believe that the Spirit is God; and that there is one glory of the sun, another of the moon, and another of the stars.

But so much is enough on these things, so that the discourse may not wander far in digression. Let us return again to the munificent Godhead of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit, then, renews us in baptism, as God, together with the Father and the Son, and brings us back from unsightliness to the original beauty, and fills us with his grace, so that we can no longer make room for anything unlovely; and he sets us free from sin and death; and from earthly men, that is, from dust and ashes, he makes us spiritual, and partakers of divine glory, and sons and heirs of God and the Father, conformed to the image of the Son, and his fellow heirs, and brothers who will be glorified together and reign together with him; and in place of earth he gives us heaven again, and bestows paradise ungrudgingly; and he makes us even now more honored than angels; … of the Holy Spirit, the restoration to paradise; the ascent to the kingdom of heaven; the [restoration] to adoption … and with the divine streams of the font he quenches the great unquenchable flame of Gehenna. For men have two births, one from our body, the other from the divine Spirit. And about each of these both the name and the account itself [are given]. John: “But as many as received him, to them he gave power to become children of God, to those who believe in his name; who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of a man, but of God.” As many, he says, as believed in Christ received power to become children of God, that is, of the Holy Spirit, and to acquire a kinship with God of which the angels were not deemed worthy. For showing that the God who begets is the Holy Spirit, he added from Christ: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not marvel that I said to you: You must be born from above. The Spirit breathes where he wills, and you hear his voice, but you do not know where he comes from and where he goes. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit.” By saying, “Unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God,” and “You must be born from above,” he signified that even if [they are baptized] into the na[me] … where their worm does not die and the fire is not quench[ed] … and are not [baptized] equally and likewise into the same Godhead of the Holy Spirit, since they do not have what is perfect, and have received the three immersions in vain, by changing after baptism the equal honor of the Trinity in their doxology and transgressing their own confessions, they cannot be deemed worthy of the kingdom of heaven; but as avowed transgressors they hear from the saints what was prophesied in Psalm 80: “The enemies of the Lord lied to him”; and from the Son, as it is in Psalm 17: “Foreign sons lied to me”; and in Psalm 100: “Those who commit transgressions I hated; a crooked heart did not cleave to me”; and from the Holy Spirit, as was written to the Romans … “I have begotten sons and raised them up, but they have rejected me” … [knowing] God, they did not glorify him as God. And after other words: Who exchanged the glory of God for a lie. And in Isaiah: “I have begotten sons …”; “In the greatness of your power your enemies will lie to you.”

And he said, “One must be born of water,” because the washing away of the body’s filth in baptism is a token of those who are being re-created by the Holy Spirit. For visibly the font gives birth to our visible body, with priests ministering; but spiritually the Spirit of God, invisible to every understanding, baptizes into himself and regenerates body and soul together, with angels serving. For the Baptist too, historically and in keeping with “of water and the Spirit,” said of Christ: “He will baptize you in the Holy Spirit and fire.” For the human vessel, being of earthenware, needs first the cleansing from water, then the spiritual fire that makes it firm (for God is a consuming fire), and so the Holy Spirit who perfects and renews it; since the spiritual fire knows how to water, and the water how to recast. Proof of this is Paul, writing to the Corinthians the second time: “But we have this treasure in earthen vessels.” And by saying, “What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit,” he taught in brief that the man who has not received baptism is fleshly, that is, without share in heavenly light (for it is clear that the flesh is understood, as long as it lives, together with its own soul); but the baptized man is spiritual, that is, a partaker of immortal life. And by saying, “The Spirit breathes where he wills,” he shows his free authority and almighty power. And by saying, “And you hear his voice, but you do not know where he comes from and where he goes,” he shows that he was not then conversing with Nicodemus alone, but was also accusing beforehand Arius, Eunomius, and Macedonius, who hear the voice of the Holy Spirit through the Scriptures and do not know how he comes, having proceeded without beginning from the Father, he who is always present everywhere, and goes to him, as his Spirit, inseparable in Godhead. For he came forth from him ineffably by nature, and is turned back toward him; and he has his procession from the Father, as proceeding from him; but [his return] only toward the Father, as being one and the same [with him]; and having come forth, he returns to the one who begot, as being of one and the same substance, and unable to come to be outside coexistence with the Father. And by saying, “So is everyone who is born of the Spirit,” he teaches that the Spirit of God begets a spiritual man, and he is called spiritual from that state, as one born of a man is called a man. The Singer, at any rate, exclaims over such a one: “Your youth shall be renewed like the eagle’s,” and “Blessed are those whose iniquities are forgiven and whose sins are covered.”

And Paul, establishing that he possesses by nature the name of God, wrote to Titus, as was said above: “Having regenerated us through the washing of rebirth and renewal of the Holy Spirit”; and to the Romans: “But if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you received the Spirit of adoption, by whom we cry: Abba, Father. The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God; and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ”; and to Timothy in the second Epistle: “For God did not give us a spirit of slavery, but of power and of lo[ve …]” … that he is speaking of the [divine] Spirit is clear also from his saying, “For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you received the Spirit of adoption.” For having already, of course, our own [spirit], we received also God’s. And this is clear also from his adding that “The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit.” See, then, how wonderfully he declares the Holy Spirit to be Master. For he who is not a slave is free; and he who sets free is a master; for no one gives to another what he himself does not have. And he who leads to adoption and inheritance is God, having communion of substance and lordship with him of whose adoption and inheritance he deems us worthy. He writes of Christ as heir, as Son by nature; but of us, as … fellow heirs of Christ, because of his … love. And he cries in us on our behalf: “Abba,” which is “Father”; since we are neither genuine sons, as he is a genuine Spirit, and are besides without boldness for such a cry: “For who that is mortal by birth could come face to face with the great God, or speak a word?” And to the Galatians, about those who have been baptized, he says: “You are no longer a slave but a son; and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ.” And to the Corinthians he writes the same: “But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.” Observe, then, from these sayings too, that redemption, sanctification, and justification are not given without the name of the divine Spirit.

And again in the Acts, it says, he asked certain disciples: “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?” And when they answered, “We have not even heard whether there is a Holy Spirit,” he said: “Into what then were you baptized?” as though they had had no profit from not believing and being baptized equally into the Holy Spirit, as they had believed into the Father and the Son. And further the Acts declare baptism unprofitable without the visitation of the divine Spirit and his sanctification, in words like these: “Now when the apostles in Jerusalem heard that Samaria had received the word of God, they sent to them Peter and John, who came down and prayed for them that they might receive the Holy Spirit. For he had not yet fallen upon any of them, but they had only been baptized into the name of the Lord Jesus. Then they laid their hands on them, and they received the Holy Spirit.” For its saying, “But they had only been baptized into the name of the Lord Jesus,” and that they received the Spirit afterward, shows not only that the knowledge of the Spirit as God was lacking to them …; but also that with the Son and the Spirit the Father and God is present together, and is mentioned together, and does good together, even if he is sometimes not named individually; or again, even if the Son or the Spirit is passed over in silence in speech, though not in faith, he is present together, and is mentioned together, and saves together with God and the Father. And again: “And while staying with them, [he char]ged them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father, which you heard from me: that John baptized with water, but you will be baptized in the Holy Spirit not many days from now”; and again from Peter, about those baptized in Caesarea: “And as I began to speak, the Holy Spirit fell on them, just as on us at the beginning; and I remembered the word of the Lord, how he said: John baptized with water, but you will be baptized in the Holy Spirit.” Those, then, who [are] baptized in the bare name of the Holy Spirit, and not as in the name of God and the Spirit of God, who is his Spirit by nature, … hope.

For going down into the font, by the good pleasure of God and the Father, we are stripped of our sins by the grace of his Spirit, putting off the old man, and by his royal power we are regenerated and sealed; and coming up, we put on Christ the Savior, an incorruptible robe, equal in honor to the Holy Spirit who regenerated and sealed us (“For as many of you,” it says, “as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ”); and we receive back the image and likeness of God of which Scripture speaks, which we received through the divine inbreathing and lost through sin; and we are found again such as we were made in the first-formed man … the image and likeness; so that Paul’s writing about the baptized fits: “That you may become according to the image of him who created you”; and “As we have borne the image of the earthly, we shall bear also the image of the heavenly.” And the same writer will persuade [us] about this, writing again, to the Romans: “Those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers”; and to the Ephesians: “And when we were dead in trespasses, he made us alive together with Christ, and raised us up together and seated us together in the heavenly places.” Who gave these things, or when? The Father, with our being renewed by his Holy Spirit. For as at first we were created by the blessed Trinity, according to “Let us make man,” so the second time we are saved by it, so that we may glorify the Trinity alike. But without being regenerated in baptism by the Spirit of God, and sealed with sanctification, and becoming his temple, no one has obtained the heavenly goods, even if he was found blameless in the rest of his life. But those too who happened to bear witness as martyrs before baptism, washed in their own blood, were thus given life by the Holy Spirit of God. Therefore a man who speaks sacred things cries, at once exhorting and bearing witness: “Come to him and be enlightened, and your faces shall not be ashamed.” For the true light, and the cause of sensible light, and the glory that shines out everywhere, is the venerable Spirit, of whom he sings again: “For your commandments are light upon the earth.” Of this he teaches also in Psalm 28: “The voice of the Lord is upon the waters; the God of glory thundered; the Lord is upon many waters”; … [into sins] both voluntary and, often, involuntary we fall, because of the weakness of nature … “The earth shook.” For by the waters he signifies baptism, in which, at the hands of the priests, there is much working, as the same writer sings; by the thunder he hints at the grace of baptism, which has reached everywhere and is received with fear; by the wheel, the unstable and strange life; by the lightnings, the godly beauties of those being enlightened; and by the shaking of the earth he shows that humanity was moved with eagerness to the knowledge of God.

And when the Master was baptized in the dispensation, in order to kill the dragon who took the Jordan into his mouth on the waters, as Job relates in a riddle, and [to destroy] our sin, and to make [us] tread upon serpents and scorpions, and upon all the power of the enemy, and at the same time to teach all that rebirth is salvation for men, the Holy Spirit was present, as was the Father. For the one bore witness from heaven … “his lightnings to the world; [the earth] saw and was shaken” … the heads of the dragons and of the dragon upon … against which the dragons work, and their leader, as it is written, reigning in the waters … and [to] the genuineness of his own offspring; and the Holy Spirit, when the heavens were opened to him, as to a king and to one higher than the nature of angels, came down and remained upon the Son of God. For it says: “Behold, the heavens were opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove.” Consider, then, what the Holy Spirit is, since he makes his own temple, us, sit together with the Most High God, be glorified together, and reign together, and when he remains upon the only-begotten God; and whether the heretics speak piously in saying that he does not reign together with God the Father. Yet let it not be thought that the Holy Spirit of God sits together, is glorified together, and reigns together with God in the same way as we creatures, who hope for such great things in so great a nakedness of good works; but as his Spirit, and by nature God and King, and sitting with him eternally, and full of undefiled glory. For creatures will be deemed worthy of these things by grace after the resurrection, enjoying the goods of the kingdom, but not being kings. For Scripture knows one glory of the sun, another of the moon and stars, and among these again a different glory. “For star,” it says, “differs from star in glory.” And the eye is more honored than the other members of the body; yet it too is body; so that we, renewed, enjoy divine kinship so far as the power of our nature allows, as they say.

And Peter, extolling baptism as divine, since the Holy Spirit who re-creates us is God, uttered through the first Epistle a universal proclamation, declaring this: “Having been born again, not of [perishable] seed … abiding.” For he feared him who commanded in the Gospel according to Mark: “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to the whole creation. He who believes and is baptized will be saved; but he who does not believe will be condemned.” And what is the preaching? “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” Which Paul too kept when he wrote: “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God and the Father, and the communion of the Holy Spirit, be with you all.” This spiritual communion [Peter shows] also [in] … “that you may become partakers of the divine nature.” And who are the unbe[lievers, but those] who do not keep the equal honor of the Holy Trinity? To whom he gave charge again through Paul in the Epistle to the Galatians: “There are some who trouble you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ; but even if an angel from heaven should preach to you otherwise than what you have been taught, let him be accursed. And again I say: If anyone preaches to you contrary to what you received, let him be accursed.” By the tradition not to be transgressed he meant his divine command spoken before, not that of the Arians, Eunomians, and Macedonians, who received this name from those whose opinion they followed, and who, despising the divine proclamations, made their prating a law; nor of the others … “Whatever counsels of the immortal God he reveals, these hold most securely, mortal as you are; and let not your mind, deceived by deceitful men, …”