Prescription against Heretics 40

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.