Prescription against Heretics 43–44

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.