Prescription against Heretics 8

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.