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| Chapter X.—The Christians Worship the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
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That we are not atheists, therefore, seeing that
we acknowledge one God, uncreated, eternal, invisible, impassible,
incomprehensible, illimitable, who is apprehended by the understanding
only and the reason, who is encompassed by light, and beauty, and spirit,
and power ineffable, by whom the universe has been created through His
Logos, and set in order, and is kept in being—I have sufficiently
demonstrated. [I say “His Logos”], for we acknowledge also
a Son of God. Nor let any one think it ridiculous that God should have
a Son. For though the poets, in their fictions, represent the gods as
no better than men, our mode of thinking is not the same as theirs,
concerning either God the Father or the Son. But the Son of God is the
Logos of the Father, in idea and in operation; for after the pattern
of Him and by Him727
| 727 “Or,
by Him and through Him.” [Kaye, pp. 155, 175.] |
were all things made, the Father and the Son being one. And, the Son
being in the Father and the Father in the Son, in oneness and power
of spirit, the understanding and reason (νοῦς καὶ
λόγος) of the Father is the Son of
God. But if, in your surpassing intelligence,728
it occurs to you to inquire
what is meant by the Son, I will state briefly that He is the first
product of the Father, not as having been brought into existence
(for from the beginning, God, who is the eternal mind [νοῦς],
had the Logos in Himself, being from eternity
instinct with Logos [λογικός]);
but inasmuch as He came forth to be the idea and energizing power of
all material things, which lay like a nature without attributes, and an
inactive earth, the grosser particles being mixed up with the lighter.
The prophetic Spirit also agrees with our statements. “The
Lord,” it says, “made me, the beginning of His
ways to His works.”729
The Holy Spirit Himself also, which operates
in the prophets, we assert to be an effluence of God, flowing from Him,
and returning back again like a beam of the sun. Who, then, would not
be astonished to hear men who speak of God the Father, and of God the
Son, and of the Holy Spirit,730
| 730
[Compare Theophilus, supra, p. 101, and Kaye’s note,
p. 156.] | and who declare both their power in union and their
distinction in order, called atheists? Nor is our teaching in what relates
to the divine nature confined to these points; but we recognise also a
multitude of angels and ministers,731
whom God the Maker and
Framer of the world distributed and appointed
to their several posts by His Logos,
to occupy themselves about the elements, and the heavens, and the world,
and the things in it, and the goodly ordering of them all.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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