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| Recapitulation of the Apology. PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP
43. Moreover, I pointed out
clearly that it is habitual to him to disparage all good men, and that,
if he can find something to blame in one man after another of those who
are highly esteemed and have gained a name in literature, he thinks
that he has added to his own reputation. I shewed also how shamefully
some of Christ’s2995
2995 Sacerdotes. This is almost always
applied to Bishops. Here the allusion is chiefly to Jerome’s
attack upon Ambrose. See Sect. 23–25. | priests have
been assailed by him; and how he has spared neither the monks nor the
virgins, nor those who live in continency, whom he had praised before;
how he has defamed in his lampoons every order and degree of
Christians; how shamefully and foully he assailed even Ambrose, that
saintly man, the memory of whose illustrious life still lives in the
hearts of all men: how even Didymus, whom he had formerly ranked among
the seer-prophets and Apostles, now he places among those whose
teaching diverges from that of the churches; how he brands with the
marks of ignorance or of folly every single writer of ancient and of
modern days; and finally does not spare even the martyrs. All these
things I have brought to the proof of his own works and his own
testimony, not to that of external witnesses. I have gone through each
particular, and have brought out the evidence from those very books of
his which he most commends, books which alone he excepted as containing
nothing of which he needed to repent, while he says that he repents of
all his other sayings and writings; not that his repentance is sincere,
but that he is driven into such straits that he must choose either to
feign penitence or to forfeit the vantage ground which enables him to
bite and wound any one whom he pleases. I therefore preferred not to
touch his other writings, so that his conviction might come out of
those alone out of which he had himself closed the door of repentance.
Last of all I have shown that he has altered the sacred books which the
Apostles had committed to the churches as the trustworthy deposit of
the Holy Spirit, and that he who calls out about the audacity shewn in
translating mere human works himself commits the greater crime of
subverting the divine oracles.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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