God

for whom the Lord loves he disciplines, and scourges every son whom he receives.

As for the cause of one who fails to choose the better part, God is not to blame.

"And you, speak to all the wise in understanding, whom I have filled with the spirit of perception.

"The Lord gave, the Lord has taken away;

to have God established within oneself through memory.

At the very beginning of the day, to hasten to prayer, and to honour the Creator with hymns and songs;

Now the Law of Nature is so unalterable, that it cannot be changed even by God himself.

“What nation is there so great who hath God so nigh unto them, as the Lord our God is in all things that we call upon him for?

The very meaning of the words divine voluntary right, shows that it springs from the divine will, by which it is distinguished from natural law, which, it has already been observed, is called divine also.

but I know and confess one God, glorified in three persons — the Father, I mean, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit — yet in one nature and essence, in one glory and kingdom undivided.

"If you wish to learn who my Master is, it is the Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of those who reign and Lord of those who rule, who alone has immortality, dwelling in unapproachable light, who is glorified with the Father and the Holy Spirit.

' Now one of the aforesaid angelic powers, a leader of one host, having in himself no trace whatever of natural evil from the Creator, but having come into being for good, by his own free choice turned from the good to the evil, and was lifted up in madness, wishing to rise against the Master and God.

Which of these suits your Christ, Marcion, to the desert of confusion?

To be sure, the most mild god threatens, since he neither judges nor grows angry!

Even now, the god of Marcion, who opposes marriage, how can he seem a lover of little ones, whose whole cause is marriage?

It is best to suffer what you cannot mend, and to attend without murmuring upon God, by whose authorship all things come to pass;

" If God adds the morrow, let us receive it gladly.

Let us give thanks to God that no one can be held fast in life.

For it follows that, having professed the soul to be from the breath of God, we should assign it a beginning.

For some wish there to be in it another natural substance, namely spirit, as though to live were one thing, which comes from the soul, and to breathe another, which is done by the spirit.

’ For he, against the faith of Scripture itself, turns breath into spirit, so that — since it is incredible that the Spirit of God should come into transgression and then into judgment — the soul should rather be believed to be from matter than from the Spirit of God.

as indeed is generally recognized, since we speak of the gods as blessed and happy, and also blessed is the term that we apply to the most godlike men;

it strikes us as absurd that the gods should be referred to our standards, and this is what praising them amounts to, since praise, as we said, involves a reference of its object to something else.

Indeed it seems that Eudoxus took a good line in advocating the claims of pleasure to the prize of highest excellence, when he held that the fact that pleasure, though a good, is not praised, is an indication that it is superior to the things we praise, as God and the Good are, because they are the standards to which everything else is referred.

Therefore is he true and so great.

Will you have us prove him from the testimony of the soul itself?

Thus the force of his greatness sets him before men both as known and as unknown.

rightly a judge, because Lord;

that He is the only one, the best, we learn from His Christ — who, enjoining love, after His own toward our neighbour, will Himself also do what He has commanded.

For each man, cast down or moved from the standing of the hope he had received in the Creator, is easily turned aside to suspecting, even of his own accord, an author of another hope.

Even among the motives which incite men to acts of religion, the invisible Legislator has ordained rewards and punishments.

I do not, by any means, speak of the justice of God, which is of another kind, and refers immediately to rewards and punishments in a life to come.

If this were the true standard, the smallest irreverence to the divine Being ought to be punished with infinitely more severity, than the assassination of a monarch.

Let the prophetic voice come forward as our witness, accordant with truth, pitying those who are worn down by ignorance and folly:

the second and other, in this their error, that they reckon as existing the things that are not, and call gods these things that do not truly exist — nay, do not exist at all, but have got only the name.

through which the fathers of children are good, those who have run to the Father;

Love the human race.

"May you grant joy to the immortal gods and to us.

The gods, being immortal, are not vexed that throughout so long an age they must always bear with men so many and so worthless;

So too he will be first, because all things are after him;

Diligently does Scripture support us, which has distinguished both names for him and shown each in its own time.

Nay, he even puts it before God, and rather subjects God to Matter, when he wishes him to have made all things out of Matter.

And so, on the day of his subjugation, the Jews fulfilled the seventy weeks foretold in Daniel.

For in this law given to Adam we recognize all the precepts contained which afterwards sprang up, given through Moses — that is:

Yet we have God himself as a worthy promiser and a faithful surety, who promised Abraham that in his seed all the nations of the earth would be blessed, and that from the womb of Rebecca two peoples and two nations would come forth — namely the Jews, that is Israel, and the nations, that is our own.

"Because the Father is greater than I.

Or was it that, because he himself was Father, Son, and Spirit, he therefore made himself plural and spoke to himself plurally?

So then, after due interval, the Father is proclaimed as born and the Father as having suffered — God himself, the almighty Lord, Jesus Christ.

For to his own Lord a man stands or falls:

Therefore, of adultery — which is also a matter of fornication — according to the work of the crime, how great a wickedness it should be esteemed, the first law of God is at hand.

" If pardon be revocable, how shall I flee, being about to be an adulterer again?

Cyrus replied to this, will it not be a very good thing for us to suggest to the army a debate on this question:

in the case of those who will not compel themselves to work out their own good, he assigns others to be their commanders.

And without hesitation, Cyrus replied:

But the Lord answers that what is impossible with men is possible with God.

to know God the eternal, the giver of things eternal, the first and supreme and one and good God.

For God does not compel—since force is hateful to God—but to those who seek He provides, and to those who ask He grants, and to those who knock He opens.

God Himself says this speaking through the voice of nature;

For they showed that God was the founder and ruler of the universe, and especially that being the Father of all mankind, He had not separated human beings, as He had the rest of living things, into different species and various divisions, but had willed them to be of one race and to be known by one name;

But although He reserves to himself the final punishment, slow and unseen but none the less inevitable, yet He appoints to intervene in human affairs two judges whom the luckiest of sinners does not escape, namely, Conscience, or the innate estimation of oneself, and Public Opinion, or the estimation of others.

And has not God, Adeimantus, left the drones which have wings and fly stingless one and all, while of the drones here who travel afoot he has made some stingless but has armed others with terrible stings?

Because, said I, if he should make only two, there would again appear one of which they both would possess the form or idea, and that would be the couch that really is in and of itself, and not the other two.

Or shall we say that they are created by reason and by divine knowledge that comes from God?

but now, looking at you and considering that you think they are created by God, I also adopt that view.

Shall we say that they came into being, not having been before, in any other way than through God’s workmanship?

We therefore, willing to take away all suspicion of hypocrisy, and of such double dealing with God and His Kirk, protest and call the Searcher of all hearts for witness, that our minds and hearts do fully agree with this our confession, promise, oath, and subscription:

and therefore we believe with our hearts, confess with our mouths, subscribe with our hands, and constantly affirm before God and the whole world, that this only is the true Christian faith and religion, pleasing God, and bringing salvation to man, which now is by the mercy of God revealed to the world by the preaching of the blessed evangel, and received, believed, and defended by many and sundry …

Charles, that all Kings and Princes at their coronation and reception of their princely authority, shall make their faithful promise by their solemn oath in the presence of the Eternal God, that during the whole time of their lives they shall serve the same Eternal God to the utmost of their power, according as He hath required in His most Holy Word, contained in the Old and New Testaments, and ac …

Shall more be lawful to human will than to divine power?

For even if He prefers the works of righteousness, yet not without the sacrifice which is the soul afflicted by fastings.

He reprobates also those who command to abstain from foods—but out of the providence of the Holy Spirit, condemning beforehand the heretics who would enjoin a perpetual abstinence to destroy and despise the works of the Creator: