Letter 105

105. To the Deaconesses, the Daughters of Count Terentius

When I came to Samosata I had expected to meet your orderly company; and when I failed of the meeting, I bore the loss with no small distress, considering when it might again be possible for me to draw near to your region, or agreeable to you to come to ours. But let these things lie in the will of the Lord.

For the present, since I found the son Sophronius setting out toward you, I gladly gave him this letter, to carry you a greeting and to make known our mind — that by the grace of God we do not cease to remember you, and to give thanks for you to the Lord that you are good shoots of a good root, fruitful in good works, and truly as lilies among thorns. For that, surrounded by such great perversity on the part of those who corrupt the word of truth, you have not given way to their deceits, nor abandoned the apostolic preaching of the faith to be carried over to the novelty now in fashion — how is this not worthy of great thanksgiving to God, and how does it not most justly earn you great praise? You have believed in the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit; do not betray this deposit. The Father is the origin of all; the Son is the only-begotten, born from him, true God, perfect from perfect, the living image, showing the whole Father in himself; the Holy Spirit has its existence from God, is the fountain of holiness, the power that bestows life, the grace that perfects, through whom man is adopted as a son and the mortal is made immortal — joined to the Father and the Son in all things, in glory and in eternity, in power and in kingship, in lordship and in godhead, as the tradition of saving baptism also testifies.

But those who call either the Son or the Spirit a creature, or who in any way bring it down into the ministering and servile rank, are far from the truth; their company we should flee and their words we should turn away from as poison to souls. And if the Lord should ever grant us to be together, we shall set out for you more fully the arguments concerning the faith, so that, with proofs from Scripture, you may recognize both the strength of the truth and the rottenness of the heresy.