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Accordingly, though the obscurity of the divine word has certainly
this advantage, that it causes many opinions about the truth to be
started and discussed, each reader seeing some fresh meaning in it,
yet, whatever is said to be meant by an obscure passage should be
either confirmed by the testimony of obvious facts, or should be
asserted in other and less ambiguous texts. This obscurity is
beneficial, whether the sense of the author is at last reached after
the discussion of many other interpretations, or whether, though that
sense remain concealed, other truths are brought out by the discussion
of the obscurity. To me it does not seem incongruous with the working
of God, if we understand that the angels were created when that first
light was made, and that a separation was made between the holy and the
unclean angels, when, as is said, "God divided the light from the
darkness; and God called the light Day, and the darkness He called
Night." For He alone could make this discrimination, who was able
also before they fell, to foreknow that they would fall, and that,
being deprived of the light of truth, they would abide in the darkness
of pride. For, so far as regards the day and night, with which we
are familiar, He commanded those luminaries of heaven that are obvious
to our senses to divide between the light and the darkness. "Let
there be," He says, "lights in the firmament of the heaven, to
divide the day from the night;" and shortly after He says, "And
God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the
lesser light to rule the night: the stars also. And God set them in
the firmament of the heaven, to give light upon the earth, and to rule
over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the
darkness." But between that light, which is the holy company of the
angels spiritually radiant with the illumination of the truth, and that
opposing darkness, which is the noisome foulness of the spiritual
condition of those angels who are turned away from the light of
righteousness, only He Himself could divide, from whom their
wickedness (not of nature, but of will), while yet it was future,
could not be hidden or uncertain.
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