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But there follows in your blasphemy that His flesh was made a temple of
the Holy Ghost, for this reason, that John has said: "For I saw the Spirit
descending from heaven and abiding upon Him." For you try to support
even this wild statement of yours by Scriptural authority: wherefore let us
see whether this sacred authority has said that which you say. "For I saw,"
it says, "the Spirit descending like a dove, and abiding upon Him." Discern
here, if you can, which is the more powerful, which greater, which more to
be honoured? He who descended, or He to whom the descent was made? He who
brought down the honour, or He to whom the honour was brought? Where do you
find in this passage that the Spirit made His flesh a temple? or wherein
does it lessen the honour of God, if God Himself descended to show God to
mankind? For certainly we ought not to think that He is less whose high
estate was pointed out, than He who pointed out His high estate. But away
with the thought of believing or making any separation in the Godhead: for
one and the same Godhead and equal power shut out altogether the wicked
notion of inequality. And so in this matter, where there is the Person of
the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, and where it is the Son of
God to whom the descent is made, the Spirit who descends, the Father who
gives His witness, no one had more honour, and no one received any slight,
but it all redounds equally to the fulness of the Godhead, for each Person
of the Trinity contains within Himself the glory of the whole Trinity. And
so nothing further needs to be said, except only to show the rise and
origin of your blasphemy. For thorns and thistles springing up from the
roots produce shoots of their own nature, and from their character show
their origin. So then you also, a thorny offshoot of the Pelagian heresy,
show in germ just the same that your father is said to have had in the
root. For he (as Leporius his follower said) declared that our Lord was
made the Christ by His baptism: you say that at His baptism He was made the
temple of God by the Spirit. The words are not altogether identical: but
the wrong-headedness is altogether the same.
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