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HE it is then of whom the Prophet says: "For in Thee is God, and there
is no God beside Thee. For Thou art our God and we knew Thee not, O God of
Israel the Saviour?" Who "afterwards appeared on earth and conversed
with men." Of whom and in whose Person the Prophet David also speaks:
"From my mother's womb Thou art my God:" showing clearly that He who was
Lord and man was never separate from God: in whom even in the Virgin's
womb the fulness of the Godhead dwelt. As elsewhere the same Prophet says:
"Truth has sprung from the earth and righteousness hath looked down from
heaven," that we may know that when the Son of God looked down from
heaven (i.e., came and descended), righteousness was born of the flesh of
the Virgin, no phantasm of a body, but the Truth: for He is the Truth,
according to His own witness of Truth: "I am the Truth and the life."
And so as we have proved in the earlier books that this Truth; viz., the
Lord Jesus Christ, was God when born of the Virgin, let us now do as we
determined to do in the book before this, and show that He who was to be
born of the Virgin, was always declared to be God beforehand. And so the
prophet Isaiah says, "Cease ye from the man whose breath is in his
nostrils, for it is He in whom he is reputed to be;" or as it is more
exactly and clearly in the Hebrew: "for he is reputed high." But by
saying "cease ye," a term which deprecates violence, he admirably denotes
the disturbance of persecution. "Cease ye," he says, "from the man whose
breath is in his nostrils, for he is reputed high." Does he not in one and
the same sentence speak of the taking upon Him of the manhood, and the
truth of His Godhead? "Cease ye," he says, "from the man whose breath is in
his nostrils, for he is reputed high." Does he not, I ask you, seem plainly
to address the Lord's persecutors, and to say, "Cease ye from the man" whom
ye are persecuting, for this man is God: and though He appears in the
lowliness of human flesh, yet He still continues in the high estate of
Divine glory? But by saying "Cease ye from the man whose breath is in his
nostrils," he admirably showed His manhood, by the clearest tokens of a
human body, and this fearlessly and confidently, as one who would as
urgently assert the truth of His humanity as that of His Godhead, for this
is the true and Catholic faith, to believe that the Lord Jesus Christ
possessed the substance of a true body just as He possessed a true and
perfect Divinity. Unless possibly you think that anything can be made out
of the fact that he uses the word "High" instead of "God"; whereas it is
the habit of holy Scripture to put "High" for "God," as where the prophet
says: "the Most High uttered His voice and the earth was moved," and
"Thou alone art Most High over all the earth." Isaiah too, who says
this: "The High and lofty one who inhabiteth eternity": where we are
clearly to understand that as he there puts Most High without adding the
name of God, so here too he speaks of God by the name of Most High. So
then, since the Divine word spoken by the prophet clearly announced
beforehand that the Lord jesus Christ would be both God and man, let us now
see whether the New Testament corresponds to and harmonizes with the
testimony of the Old.
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