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THE tales of poets tell us that of old the hydra when its heads were
cut off gained by its injuries, and sprang up more abundantly: so that
owing to a miracle of a strange and unheard-of kind, its loss proved a kind
of gain to the monster which was thus increased by death, while that
extraordinary fecundity doubled everything which the knife of the
executioner cut off, until the man who was eagerly seeking its destruction,
toiling and sweating, and finding his efforts so often baffled by useless
labours, added to the courage of battle the arts of craft, and by the
application of fire, as they tell us, cut off with a fiery sword the
manifold offspring of that monstrous body; and so when the inward parts
were thus burnt, by cauterizing the rebellious throbbings of that ghastly
fecundity, at length those prodigious births were brought to an end. Thus
also heresies in the churches bear some likeness to that hydra which the
poets' imagination invented; for they too hiss against us with deadly
tongues; and they too cast forth their deadly poison, and spring up again
when their heads are cut off. But because the medicine should not be
wanting when the disease revives, and because the remedy should be the more
speedy as the sickness is the more dangerous, our Lord God is able to bring
to pass that that may be a truth in the church's warfare, which Gentile
fictions imagined of the death of the hydra, and that the fiery sword of
the Holy Spirit may cauterize the inward parts of that most dangerous
birth, in the new heresy to be put down, so that at last its monstrous
fecundity may cease to answer to its dying throbs.
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