unto you.”2339 What is this? “If I by the Spirit of God cast out devils,” He saith, and your
children, to whom I have given no hurtful and deceitful doctrine but a simple faith, can in
no other way cast them out; no doubt the kingdom of God is come unto you; whereby the
kingdom of the devil is subverted, and ye also are subverted with it.
3. And after that He had said, “By whom do your children cast them out?” to show that
in them it was His grace, not their own desert; He saith, “Or else how can one enter into a
strong man’s house and spoil his goods, except He first bind the strong man, and then He
will spoil his house?”2340 Your children, saith He, who either have already believed in Me,
or who shall yet believe, and cast out devils, not through the prince of the devils, but through
the simplicity of holiness, who assuredly either once were, or still are what ye are also, sinners
and ungodly; and so in the house of the devil, and the vessels of the devil, how could they
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be rescued from him whom he held so firmly through the iniquity which reigned over them,
unless he were bound by the chains of My justice, that I might take away from him his vessels
which once were vessels of wrath, and make them vessels of mercy? This it is which the
blessed Apostle also says when he rebukes the proud, and those who boast as it were of their
own deserts, “For who maketh thee to differ?”2341 That is, who maketh thee to differ from
the mass of perdition derived from Adam and from the vessels of wrath. And that no man
might say, “My own righteousness,” he says, “What hast thou, that thou didst not receive?”
And on this point he says of himself also, “We also once were by nature the children of
wrath, even as others.”2342 So then he himself was a vessel in the house of that strong one,
strong in evil, when he was a persecutor of the Church, a “blasphemer, injurious, living in
malice and envy,” as he confesses. But He who bound the strong one, took away from him
this vessel of perdition, and made it a vessel of election.
4. Afterwards, that the unbelievers and ungodly, the enemies of the Christian name,
might not suppose by reason of the divers heresies and schisms of those who under the
Christian name gather together flocks of lost sheep, that the kingdom of Christ also is divided
against itself, He next adds, “He that is not with Me is against Me, and he that gathereth not
with Me, scattereth abroad.”2343 He does not say, he who is under the outward profession2344
of My Name; or the form of My Sacrament; but “he who is not with Me is against Me.” Nor
doth He say, he who gathereth not under the outward profession of My Name; but “he who
gathereth not with Me, scattereth abroad.” Christ’s kingdom then is not divided against itself;
2339 Matt. xii. 28.
2340 Matt. xii. 29.
2341 1 Cor. iv. 7.
2342 Eph. ii. 3.
2343 Matt. xii. 30.
2344 Voce.
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On the words of the Gospel, Matt. xii. 32, ‘Whosoever shall speak a word…