But to persist in such teaching does not consist with piety, for it is rather the tone of thought of Sadducees and the Samosatene; it remains then to say that the Son of God is so called according to the other sense, in which Isaac was son of Abraham; for what is naturally begotten from any one and does not accrue to him from without, that in the nature of things is a son, and that is what the name implies. Is then the Son’s generation one of human affection? (for this perhaps, as their predecessors, they too will be ready to object in their ignorance;)—in no wise; for God is not as man, nor men as God. Men were created of matter, and that passible; but God is immaterial and incorporeal. And if so be the same terms are used of God and man in divine Scripture, yet the clear-sighted, as Paul enjoins, will study it, and thereby discriminate, and dispose of what is written according to the nature of each subject, and avoid any confusion of sense, so as neither to conceive of the things of God in a human way, nor to ascribe the things of man to God. For this were to mix wine with water, and to place upon the altar strange fire with that which is divine.