Chapter XI.
That they who deny the Spirit are transgressors.
27. “
Who
hath
woe? Who hath sorrow?”
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For whom
is distress and darkness? For whom eternal doom? Is it not
for the transgressors? For them that deny the faith? And
what is the proof of their denial? Is it not that they have set
at naught their own confessions? And when and what did they
confess? Belief in the Father and in the Son and in the Holy
Ghost, when they renounced the devil and his angels, and uttered those
saving words. What fit title then for them has been discovered,
for the children of light to use? Are they not addressed as
transgressors, as having violated the covenant of their
salvation? What am I to call the denial of God? What the
denial of Christ? What but transgressions? And to him who
denies the Spirit, what title do you wish me to apply? Must it
not be the same, inasmuch as he has broken his covenant with God?
And when the confession of faith in Him secures the blessing of true
religion. and its denial subjects men to the doom of godlessness, is it
not a fearful thing for them to set the confession at naught, not
through fear of fire, or sword, or cross, or scourge, or wheel, or
rack, but merely led astray by the sophistry and seductions of the
pneumatomachi? I testify to every man who is confessing Christ
and denying God, that Christ will profit him nothing;
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to every man that calls upon God but rejects the Son, that his faith is
vain;
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to every man
that sets aside the Spirit, that
his faith in the Father and the Son
will be useless, for he cannot even hold it without the presence
of the Spirit. For he who does not believe the Spirit does
not believe in the Son, and he who has not believed in the Son
does not believe in the Father. For none “can say that
Jesus is the Lord but by the Holy Ghost,”
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and “No man hath seen God at any
time, but the only begotten God which is in the bosom of the
Father, he hath declared him.”
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Such an one hath neither part nor lot in the true
worship; for it is impossible to worship the Son, save by the Holy
Ghost; impossible to call upon the Father, save by the Spirit of
adoption.
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Prov. xxiii. 29
.
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cf
.
Gal. v. 2
.
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cf
.
1 Cor. xv.
17
.
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1 Cor. xii. 3
.
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John i. 18
. On the reading
“only begotten God”
cf
. note on p. 9. In
this passage in St. Basil “God” is the reading of three
mss.
at Paris, that at Moscow, that at the
Bodleian, and that at Vienna. “Son” is read by
Regius III., Regius I., Regius IV., and Regius V. in Paris, the
three last being all of the 14th century, the one in the British
Museum, and another in the Imperial Library at Vienna, which
generally agrees with our own in the Museum.