said, ‘My heart has indited a good matter’;126 and ‘I begat thee out of my bosom before the
dawn’?127 Or how is he unlike the Father’s essence, who is ‘his perfect image,’128 and ‘the
brightness of his glory’129 and says: ‘He that hath seen me, hath seen the Father’? Again how
if the Son is the Word and Wisdom of God, was there a period when he did not exist? for
that is equivalent to their saying that God was once destitute both of Word and Wisdom.
How can he be mutable and susceptible of change, who says of himself, ‘I am in the Father,
and the Father in me’;130 and ‘I and the Father are one’;131 and again by the Prophet,132
‘Behold me because I am, and have not changed’? But if any one may also apply the expression
to the Father himself, yet would it now be even more fitly said of the Word; because he was
not changed by having become man, but as the Apostle says,133 ‘Jesus Christ, the same
yesterday, to-day, and forever.’ But what could persuade them to say that he was made on
our account, when Paul has expressly declared134 that ‘all things are for him, and by him’?
One need not wonder indeed at their blasphemous assertion that the Son does not perfectly
know the Father; for having once determined to fight against Christ, they reject even the
words of the Lord himself, when he says,135 ‘As the Father knows me, even so know I the
Father.’ If therefore the Father but partially knows the Son, it is manifest that the Son also
knows the Father but in part. But if it would be improper to affirm this, and it be admitted
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that the Father perfectly knows the Son, it is evident that as the Father knows his own Word,
so also does the Word know his own Father, whose Word he is. And we, by stating these
things, and unfolding the divine Scriptures, have often confuted them: but again as
chameleons they were changed, striving to apply to themselves that which is written, ‘When
the ungodly has reached the depths of iniquity, he becomes contemptuous.’136 Many heresies
have arisen before these, which exceeding all bounds in daring, have lapsed into complete
infatuation: but these persons, by attempting in all their discourses to subvert the Divinity
of The Word, as having made a nearer approach to Antichrist, have comparatively lessened
the odium of former ones. Wherefore they have been publicly repudiated by the Church,
126 Ps. xliv. 1, according to the LXX.
127 ῾Εωσφόρον, the morning-star; taken from Ps. cix. 3. Cf. the LXX, quoted from Ps. lxxii.
128 Col. i. 15.
129 Heb. i. 3.
130 John xiv. 10.
131 John x. 30.
132 Mal. iii. 6.
133 Heb. xiii. 8.
134 Heb. ii. 10.
135 John x. 15.
136 Prov. xviii. 3, according to the LXX.
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Division begins in the Church from this Controversy; and Alexander Bishop…