4. But these teachers of a new Christ, who deny to
Him all that is His, preach another Lord Christ as well as another God
the Father. The One is not the Begetter but the Creator, the
Other not begotten, but created. Christ is therefore not very
God, because He is not God by birth, and faith cannot recognise a
Father in God, because there is no generation to constitute Him
Father. They glorify God the Father indeed, as is His right and
due, when they predicate of Him a nature unapproachable, invisible,
inviolable, ineffable, and infinite, endued with omniscience and
omnipotence, instinct with love, moving in all and permeating all,
immanent and transcendent, sentient in all sentient existence.
But when they proceed to ascribe to Him the unique glory of being alone
good, alone omnipotent, alone immortal, who does not feel that this
pious praise aims to exclude the Lord Jesus Christ from the
blessedness, which by the reservation ‘alone’ is restricted
to the glory of God? Does it not leave Christ in sinfulness and
weakness and death, while the Father reigns in solitary
perfection? Does it not deny in Christ a natural origin from God
the Father, in the fear lest He should be thought to inherit by a
birth, which bestows upon the Begotten the same virtue of nature as the
Begetter, a blessedness natural to God the Father alone?