36. Make thou thy fold with the sheep:
flee from the wolves: depart not from the Church. Hate
those also who have ever been suspected in such matters: and
unless in time thou perceive their repentance, do not rashly trust
thyself among them. The truth of the Unity of God has been
delivered to thee: learn to distinguish the pastures of
doctrine. Be an approved banker This saying is quoted three times in
the Clementine Homilies as spoken by our Lord. See Hom. II.
§ 51; III. § 50; XVIII. § 20: “Every man who
wishes to be saved must become, as the Teacher said, a judge of the
books written to try us. For thus He spake: Become
experienced bankers. Now the need of bankers arises from the
circumstance that the spurious is mixed up with the
genuine.”
On the same saying, quoted as Scripture
in the Apostolic Constitutions (II. § 36), Cotelerius suggests
that in oral tradition, or in some Apocryphal book, the proverb was
said to come from the Old Testament, and was added by some transcriber
as a gloss in the margin of Matt. xxv. 27, or
Luke xix. 23. Dionysius
of Alexandria, Epist. VII., speaks of “the Apostolic word, which
thus urges all who are endowed with greater virtue, ‘Be ye
skillful money-changers,’” referring apparently as here to
1 Thess. v. 21, 22, “try all things,
&c.” (See Euseb. E.H. VII. ch. 6 in this
series: Suicer. Thesaurus, Τραπεζίτης:
and Resch. (Agrapha, pp. 233–239.), holding fast
that which is good, abstaining from every form of evil 1 Thess. v. 21, 22.. Or if thou hast ever been such as
they, recognise and hate thy delusion. For there is a way of
salvation, if thou reject the vomit, if thou from thy heart detest it,
if thou depart from them, not with thy lips only, but with thy soul
also: if thou worship the Father of Christ, the God of the Law
and the Prophets, if thou acknowledge the Good and the Just to be one
and the same God. Compare § 13 of
this Lecture, where Cyril seems to refer especially to the heresy of
Manes, as described in the Disputatio Archelai, cap. 6:
“If you are desirous of being instructed in the faith of Manes,
hear it briefly from me. That man worships two gods, unbegotten,
self-originate, eternal, opposed one to the other. The one he
represents as good, and the other as evil, naming the one Light, and
the other Darkness.” And may He
preserve you all, guarding you from falling or stumbling, stablished in
the Faith, in Christ Jesus our Lord, to Whom be glory for ever and
ever. Amen.