8. As we are answering all, even their most insensate statements, we come now to the discussion of the unknown hour “Of that day and that hour knoweth no one, not even the Angels of Heaven, neither the Son, but the Father only.” St. Matt. xxiv. 36; cf. St. Mark xiii. 32.. Now, even if, as they say, the Son had not known it, this could give no ground for an attack upon His Godhead as the Only-begotten. It was not in the nature of things that His birth should avail to put His beginning back, until it was equivalent to the existence which is unbegotten, and had no beginning; and the Father reserves as His prerogative, to demonstrate His authority as the Unbegotten, the fixing of this still undetermined day. Nor may we conclude that in His Person there is any defect in that nature which contained by right of birth all the fulness of that nature which a perfect birth could impart. Nor again could the ignorance of day and hour be imputed in the Only-begotten God to a lower degree of Divinity. It is to demonstrate against the Sabellian heretics that the Father’s authority is without birth or beginning, that this prerogative of unbegotten authority is not granted to the Son Hilary is granting for the moment that the Son really was ignorant of the day and hour; this, he says, could be not argument for the inequality of the Son: it would serve, however, to disprove the Sabellian identification of the Son and the Father by shewing that this knowledge was the possession of the Father only. Erasmus inserted here a passage which he found in a ms.;—“and this shews us that the saying of the Word referred to the mystery of human perfection: that He, Who bore our infirmities, should take upon Himself also the infirmity of human ignorance, and that He should say He knew not the day, just as He knew not where they had laid Lazarus, or who it was when the woman touched the hem of His garment: being infirm in knowledge as He was infirm in weeping, in the endurance of weariness, hunger, and thirst, He did not disdain even the error of ignorance: especially when we consider how, when He rose from the dead, and was about to ascend up to, and above, the heavens, the Apostles approached Him as no longer ignorant, but knowing, and determining this His day, and put exactly the same question to Him of which He was silent during the dispensation of His humanity: that it might be made plain by their repeated question, that they understood His statement, ‘I know not,’ of an ignorance which He took upon Himself, not essential to His nature.” The passage is utterly inconsistent with Hilary’s teaching both here and in ix. 58 f., and is an obvious and clumsy interpolation.. But if, as we have maintained, when He said that He knew not the day, He kept silence not from ignorance, but in accordance with the Divine Plan, all occasion for irreverent declarations must be removed, and the blasphemous teachings of heresy thwarted, that the truth of the Gospel may be illustrated by the very words which seem to obscure it.