Chapter XXIII.
The glorifying of the enumeration of His attributes.
54.
1179
Now
of the rest of the Powers
each
is believed
to be in a circumscribed place. The angel who stood by
Cornelius
1180
was not at
one and the same moment with Philip;
1181
nor yet did the angel who spoke with
Zacharias from the altar at the same time occupy his own post in
heaven. But the Spirit is believed to have been operating
at the same time in Habakkuk and in Daniel at Babylon,
1182
and to have been at the prison with
Jeremiah,
1183
and with
Ezekiel at the Chebar.
1184
For the
Spirit of the Lord filleth the world,
1185
and “whither shall I go from thy
spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?”
1186
And, in the words of the
Prophet, “For I am with you, saith the Lord…and my
spirit remaineth among you.”
1187
But what nature is it becoming
to assign to Him who is omnipresent, and exists together with
God? The nature which is all-embracing, or one which is
confined to particular places, like that which our argument shews
the nature of angels to be? No one would so say.
Shall we not then highly exalt Him who is in His nature divine,
in His greatness infinite, in His operations powerful, in the
blessings He confers, good? Shall we not give Him
glory? And I understand glory to mean nothing else than the
enumeration of the wonders which are His own. It follows
then that either we are forbidden by our antagonists even to
mention the good things which flow to us from Him. or on the
other hand that the mere recapitulation of His attributes is the
fullest possible attribution of glory. For not even in the
case of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ and of the
Only begotten Son, are we capable of giving Them glory otherwise
than by recounting, to the extent of our powers, all the wonders
that belong to Them.
1179
Here the
Benedictine Editors begin Chapter xxiii., remarking that they do so
“
cum plures
mss.
codices.
tum ipsam sermonis seriem et continuationem secuti. Liquet
enim hic Basilium ad aliud argumentum
transire
.” Another division of the text makes
Chapter XXIII. begin with the words “But I do not mean by
glory.”
1180
Acts x. 3
.
1181
Acts viii.
26
.
1182
Bel and the Dragon
34.
1183
Jer. xx. 2
, LXX.
εἰς τὸν
καταῤ&
191·άκτην ὁς
ἦν ἐν πύλῃ.
Καταῤ&
191·άκτης τῶν
πυλῶν
occurs in Dion. Halic.
viii. 67, in the same sense as the Latin
cataracta
(Livy
xxvii. 27)
a portcullis
. The Vulgate has
in
nervum
, which may either be
gyve
or
gaol
.
The Hebrew="stocks", as in A.V. and R.V.
καταῤ&
191·άκτης
in the text
of Basil and the lxx. may be assumed to mean
prison
, from
the notion of the barred grating over the door.
cf
.
Ducange s.v.
cataracta
.
1184
Ez. i. 1
.
1185
Wis. i. 7
.
1186
Ps. xxxix. 7
.
1187
Hag. ii. 4,
5
.