Sermons & Letters 120

CHAPTER I. — Gladly embracing all occasions of writing, I do not cease to address your love with priestly affection: so that from the very frequency of the letters you may recognize how great a care we have for the universal Church, for the more zealous defense of whose most pious faith it behooves your devotion also to be a partner of our labors.

For both through our brethren, bishops and presbyters, whom we have sent for the state of the Christian religion, and whom we trust to have been for some time now among you, you have been able most fully, from all the instruction we gave, to perceive how intolerable is that which the profane folly of certain men attempted to bring against the sacrament of human redemption, upon all the priests of our region. And now, through our son Maximin the count, we continually exhort you by our addresses, that—since by the Lord's favor the liberty of catholics has been greatly increased—you may take up spiritual constancy against the forerunners of Antichrist, as blessed John says: 'Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God;'

'and every spirit that dissolves Jesus Christ is not of God, and this is Antichrist' (1 John 4:2-3). CHAPTER II. — Under this spirit Nestorius and Eutyches, though under a diverse appearance of error yet under the same spirit of falsehood, willed to serve; since the catholic faith, imbued with apostolic and evangelical doctrines, detests both and condemns both. This faith, from the moment that the Word coeternal with the Father was made flesh (John 1:14), confesses that same one whom it believes to be the Son of God to be also the son of man; and in the one true God and true man, the Lord Jesus Christ, it professes to adore not one nature, but one person. United in this faith with us inseparably and without difference, stand constantly and act manfully;

and if there are any delays concerning those things which we ask to be ordered, yet by occasions which the divine grace shall have faithfully provided, instruct us with letters of your love. For it is much consolation, when to solicitous minds the accomplishment of longed-for things is announced. But we wish that these our letters, which we have sent to your love, may become known also to the other catholics: so that they too may understand themselves to be incited to the defense of the faith by these our exhortations. Given on the sixth day before the Ides of November, in the consulship of Valentinian Augustus for the seventh time and of Avienus.