Nicene and Post-Nicene Church Fathers Series 2 - The Still Small ...

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,
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.
The glorifying of the enumeration of His attributes.
215
35