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

To Count Magnenianus. 2577
Letter CLXXV. 2576
Your excellency lately wrote to me, plainly charging me, besides other matters, to write
concerning the Faith. I admire your zeal in the matter, and I pray God that your choice of
good things may be persistent, and that, advancing in knowledge and good works, you may
be made perfect. But I have no wish to leave behind me a treatise on the Faith, or to write
various creeds, and so I have declined to send what you asked. 2578 You seem to me to be
surrounded by the din of your men there, idle fellows, who say certain things to calumniate
me, with the idea that they will improve their own position by lying disgracefully against
me. 2579 The past shews what they are, and future experience will shew them in still plainer
colours. I, however, call on all who trust in Christ not to busy themselves in opposition to
the ancient faith, but, as we believe, so to be baptized, and, as we are baptized, so to offer
the doxology. 2580 It is enough for us to confess those names which we have received from
Holy Scripture, and to shun all innovation about them. Our salvation does not lie in the
invention of modes of address, but in the sound confession of the Godhead in which we
have professed our faith.
2576 Written probably early in 374.
2577 One ms. reads Magninianus. On the identification of this officer with the recipient of cccxxv., see that
letter.
2578 But what Basil declined to do at the prompting of Magnenianus, he shortly afterwards did for Amphilochi-
us, and wrote the De Spiritu Sancto.
2579 Maran (V. Basilxxx.) thinks that the allusion is to Atarbuis of Neocæsarea and to some of his presbyters.
cf. Letter ccx.
2580 cf. De Sp. Scto. p. 17.
To Count Magnenianus.
636