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

your city to take charge of the education of the young, and a deputation of the first men
among you came to see me. 2771 Afterwards, when you all crowded round me, what were
you not ready to give? what not to promise? Nevertheless you were not able to keep me.
How then could I, who at that time would not listen when you invited me, now attempt to
thrust myself on you uninvited? How could I, who when you complimented and admired
me, avoided you, have been intending to court you now that you calumniate me? Nothing
of the kind, sirs; I am not quite so cheap. No man in his senses would go on board a boat
without a steersman, or get alongside a Church where the men sitting at the helm are
themselves stirring up tempest and storm. Whose fault was it that the town was all full of
tumult, when some were running away with no one after them, and others stealing off when
no invader was near, and all the wizards and dream-tellers were flourishing their bogeys?
Whose fault was it else? Does not every child know that it was the mob-leaders’? The
reasons of their hatred to me it would be bad taste on my part to recount; but they are quite
easy for you to apprehend. When bitterness and division have come to the last pitch of
savagery, and the explanation of the cause is altogether groundless and ridiculous, then the
mental disease is plain, dangerous indeed to other people’s comfort, but greatly and personally
calamitous to the patient. And there is one charming point about them. Torn and racked
with inward agony as they are, they cannot yet for very shame speak out about it. The state
they are in may be known not only from their behaviour to me, but from the rest of their
conduct. If it were unknown, it would not much matter. But the veritable cause of their
shunning communication with me may be unperceived by the majority among you. Listen;
and I will tell you.
3. There is going on among you a movement ruinous to the faith, disloyal to the
apostolical and evangelical dogmas, disloyal too to the tradition of Gregory the truly great, 2772
and of his successors up to the blessed Musonius, whose teaching is still ringing in your
ears. 2773 For those men, who, from fear of confutation, are forging figments against me,
are endeavouring to renew the old mischief of Sabellius, started long ago, and extinguished
by the tradition of the great Gregory. But do you bid goodbye to those wine-laden heads,
bemuddled by the swelling fumes that mount from their debauch, and from me who am
wide awake and from fear of God cannot keep silence, hear what plague is rife among you.
Sabellianism is Judaism 2774 imported into the preaching of the Gospel under the guise of
Christianity. For if a man calls Father Son and Holy Ghost one thing of many faces, 2775
2771 i.e. when he was resident at Cæsarea in his earlier manhood. If Letter ccclviii. (from Libanius to Basil
refers to this period, it would seem that for a time Basil did undertake school work.
2772 i.e.Gregory Thaumaturgus. cf. note on p. 247.
2773 Musonius, bp. of Neocæsarea, who died in 368. cf. Ep. xxviii.
2774 cf. De Sp. S. § 77, p. 49and Ep. clxxxix. p. 229.
To the notables of Neocæsarea.
2775 ἓν πρᾶγμα πολύπροσωπον . Another ms. reading is πολυώνυμον, “of many names.”
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