Third contradiction: diverting the Church from the Bible to endless volumes; two modes of containing revelation

XIV. Third, all contradict by the very deed who, not compelled by duty and the singular necessity of the Church, but stirred by the common itch of writing, already from the time of the Apostles onward, all first love — or the practice of the saints fully described in the sacred letters — set aside, miserably turn the Church of Christ by their πολυλογία from the richest and most wholesome storehouse of the Bibles to the poverty and leanness of their own volumes to this day.

For the sacred Bibles, which we still call so, are that one richest and most sufficient book and canon which, all the rest going into sponge or pyre, alone is more than enough for the worship of God and the salvation of men, even if not the least apex is set to it by a human finger — if only the true and apostolic practice of the saints, and the laborious charity of Christian faith and piety, painted in that book in full colors and graphically enough, is recalled by right of postliminium into use by the bishops and curators of the churches, by Christian magistrates, and by men of every order desirous of eternal salvation, in place of so many glosses, exegeses, interpretations, disputations, commentaries, reconciliations, elucidations, summas, commonplaces, catechisms, Articles, symbols, councils, confessions, postils, and like books, of which there is neither measure nor end, and under whose burden the Christian world groans. For if the pious consult the skill in church histories and controversies which they possess, they will without doubt discover that for no better cause than the omission of first love (Revelation 2:4) the wrath of God, the candlestick moved, so heavily presses upon the church of the New Testament under the Smyrnaean, Pergamene, Thyatiran, and our Sardian condition, that scarcely greater likeness remains between these periods and the Ephesian, in which the Apostles themselves taught, than between lambs and pups — while in place of the true and practical knowledge of God with which the apostolic church was lit, bare heresies and their refutations, fights of words and quarrels of the schools have so prevailed, the efficacy of faith and the practice of piety more and more failing, that the light of the divine letters itself has been judged so dark, obscure, and insufficient, and the foremost of Christians, after the manner of the Israelites over the Baals, almost forgetting the Lord, have mostly begun to seek life from the dead and light from darkness — whether the Pope's or their own.

XV. For the rest, what is revealed in the sacred letters is contained in two ways: one expressly (αὐτολεξεί), according to the thing expressed to us by the signed words; the other virtually (δυνάμει), according to the thing though not expressed in signed words. The former mode, as it has sound words (1 Timothy 6:3), so those words must also be kept and the Apostle's rule held in them (2 Timothy 1:13) — since, though Augustine witnesses (City of God 10.23) that philosophers speak with free words and do not fear offense to religious ears in things hardest to understand, yet it is right for us to speak by a fixed rule, lest license of words also beget an impious opinion about the things signified by them.

But the latter mode has words which, if newly employed by the Church so that by them a thing not so spoken may be expressed, must not be repudiated, provided the thing signified by them is brought into the letters. Of this kind is the Trinity, the Homoousion of the three persons of the Godhead — of which Augustine treats thus (tract. 97 on John): Against the impiety of the Arian heretics the fathers coined the new name Homoousion, but they did not signify a new thing by such a name. For this is called Homoousion which is: I and the Father are one — namely of one and the same substance. But whichever way God reveals some dogma, it makes no difference as to truth and infallibility, since it is agreed that both are truly had from the Holy Spirit. And lest anyone be troubled by the ambiguity of αὐτολεξεί, it is taken in two ways. First, rhetorically, and so it is the same as literally proper, when a certain word is taken properly and not modified and is opposed to tropically. Second, hermeneutically, and so it is the same as literally expressed, when the word by which a dogma or some thing is signed is had in the sacred writings, in whichever signification that is done — which is how we assert that many things must be believed that are not written in so many express words, provided the thing itself is in the Scriptures: to elicit which the fathers long ago judged that a true reasoning is needed.