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| In what manner Valens fell into heresy.
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Chapter XI.—In what manner Valens fell into
heresy.
I will now pursue the course of my narrative, and will describe the
beginning of the tempest which stirred up many and great billows to
buffet the Church. Valens, when he first received the imperial dignity,
was distinguished by his fidelity to apostolic doctrine. But when the
Goths had crossed the Danube and were ravaging Thrace, he determined to
assemble an army and march against them; and accordingly resolved not
to take the field without the garb of divine grace, but first to
protect himself with the panoply of Holy Baptism.709
In forming this resolution he acted at once
well and wisely, but his subsequent conduct betrays very great
feebleness of character, resulting in the abandonment of the truth. His
fate was the same as that of our first father, Adam; for he too, won
over by the arguments of his wife, lost his free estate and became not
merely a captive but an obedient listener to woman’s wily words.
His wife710
had already been entrapped in the
Arian snare, and now she caught her husband, and persuaded him to fall
along with her into the pit of blasphemy. Their leader and initiator
was Eudoxius, who still held the tiller of Constantinople, with the
result that the ship was not steered onwards but sunk711
| 711 The
use of the word baptized for submerged is significant.
Polyb. 1: 51. 6 uses it of sinking a ship. It first appears with the
technical sense of baptized in the Evangelists. | to the bottom.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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