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472 [Doc. 256.
TESTIMONY OF CONTEMPORARIES.
critic, will take up his pen against you. You will then have
written in vain, and your future writings too will be to no
purpose. You have published your writings at a great expense
of money; and as soon as they have been published you have
distributed them. Of what use has all this been ? Of none
whatever. As long as you start from unproved principles, and
as long as you do not adduce a Divine testimony in Divine
matters, and fall short of your extraordinary reputation, so
long every divine will hesitate to dispute with you on theological
matters, and to contend with you concerning the spiritual sense
of the Word, which you attribute to yourself alone. No one
will acknowledge the angelic wisdom, as you call it, and will
so much the less because all your spirits are men, metamorphosed
into angels, concerning which metamorphosis, or change into
a new race of beings, the Scripture, which Christians consider
as divine, does not say a single word.
"It is a thesis, or at least a hypothesis [it is well that
Cuno himself acknowledges it to be a mere hypothesis] , very
well known in the church and among the learned, that the
angels were created together with primeval light on the first day
of creation. That the angels were created in various orders, and
hence under various names, such as Cherubim, Seraphim, thrones,
dominions, and principalities, appears very clearly from the
testimony of Paul in his epistle to the Colossians i, 16 [Paul
in that passage does not apply these terms to created angels];
and that a part of the angels sinned and were cast down
from heaven may be read in the Epistle of Jude (verse 6),*
and of Peter (2 Epistle ii, 4). And, besides, your entirely
new doctrine is disproved by the truth itself; for our Saviour
Himself states in clear words, in John viii, 44, that ’the devil
did not abide in the truth.’ [True, but it does not follow
from this, that devils are fallen angels ; they are fallen men
because they did not abide in the truth.’] What more do
you wish?
"No one, I think, will deny that in the literal sense there
is a spiritual sense ; and I willingly admit that you are most
* Jude and Peter derived this idea from the merely literal meaning of
Scripture.
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