Nestorius, Founder of a Heresy

Nestorius, the founder of a heresy, was regarded as a remarkable teacher who could speak without preparation while he was a presbyter of the church at Antioch. He composed a great many treatises on various questions. Even then he worked into them the subtle evil that later became the poison of open ungodliness, though for the time it was veiled by moral exhortation. But afterward, when his eloquence and his abstinence had commended him and he had been made pontiff of the church at Constantinople, he showed openly what he had long concealed and became a declared enemy of the church. He wrote a book On the Incarnation of the Lord, made up of sixty-two passages from Divine Scripture used in a perverted sense. What he maintained in this book may be found in the catalog of heretics. [a]