The New Heretic Is Condemned in His Forerunners

In the first book we began by setting down some things to show that our new heretic is only an offshoot of old stocks of heresy. That being so, the just condemnation of the earlier heretics ought to be enough to secure a just sentence of condemnation against him as well. He has the same roots and grows up out of the same soil, so he has already been fully condemned in the persons of those who went before him. This is all the more true because the men who went wrong just before these quite rightly condemned the very thing these men are now asserting. So the examples of their own party ought to be fully enough for them in both directions: the example of those who were restored, and the example of those who were condemned. If they can be corrected, they have their remedy set before them in the correction of their own party. If they cannot, they receive their sentence in the condemnation of their own people. [a]

But so that we may not be thought to have prejudged the case against them instead of judging it fairly, we will bring forward their actual poisonous claims, or rather, I should say, their blasphemous folly. We take up “above all the shield of faith, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God,” so that when the head of the old serpent rises once more, the same sword of God’s word that once cut it off in those ancient dragons may now cut it off in these new serpents too. Since their error is the same as that of the earlier ones, the beheading of those ought to count as the beheading of these. And since the serpents come back to life and breathe out poisonous blasts against the Lord’s church, and make some fall away through their hissing, we must add a fresh remedy to the older cures because of these new diseases. Then, even if what has already been done should not be enough to heal the sickness, what we are doing now may be enough to restore those who are suffering from it.