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Updated: June 19, 2025
Who ever before wicked Sabellius durst confound the Trinity of Unity? Who ever before cruel Novatian affirmed God to be merciless, in that He had rather the death of a sinner than that he should return and live?
As for second marriages, the Montanist and the Novatian sects condemned them absolutely, on the ground that if God has removed a wife or husband he has thereby signified his will to end the marrying of the parties; Tertullian calls second marriage a species of prostitution. Jerome expresses the more tolerant and orthodox view: "What then? Do we condemn second marriages?
The reason is this, because the Scripture being of itself so deep and profound, all men do not understand it in one and the same sense, but divers men diversely, this man and that man, this way and that way, expound and interpret the sayings thereof, so that to one's thinking, 'so many men, so many opinions' almost may be gathered out of them: for Novatian expoundeth it one way, Photinus another; Sabellius after this sort, Donatus after that; Arius, Eunomius, Macedonius will have this exposition, Apollinaris and Priscilian will have that; Jovinian, Pelagius, Celestius, gather this sense, and, to conclude, Nestorius findeth out that; and therefore very necessary it is for the avoiding of so great windings and turnings, of errors so various, that the line of expounding the Prophets and Apostles be directed and drawn, according to the rule of the Ecclesiastical and Catholic sense.
Novatian asserts that "the whole mind of man is conscious" of Him, "even if does not express itself," and Lactantius thinks that for Cicero "it was no difficult task, indeed, to refute the falsehoods of a few men who entertained perverse sentiments by the testimony of communities and tribes, who on this one point had no disagreement."
Both of these influences, no doubt, had some influence on the shape in which Tertullian of Carthage, Minucius Felix, Novatian and Lactantius presented their doctrine, and, together with the more material and less religious character of the West, accounts in large degree for the comparative frequency of their appeal to the theistic argument.
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