Section 440
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ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY. 409 and pains to himself/* has saved us, not only struggling with dreadful ulcers, and wounds already putrid, but even lying among the dead, and rescued us to himself from the very jaws of death. For none of those in heaven had such power at command, as to promote the salvation of so many without detriment. But he alone, after having reached the deplorable corruption of our race, he alone taking upon him our labours, and bearing the punish ment of our iniquities, recovering us, not merely half dead, but altogether foetid and offensive, in tombs and sepulchres, both of old and new, by his gracious love saves us still beyond the hope and expectation of others, and even of ourselves, and liberally imparts to us the abundance of his Father's blessings. He, the giver of life and of light, our great Physician, King and Lord, the Christ of God. And then, indeed, when the whole human race, once lay buried in gloomy night and the depths of dark ness, by the delusions of execrable daemons, and the machina tions and influences of malignant spirits, as soon as he appeared, as the wax melts under the rays of the sun, he dissolved the knotty and entangled bonds of our iniquities, by the rays of his light. But when malignant envy and the mischievous spirit of iniquity, almost bursting asunder at such a display of grace and benevo lence, was now arraying all his deadly forces against us, and like a dog in a fit of madness, first gnashing his teeth at the stones cast at him, and pouring his rage kindled by his assailants, against inanimate weapons, he levelled his savage ferocity at the stones of the oratories and lifeless materials to produce, as he supposed, the desolation of the churches. Afterwards, however, he issued dreadful hissings and serpentine voices, sometimes by the threats of impious tyrants, sometimes by the blasphemous ordinances of profane governors ; and moreover, he himself, pouring forth death, and infecting the souls captured by him with his pestilen tial and destructive poison, almost destroyed them with the deadly sacrifices to dead idols, and caused every sort of beast in the shape of man, and every savage, to assault us. Then the Angel of the * This is a quotation from some poet, and seems to belong to Sophocles or •flSschylus. The verses in the original are iambics ; but the poem from which they are taken is lost. 3F