Section 451
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420 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY. As I live, saith the Lord, thou shalt clothe thyself with them all as with an ornament, and thou shalt bind them on thee as orna ments on a bride. For thy waste and desolate places, and the land of thy destruction, shall now be too narrow by reason of the inhabitants, and they that would swallow thee up shall be fai away. The children which thou hast lost shall say in thine ears The place is narrow for me, give place to me that I may dwell/ Then shalt thou say in thine heart, Who hath begotten me these ? seeing I have lost my children and am a widow ? and who hath brought up these. Behold, I was left alone. But these, where had they been ?' " Such were the oracles uttered before by Isaiah. These were the declarations respecting us anciently, recorded in the holy Scriptures. It was just, therefore, that we should at some time receive their truth in the facts themselves. Since then the spouse and word addressed such language as this to the holy church before ; justly, therefore, has this our bride-man (bridedresser,) raised her lying desolate, and as a dead carcase, hope less in the sight of men, and with the common prayers of you all, stretched out his hands, raised her up, and at the command of God, the sovereign king, and in the manifestation of the powers of Christ Jesus, caused her to stand upright. And when thus raised, he so ordered and established her, as he had learned from the description given by the sacred oracles. Won derful and mighty, therefore, and beyond all admiration is thi? work, especially to those who attend only to the external appear ance. But more wonderful than wonders are those archetypes, the mental prototypes and divine exemplars, the renewals of the divine and spiritual buildings in our souls, which he, the Son of God himself, framed and fashioned according to his own image, and to which every where and in all respects he imparted the likeness of God. An incorruptible nature, incorporeal, reason able, separate from all earthly mixture and matter, an intelli gent existence. And having once created herf and brought her * V«/U?OCTO\O; here, applied to Paulinus. •j-Our author means the spiritual church of which he had just spoken, using a per sonification in the pronoun her, as common with the Christian fathers as it is with t>