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IN CHRIST'S NAME HERE BEGINS THE THIRD BOOK I wish, if it is agreeable, to make a brief comparison of the suc- cesses that have come to Christians who confess the blessed Trinity and the ruin which has come to heretics who have tried to destroy the same. And let us omit how Abraham worshipped the Trinity at the oak,^ and Jacob preached it in his blessing, and Moses recog- nized it in the bush, and the people followed it in the cloud and dreaded the same in the mountain, and how Aaron carried it on his breastplate, or how David made it known in the Psalms, pray- ing to be made new by a right spirit and that the holy spirit should not be taken from him and that he be comforted by the chief spirit. And, for my part, I consider this a great mystery, namely that the voice of the prophet proclaimed as the chief spirit that which the heretics assert to be the lesser. But passing over these, as we have said, let us return to our times. For Arius, who was the first wicked inventor of this wicked sect, was subjected to infernal fires after he had lost his entrails in a privy. But Hilarius, the blessed defender of the undivided Trinity, though sent into exile for its sake, was restored both to his native land and to Paradise. King Cloyis confessed it, and crushed the heretics by its aid and extended his kingdom over all the Gauls ; Alaric, on the other hand, who denied it, was deprived of kingdom and people, and what is more, of eternal life itself. And to true believers, even if through the plots of the enemy they lose something, the Lord re- stores it a hundred fold, but heretics do not gain any advantage, but what they seem to have is taken from them. This is proved by the deaths of Godegisel, Gundobad, and Godomar, who at the same time lost their country and their souls. But we confess one God, invisible,^ infinite, incomprehensible, glorious, always the ^ ad ilicem. Not in the Vulgate. Gregory probably used in part a rude popular version of the Scriptures. See Bonnet, p. 6i. ^ Reading invisihilem for indivisibilem. 53