§ 1.
Evidently therefore the coming of the Lord to His own,1 (at which time also His own creation bare Him, which is borne by Him) and the summing up which He made of the disobedience at the former tree by the obedience at the present tree, and His undoing the perversion, the evil perversion of Eve, that Virgin now espoused to a man:2—all this news was well and truly preached by the Angel to the Virgin Mary, now under a husband. For as the former was led astray by an Angel’s discourse to fly from God after transgressing His Word, so the latter by an Angel’s discourse had the Gospel preached unto her, that she might bear God, obeying His Word. And if the former had disobeyed God, yet the other was persuaded to obey God: that the Virgin Mary might become an Advocate for the Virgin Eve. And as mankind was bound unto death through a Virgin, it is saved through a Virgin: by the obedience of a virgin the disobedience of a virgin is compensated. For while the sin of the First-made man is yet receiving correction by the rebuke of the First-born, the Serpent’s craft being overcome by the simplicity of the Dove, we are freed from those Chains whereby we had been bound unto death.
§ 2.
All heretics being unlearned,3 and ignorant of God’s ways of ordering things, and uninstructed in the dispensation concerning Man, as being blind to the truth, contradict their own salvation. Some, introducing another Father, besides the Creator. Others again saying that the world and its substance are made by certain Angels. Some indeed, that the same substance,4 far and wide separated from Him, Who in their account is the Father, flourished of itself, and is born of itself. But others, that in those things which are kept together by the Father, it [the world] had its substance, of decay and ignorance. Others again scorn the manifest advent of the Lord, not receiving His Incarnation. And others moreover, not knowing the dispensation of the Virgin, say that He was begotten of Joseph. And while some affirm that neither soul nor body can receive eternal life, but only “the inner man”: (and this they will have to be the Mind which is in them, which also alone they decree to ascend into perfection:) others say that the soul being saved, their body shares not in the salvation which is of God: as we said in the first book: wherein also we stated the arguments of them all, and in the Second shewed their weakness and inconsistency.