<1r>

Epistle written against Eusebius & Theognis, Constantine saith that [1]Christ the son of God the framer of all things, & giver of immortality was begotten, in respect of the faith in which we beleive: he was begotten, (or rather he came out, since he was always in the father,) to set in order those things which were made by him.

Arius & those with him in their Epistle which they sent to Alexander before the meeting of the council of Nice, wrote thus. The Son is not a being which first existed & was afterwards begotten or formed into a son; for your self, o blessed father, in the middle of the Church & in the session [of the Presbytery] have often confuted them who affirmed these things. And a little after: But if this, I came out from him, & out of the womb, & out from the father be understood by some as a consubstantial part or an emission: the Father will be compounded & divisible & mutable, & also a body according to those men, & so far as they can effect, the incorporeal father will suffer those things which are proper to bodies. Alexander therefore, as I find by his Epistles, for avoiding these difficulties allowed no other generation of the son of God then what was from all eternity affirming that the father was always a father & the son was a natural son always coexisting with the father by a generation without beginning & coequal to him in all things except paternity, & uncapable of mutation. And they that opposed Alexander relpied that according to this opinion the son was ἀγενετος unbegotten meaning that the necessary & eternal existence of the λογος ενδιαθετος was no generation. And this is the first instance that I meet with of calling the λόγος ἐνδιάθετος of the father the natural son of the father by an eternal generation. For had the opinion been older the objection against it would also have been older, namely that it made the son unbegotten & so amounted to a denyal of the father & the son.

<2r>

[1] Apud Gelasium de Actis Nicæn. Concil. par. 3.

[2] Vide Tom 5. p. 99. Edit. Paris. 1699.

[3] a Athanas

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