Strength of God - 11/18/24 - The four Gospels and the Fathers of the Church - part III. Frei Gilson and Dom José Falcão reflect on the four Gospels and the Fathers of the Church. Part III: Matthew 13,11-15 Matthew 13,16 Matthew 11,25-27 “The same way the Holy Scripture is written, accessible to all, understandable to very few, speaks without mistake what it contains clearly, like an intimate friend to the hearts of the ignorant and the learned. And as for the mysterious, he does not highlight it with grandiloquence of style, as far as slow and uneducated intelligences cannot reach, as if it were a poor person going towards a rich person; but he invites everyone in simple language, not only to feed them with the clearly exposed truth, but also to train them in the secret truth, offering this both in what is patent and in what is hidden. And so that what is manifest does not repulse us, the manifest itself is desired again; what is desired, in a certain way, is renewed; the renewed gently penetrates our hearts. With this, in a salutary way, those with perverted conduct correct themselves, the weak are nourished and the great hearts are delighted” Saint Augustine (354-430) Ad Volusianum, ep. 3 Acts of the Apostles 9:3-6 “What can I do with you, whom iniquity has made so deaf to the testimonies of the Scriptures, that whatever may be alleged of them against you, you dare assert that it was not said by the Apostle, but it was written in his name by I don't know which forger? To such an extent the doctrine of demons that you preach is clearly foreign to Christian doctrine that you can in no way defend it under the name of Christian doctrine, except by saying that the writings of the apostles are false! O wretched enemies of soul! What writings will have some weight of authority if evangelical and apostolic ones do not? About the author of which book will there ever be certainty, if it is uncertain whether the writings that the Church says and keeps as those of the apostles, which the apostles themselves spread and proclaimed among all peoples with such perfection? And is it true that the apostles wrote what is proclaimed by the heretics opposed to this Church, attributed by them to the names of its founders, who lived long after the apostles? ... Many composed many things about ecclesiastical scriptures, not however with canonical authority, but with the intention of being useful or for learning. How can we know that a work belongs to someone, if not because at the moment that person wrote it, he made it known to whoever he could and published it, and from then on his knowledge reached others and still others and always with greater confirmation for the posterity, until our days, so that, if we are asked whose book it is, we do not hesitate in what we have to answer? But why resort to such a distant past? Here, we have some writings in our hands: if some time after the end of our lives someone denies that some are from Faust and others are mine, how will they be convinced, if not for the fact that those who now know them also transmit the news to the most distant in time through the uninterrupted succession of posterity? Therefore, who on earth, if not he who has perverted himself by consenting to the malice and deceit of lying demons, is so blinded by fury as to affirm that the Church of the Apostles, in such a reliable and numerous concord of brothers, could not deserve that its writings passed faithfully to posterity, when with very certain succession their chairs were preserved down to the bishops of today, and the same happens so easily with the writings of any man, both outside the Church and within the Church itself?” Saint Augustine (354-430) Against Faustum, 33, 6.