in a doxology (xxiii 63 = Wright 498) Aphraates ascribes, "glory and honour to the Father and to His Son and to His Spirit, the living and holy," where living and holy are feminine adjectives in the better ms. But he goes further: it is not a question of mere grammatical niceties. In the treatise, On Virginity against the Jews (xviii 10 = Wright 354), he says: "We have heard from the law that a man will leave his father and his mother and will cleave to his wife, and they will be one flesh; and truly a prophecy great and excellent is this. What father and mother doth he forsake that taketh a wife? This is the meaning: that when a man not yet hath taken a wife, he loveth and honoureth God his Father, and the Holy Spirit his Mother, and he hath no other love. But when a man taketh a wife he forsaketh his Father and his Mother, those namely that are signified above, and his mind is united with this world; and his mind and his heart and his thought is dragged away from God into the midst of the world, and he loveth and cherisheth it, as a man loveth the wife of his youth, and the love
