Page:The Nestorians and their rituals, volume 2.djvu/428

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THE NESTORIANS AND THEIR RITUALS.

Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, and in their use of unleavened bread in the Lord's Supper. These two sects accepted the appellation "Mother of God;" but the Jacobites have added to the canon: "Holy God," &c. "Who wast crucified for us."

The third sect which confesses two Natures and two Persons in Christ is called the sect of the Nestorians. As to the Easterns, however, because they never changed their faith, but kept it as they received it from the Apostles, they were unjustly styled "Nestorians," since Nestorius was not their Patriarch, neither did they understand his language; but when they heard that he taught the doctrine of the two Natures and two Persons, one Son of God, one Christ, and that he confessed the orthodox faith, they bore witness to him, because they themselves held the same faith. Nestorius, then, followed them, and not they him, and that more especially in the matter of the appellation "Mother of Christ." Therefore when called upon to excommunicate him, they refused, maintaining that their excommunication of Nestorius would be equivalent to their excommunication of the Sacred Scriptures and the holy Apostles, from which they received what they professed, and for which we are censured together with Nestorius, as shall appear in the following chapter.


CHAPTER V.

Refutation of the foregoing Creeds.

After having carefully distinguished the above Creeds, we shall now briefly refute two of them.

First: If it is right to believe that there is but one nature and one Person in Christ after the union, either the human nature and person are destroyed through the union;—here is destruction, not salvation. Or, the Divine Nature and Person are destroyed;—a monstrous profanity. Or, the two natures and two persons were mingled and confounded together;—behold hence a corruption! neither divinity nor humanity any longer existing. Mar Yohanan bar Pinkhâyé adduced the name