Gregory of Nazianzus

In the early days of the church, all was well. The present elaborate, far-fetched and artificial treatment of theology had not made its way into the schools of divinity, but playing with pebbles that deceive the eye by the quickness of their changes or dancing before an audience with varied and effeminate contortions were looked on as all one with speaking or hearing of God in a way unusual or frivolous. But since the Sextuses and Pyrrhos, and the antithetic style, like a dire and malignant disease, have infected our churches, and babbling is reputed culture, and, as the book of the Acts says of the Athenians, we spend our time in nothing else but either to tell or to hear some new thing. O, what Jeremiah will bewail our confusion and blind madness; he alone could utter lamentations befitting our misfortunes.The beginning of this madness was Arius (whose name is derived from frenzy). He paid the penalty of his unbridled tongue by his death in a profane spot, brought about by prayer not by disease, when he like Judas burst asunder for his similar treachery to the Word. Then others, catching the infection, organized an art of impiety and, confining Deity to the Unbegotten, expelled from Deity not only the Begotten but also the proceeding one, and honored the Trinity with communion in name alone or even refused to retain this for it. Not so that blessed one who was indeed a man of God and a mighty trumpet of truth: but being aware that to contract the three persons to a numerical unity is heretical and the innovation of Sabellius, who first devised a contraction of Deity; and that to sever the three persons by a distinction of nature is an unnatural mutilation of Deity; he both happily preserved the unity, which belongs to the Godhead, and religiously taught the Trinity, which refers to personality, neither confounding the three persons in the unity nor dividing the substance among the three persons but abiding within the bounds of piety by avoiding excessive inclination or opposition to either side.

Take my advice, my friend, and be slow to do evil but swift to your salvation; for readiness to evil and tardiness to good are equally bad. If you are invited to a revel, be not swift to go; if to apostasy, leap away; if a company of evildoers say to you, “Come with us, share our blood guiltiness, let us hide in the earth a righteous person unjustly,” do not lend them even your ears. Thus you will make two very great gains; you will make known to the other his sin, and you will deliver yourself from evil company. But if David the Great says to you, Come and let us rejoice in the Lord, or another prophet, Come and let us ascend into the mountain of the Lord, or our Savior himself, Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest, or, Arise, let us go hence, shining brightly, glittering above snow, whiter than milk, shining above the sapphire stone, let us not resist or delay. Let us be like Peter and John, and let us hasten, as they did to the sepulcher and the resurrection, so we to the font; running together, racing against each other, striving to be first to obtain this blessing.