Lamentations 1:4

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.

"Call for the mourning women," as says the prophet Jeremiah. In no other way can the burning heart cool down, swelling as it is with its affliction, unless it relieves itself by sobs and tears. Formerly the hope of his return consoled us for the pang of separation, but now he has been torn from us by that final separation. A huge intervening chasm is fixed between the Church and him. He rests indeed in the bosom of Abraham, but there exists not one who might bring the drop of water to cool the tongue of the agonized. Gone is that beauty, silent is that voice, closed are those lips, fled that grace. Our happy state has become a tale that is told. Elijah of old time caused grief to the people of Israel when he soared from earth to God. But Elisha consoled them for the loss by being adorned with the mantle of his master. But now our wound is beyond healing; our Elijah has been caught up, and no Elisha left behind in his place. You have heard certain mournful and lamenting words of Jeremiah, with which he bewailed Jerusalem as a deserted city, and how among other expressions of passionate grief he added this, "The ways of Zion do mourn." These words were uttered then, but now they have been realized. For when the news of our calamity shall have been spread abroad, then will the ways be full of mourning crowds, and the sheep of his flock will pour themselves forth, and like the Ninevites utter the voice of lamentation, or, rather, will lament more bitterly than they. For in their case their mourning released them from the cause of their fear, but with these no hope of release from their distress removes their need of mourning. I know, too, of another utterance of Jeremiah, which is reckoned among the books of the Psalms; it is that which he made over the captivity of Israel. The words run thus: "We hung our harps upon the willows, and condemned ourselves as well as our harps to silence." I make this song my own. For when I see the confusion of heresy, this confusion is Babylon. And when I see the flood of trials that pours in upon us from this confusion, I say that these are "the waters of Babylon by which we sit down, and weep" because there is no one to guide us over them. Even if you mention the willows, and the harps that hung thereon, that part also of the figure shall be mine. For in truth our life is among willows, the willow being a fruitless tree, and…