24. A third passage with which he finds fault is that in which I gave a threefold interpretation of the Apostle's words: |That in the ages to come he might shew the exceeding riches of his grace in kindness towards us in Christ Jesus.| The first was my own opinion, the second the opposite opinion held by Origen, the third the simple explanation given by Apollinarius. As to the fact that I did not give their names, I must ask for pardon on the ground that it was done through modesty. I did not wish to disparage men whom I was partly following. and whose opinions I was translating into the Latin tongue. But, I said, the diligent reader will at once search into these things and form his own opinion. And I repeated at the end: Another turns to a different sense the words That in the ages to come he might shew the exceeding riches of his grace.' |Ah,| you will say, |I see that in the character of the diligent reader you have unfolded the opinions of Origen.| I confess that I was wrong. I ought to have said not The diligent but The blasphemous reader. If I had anticipated that you would adopt measures of this kind I might have done this, and so have avoided your calumnious speeches. It is, I suppose, a great crime to have called Origen a diligent reader, especially when I had translated seventy books of his and had praised him up to the sky, -- for doing which I had to defend myself in a short treatise two years ago in answer to your trumpeting of my praises. In those praises' which you gave me you laid it to my charge that I had spoken of Origen as a teacher of the churches, and now that you speak in the character of an enemy you think that I shall be afraid because you accuse me of calling him a diligent reader. Why, even shopkeepers who are particularly frugal, and slaves who are not wasteful, and the care-takers who made our childhood a burden to us and even thieves when they are particularly clever, we speak of as diligent; and so the conduct of the unjust steward in the Gospel is spoken of as wise. Moreover |The children of this world are wiser than the children of light,| and |The serpent was wiser than all the beasts which the Lord had made on the earth.|

Eph. ii.7 Jerome Letter 84.

Luke xvi.8

Gen. iii.1