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# Ante-Nicene Fathers/Volume VI/Methodius/Banquet of the Ten Virgins/Domnina/Part 3

Chapter III.—The Bramble and the Agnos the Symbol of Chastity; The Four Gospels, that Is, Teachings or Laws, Instructing to Salvation.
Now the bramble commends chastity, for the bramble and the agnos is the same tree: by some it is called bramble, by others agnos. Perhaps it is because the plant is akin to virginity that it is called bramble and agnos; bramble, because of its strength and firmness against pleasures; agnos, because it always continues chaste. Hence the Scripture relates that Elijah, fleeing from the face of the woman Jezebel, at first came under a bramble, and there, having been heard, received strength and took food; signifying that to him who flies from the incitements of lust, and from a woman—that is, from pleasure—the tree of chastity is a refuge and a shade, ruling men from the coming of Christ, the chief of virgins. For when the first laws, which were published in the times of Adam and Noah and Moses, were unable to give salvation to man, the evangelical law alone has saved all.
And this is the cause why the fig-tree may be said not to have obtained the kingdom over trees, which, in a spiritual sense, mean men; and the fig-tree the command, because man desired, even after the fall, again to be subject to the dominion of virtue, and not to be deprived of the immortality of the paradise of pleasure. But, having transgressed, he was rejected and cast far away, as one who could no longer be governed by immortality, nor was capable of receiving it. And the first message to him after the transgression was preached by Noah, to which, if he had applied his mind, he might have been saved from sin; for in it he promised both happiness and rest from evils, if he gave heed to it with all his might, just as the vine promises to yield wine to those who cultivate it with care and labour. But neither did this law rule mankind, for men did not obey it, although zealously preached by Noah. But, after they began to be surrounded and drowning by the waters, they began to repent, and to promise that they would obey the commandments. Wherefore with scorn they are rejected as subjects; that is, they are contemptuously told that they cannot be helped by the law; the Spirit answering them back and reproaching them because they had deserted those men whom God had commanded to help them, and to save them, and make them glad; such as Noah and those with him. “Even to you, O rebellious,” said he, “I come, to bring help to you who are destitute of prudence, and who differ in nothing from dry trees, and who formerly did not believe me when I preached that you ought to flee from present things.”

## Footnotes

* ↑ Jahn’s reading is here followed. [This is a puzzle as well as a parable; the Seventy give ῥάμνος, which is not = ἄγνος. It spoils the force of Jotham’s caustic satire to adopt this conception of our author.]
* ↑ 1 Kings xix. 4.
* ↑ Gen. v. 29.
# Ante-Nicene Fathers/Volume VI/Methodius/Banquet of the Ten Virgins/Domnina/Part 6

Chapter VI.—The Mystery of the Vision of Zechariah.
Moreover, Zechariah shows that the olive shadows forth the law of Moses, speaking thus: “And the angel that talked with me came again and waked me, as a man that is wakened out of his sleep, and said unto me, What seest thou? And I said, I have looked, and behold a candlestick all of gold, with a bowl upon the top of it.…And two olive-trees by it, one upon the right side of the bowl, and the other upon the left side thereof.” And after a few words, the prophet, asking what are the olives on the right and left of the candlestick, and what the two olive-boughs in the hands of the two pipes, the angel answered and said: “These are the two sons of fruitfulness which stand by the Lord of the whole earth,” signifying the two first-born virtues that are waiting upon God, which, in His dwelling, supply around the wick, through the boughs, the spiritual oil of God, that man may have the light of divine knowledge. But the two boughs of the two olives are the law and the prophets, around, as it were, the lot of the inheritance, of which Christ and the Holy Spirit are the authors, we ourselves meanwhile not being able to take the whole fruit and the greatness of these plants, before chastity began to rule the world, but only their boughs—to wit, the law and the prophets—did we formerly cultivate, and those moderately, often letting them slip. For who was ever able to receive Christ or the Spirit, unless he first purified himself? For the exercise which prepares the soul from childhood for desirable and delectable glory, and carries this grace safely thither with ease, and from small toils raises up mighty hopes, is chastity, which gives immortality to our bodies; which it becomes all men willingly to prefer in honour and to praise above all things; some, that by its means they may be betrothed to the Word, practising virginity; and others, that by it they may be freed from the curse, “Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”
This, O Arete, is the discourse on virginity which you required of me, accomplished according to my ability; which I pray, O mistress, although it is mediocre and short, that thou wilt receive with kindness from me who was chosen to speak last.

## Footnotes

* ↑ Zech. iv. 1–3.
* ↑ E.V. “Anointed ones,” ver. 14.
* ↑ σχοίνισμα same word as that translated “wick.”—Tr.
* ↑ Gen. iii. 19.
# Ante-Nicene Fathers/Volume VI/Methodius/Banquet of the Ten Virgins/Elucidations

Elucidations.
I.
(We here behold only shadows, etc., p. 335.)
Schleiermacher, in commenting on Plato’s Symposium, remarks: “Even natural birth (i.e., in Plato’s system) was nothing but a reproduction of the same eternal form and idea.…The whole discussion displays the gradation, not only from that pleasure which arises from the contemplation of personal beauty through that which every larger object, whether single or manifold, may occasion, to that immediate pleasure of which the source is in the Eternal Beauty,” etc. Our author ennobles such theorizing by mounting up to the great I Am.
II.
(Christ Himself is the one who is born, p. 337.)
Wordsworth, and many others of the learned, sustain our author’s comment on this passage. So Aquinas, ad loc., Bede, and many others. Methodius is incorrectly represented as rejecting the idea that “the woman” is the Blessed Virgin Mary, for no such idea existed for him to reject. He rejects the idea that the man-child is Christ; but that idea was connected with the supposition that the woman was the Church of the Hebrews bringing forth the Messiah. Gregory the Great regards the woman as the Christian Church. So Hippolytus: “By the woman…is meant most manifestly the Church, endued with the Father’s Word, whose brightness is above the sun,” etc. Bossuet says candidly, “C’est l’Église, tout éclatante de la lumière de J. C.,” etc.
Now, note the progress of corruption, one fable engendering another. The text of Gen. iii. 15, contrary to the Hebrew, the Seventy, the Syriac, and the Vulgate itself, in the best mss., is made to read, “She shall bruise thy head,” etc. The “woman,” therefore, becomes the Mother of our Lord, and the “great red dragon” (of verse 3), from which the woman “fled into the wilderness,” is next represented as under her feet (where the moon appears in the sacred narrative); and then the Immaculate Conception of her Holy Seed is transferred back to the mother of Mary, who is indecently discussed, and affirmed to have been blest with an “Immaculate Conception” when, in the ordinary process of nature, she was made the mother of the Virgin. So, then, the bull Ineffabilis—comes forth, eighteen hundred years after the event, with the announcement that what thousands of saints and many bishops of Rome have denounced as a fable must be received by all Christians on peril of eternal damnation. The worst of it all is the fact, that, as the mystery of the Incarnation of the Son of God has heretofore been the only “Immaculate Conception” known to the faith of Christendom, thousands now imagine that this is what was only so lately set forth, and what we must therefore renounce as false.

## Footnotes

* ↑ Introduction to the Dialogues, etc., Dobson’s translation, Cambridge, 1836.
* ↑ See his work On the Apocalypse, Lecture IX. p. 198, ed. Philadelphia, 1852.
* ↑ Speaker’s Com., ad loc.
* ↑ Vol. v. p. 217, this series.
* ↑ Works, vol. i. p. 447, ed. Paris, 1845.
* ↑ Dec. 8, 1854.
* ↑ See The Eirenicon of Dr. Pusey, ed. New York, 1866.
# Ante-Nicene Fathers/Volume VI/Methodius/Banquet of the Ten Virgins/Marcella
## Contents

* Part 1
* Part 2
* Part 3
* Part 4
* Part 5
# Ante-Nicene Fathers/Volume VI/Methodius/Banquet of the Ten Virgins/Marcella/Part 2

Chapter II.—Virginity a Plant from Heaven, Introduced Late; The Advancement of Mankind to Perfection, How Arranged.
For truly by a great stretch of power the plant of virginity was sent down to men from heaven, and for this reason it was not revealed to the first generations. For the race of mankind was still very small in number; and it was necessary that it should first be increased in number, and then brought to perfection. Therefore the men of old times thought it nothing unseemly to take their own sisters for wives, until the law coming separated them, and by forbidding that which at first had seemed to be right, declared it to be a sin, calling him cursed who should “uncover the nakedness” of his sister; God thus mercifully bringing to our race the needful help in due season, as parents do to their children. For they do not at once set masters over them, but allow them, during the period of childhood, to amuse themselves like young animals, and first send them to teachers stammering like themselves, until they cast off the youthful wool of the mind, and go onwards to the practice of greater things, and from thence again to that of greater still. And thus we must consider that the God and Father of all acted towards our forefathers. For the world, while still unfilled with men, was like a child, and it was necessary that it should first be filled with these, and so grow to manhood. But when hereafter it was colonized from end to end, the race of man spreading to a boundless extent, God no longer allowed man to remain in the same ways, considering how they might now proceed from one point to another, and advance nearer to heaven, until, having attained to the very greatest and most exalted lesson of virginity, they should reach to perfection; that first they should abandon the intermarriage of brothers and sisters, and marry wives from other families; and then that they should no longer have many wives, like brute beasts, as though born for the mere propagation of the species; and then that they should not be adulterers; and then again that they should go on to continence, and from continence to virginity, when, having trained themselves to despise the flesh, they sail fearlessly into the peaceful haven of immortality.

## Footnotes

* ↑ Lev. xviii. 19; xx. 17.
* ↑ [Contending with the worse than bestial sensuality of paganism, and inured to the sorrows of martyr-ages, when Christian families could not be reared in peace, let us not wonder at the high conceptions of these heroic believers, based on the words of Christ Himself, and on the promise, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”]
# Ante-Nicene Fathers/Volume VI/Methodius/Banquet of the Ten Virgins/Marcella/Part 3

Chapter III.—By the Circumcision of Abraham, Marriage with Sisters Forbidden; In the Times of the Prophets Polygamy Put a Stop To; Conjugal Purity Itself by Degrees Enforced.
If, however, any one should venture to find fault with our argument as destitute of Scripture proof, we will bring forward the writings of the prophets, and more fully demonstrate the truth of the statements already made. Now Abraham, when he first received the covenant of circumcision, seems to signify, by receiving circumcision in a member of his own body, nothing else than this, that one should no longer beget children with one born of the same parent; showing that every one should abstain from intercourse with his own sister, as his own flesh. And thus, from the time of Abraham, the custom of marrying with sisters has ceased; and from the times of the prophets the contracting of marriage with several wives has been done away with; for we read, “Go not after thy lusts, but refrain thyself from thine appetites;” for “wine and women will make men of understanding to fall away;” and in another place, “Let thy fountain be blessed; and rejoice with the wife of thy youth,” manifestly forbidding a plurality of wives. And Jeremiah clearly gives the name of “fed horses” to those who lust after other women; and we read, “The multiplying brood of the ungodly shall not thrive, nor take deep rooting from bastard slips, nor lay any fast foundation.”
Lest, however, we should seem prolix in collecting the testimonies of the prophets, let us again point out how chastity succeeded to marriage with one wife, taking away by degrees the lusts of the flesh, until it removed entirely the inclination for sexual intercourse engendered by habit. For presently one is introduced earnestly deprecating, from henceforth, this seduction, saying, “O Lord, Father, and Governor of my life, leave me not to their counsels; give me not a proud look; let not the greediness of the belly, nor lust of the flesh, take hold of me.” And in the Book of Wisdom, a book full of all virtue, the Holy Spirit, now openly drawing His hearers to continence and chastity, sings on this wise, “Better it is to have no children, and to have virtue, for the memorial thereof is immortal; because it is known with God and with men. When it is present men take example at it; and when it is gone they desire it: it weareth a crown and triumpheth for ever, having gotten the victory, striving for undefiled rewards.”

## Footnotes

* ↑ Ecclus. xviii. 30.
* ↑ Ecclus. xix. 2.
* ↑ Prov. v. 18.
* ↑ Jer. v. 8.
* ↑ Wisd. iv. 3.
* ↑ Ecclus. xxiii. 1, 4, 6.
* ↑ Wisd. iv. 1, 2.
# Ante-Nicene Fathers/Volume VI/Methodius/Banquet of the Ten Virgins/Domnina/Part 4

Chapter IV.—The Law Useless for Salvation; The Last Law of Chastity Under the Figure of the Bramble.
And so those men, having been thus rejected from the divine care, and the human race having again given themselves up to error, again God sent forth, by Moses, a law to rule them and recall them to righteousness. But these, thinking fit to bid a long farewell to this law, turned to idolatry. Hence God gave them up to mutual slaughters, to exiles, and captivities, the law itself confessing, as it were, that it could not save them. Therefore, worn out with ills and afflicted, they again promised that they would obey the commandments; until God, pitying man the fourth time, sent chastity to rule over them, which Scripture consequently called the bramble. And she consuming pleasures threatens besides, that unless all undoubtingly obey her, and truly come to her, she will destroy all with fire, since there will be hereafter no other law or doctrine but judgment and fire. For this reason, man henceforth began to do righteousness, and firmly to believe in God, and to separate himself from the devil. Thus chastity was sent down, as being most useful and helpful to men. For of her alone was the devil unable to forge an imitation to lead men astray, as is the case with the other precepts.
# Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography/Denaut, Peter

Edition of 1900.
​DENAUT, Peter (duh-no'), Canadian R. C. bishop, b. in Montreal, 20 July, 1743; d. in Longueil, 17 Jan., 1806. He was parish priest of Longueil, and vicar-general of the diocese of Quebec. During the invasion of Canada by Arnold and Montgomery, in 1775, he was zealous in preventing the Canadians from joining them. As he occupied the post of danger on the route from the United States to Canada, the British authorities suggested his presentation as coadjutor bishop of Quebec, but, feeling that his presence at Longueil would be useful to them in case of another invasion from the United States, they persuaded him to reside there. He was consecrated at Montreal in 1794, and in 1797 Bishop Hubert resigned the see of Quebec in his favor. Bishop Denaut was accused of subserviency to those in power; but on a noteworthy occasion he showed firmness of character. As soon as he succeeded to the bishopric he found the aid of a coadjutor necessary. Both the people and the clergy wished the cure of Quebec, Joseph Octavius Plessis, to be appointed. The Duke of Kent, father of Queen Victoria, was then holding court in Quebec, and at the same time carrying on an intrigue with a married woman in the neighboring village of Beauport. The parish priest of this town secretly favored the liaison, and, to reward his complaisance, the young prince used every effort to have him appointed coadjutor bishop. Bishop Denaut insisted on the choice of Plessis, who had been elected by the clergy, and declared that they neither should nor would hold another election. In presence of this unexpected resistance, the Canadian government withdrew their candidate, and Bishop Denaut then retired to Longueil, where he spent the remainder of his life.
# Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography/Deane, John Hall

Edition of 1900.
​Deane, John Hall, lawyer, b. in Canada. He removed to the United States at an early age. He entered Rochester university, but in 1862 left college and enlisted as a private soldier in defence of the Union. He was captured at the battle of Gettysburg, and was for some time confined in a Confederate prison. After being exchanged, he entered the navy and served until the close of the war. He then studied law, was admitted to the bar, and began practice in the city of New York. Mr. Deane has been especially distinguished for his gifts to benevolent institutions under the control of Baptists. To Rochester university he has given $100,000, besides considerable sums to the Rochester theological seminary and to Vassar college.
# Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography/Deane, Samuel

Edition of 1900.
​Deane, Samuel, clergyman, b. in Mansfield, Mass., 30 March, 1784; d. 9 Aug., 1834. He was graduated at Brown in 1805, and in 1810 became pastor of the second church at Scituate, Mass., a charge which he retained for twenty-four years. He published "The Populous Village," a poem (1826); a "History of Scituate" (1831); and a number of sermons and short poems.—His nephew, William Reed, antiquary, b. in Mansfield, Mass., 21 Aug., 1809; d. there, 16 June, 1871, was engaged many years in mercantile life in Boston, and also contributed largely to the Unitarian and the secular press. He wrote valuable articles for the "New England Historical and Genealogical Register" and "The Historical Magazine," and was thoroughly acquainted with the early history of New England. He published genealogical histories of the Deane (in 1849), Leonard (1851), and Watson (1864) families, and also edited "Madam Knight's Journal," reprinted in "Littell's Living Age," 26 June, 1858. He was one of the earliest members of and held various offices in the New England historic-genealogical society.
# Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography/Denin, Susan

Edition of 1900.
​DENIN, Susan, actress, b. in Philadelphia, Pa., 22 March, 1835; d. in Bluffton, Ind., 4 Dec., 1875; When very young she and her sister Kate took the part of dancing fairies at the National theatre, Philadelphia. Susan afterward became a favorite in New York and other parts of the country, and in 1869 made her first appearance in London. Her ​death was the result of a fall on the stage in Indianapolis, Ind. She had been married four times. — Her sister Kate, b. in Philadelphia in 1837, was also a popular actress. They resembled each other in person, manner, and ability, and for a time were quite popular in melodramatic characters.
# Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography/Deitzler, George Washington

Edition of 1900.
​DEITZLER, George Washington, soldier, b. in Pine Grove, Schuylkill co., Pa., 30 Nov., 1826; d. near Tucson, Arizona, 11 April, 1884. He received a common-school education, removed to Kansas, and “grew up with the state.” He was a member of the Kansas house of representatives in 1857-'8, and again in 1859-'60, and during the former period was elected speaker. He was subsequently mayor of Lawrence, and treasurer of the University of Kansas. At the beginning of the war he was made colonel of the 1st regiment of Kansas volunteers. He was promoted to be brigadier-general, 29 Nov., 1862, but resigned in August of the year following. In 1864 he was commissioned major-general of Kansas militia. He was killed by being thrown from a carriage.
# Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography/Delano, Columbus

Edition of 1900.
​DELANO, Columbus, congressman, b. in Shoreham, Vt., 5 June, 1809; d. in Mount Vernon, Ohio, 23 Oct., 1896. He was educated at the common schools, studied law, and was admitted to the bar in 1831. He practised at Mount Vernon, and became eminent as an advocate and criminal lawyer. He was a delegate in 1860 to the National republican convention at Chicago which nominated Lincoln and Hamlin. He served as state commissary-general of Ohio in 1861, and was a member of the Ohio house of representatives in 1863, and was elected a member of congress from that state in 1844, 1864, and 1866. He was a delegate in 1864 to the National republican convention at Baltimore which nominated Lincoln and Johnson. On 5 March, 1869, he was appointed by President Grant commissioner of internal revenue, and while he held office reorganized the bureau, thereby increasing the receipts over 100 per cent in eight months. He succeeded Jacob D. Cox as secretary of the interior in October, 1870, a portfolio that he retained till 1875. Mr. Delano was for many years ​one of the trustees of Kenyon college, Ohio, which conferred on him the degree of LL. D., and in connection with which he has endowed a grammar school called Delano hall.
# Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography/Dengler, Frank

Edition of 1900.
​DENGLER, Frank, sculptor, b. in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1853. He went abroad while young, studied in the Munich academy of fine arts, and received there in 1874 a silver medal for his group the “Sleeping Beauty.” He was for a short time an instructor in modelling in the Boston museum art school, but resigned in 1877 on account of failing health, and removed to Covington, Ky., and afterward to Cincinnati. Among his works are “Azzo and Melda” (1877), an ideal head of “America,” and several portrait busts.