Note 035 Lactantius, iv. 8. Yet the Probole, or Prolatio, which the most orthodox divines borrowed without scruple from the Valentinians, and illustrated by the comparisons of a fountain and stream, the sun and its rays, etc., either meant nothing, or favoured a material idea of the divine generation See Beausobre, tom. i. 1. ii. c. 7, p. 548.

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Note to Chapter 21 of Decline and Fall by Gibbon