[178]Or Dionysius may mean that he had encouraged the singing of the Psalms in service.
[179]Cf. Tit. ii. 13, 2 Thess. ii. 8, etc.
[180]The reference is to 2 Thess. ii. 1 and 1 John iii. 2.
[181]It does not appear to whom Dionysius addressed this treatise, but he usually did address what he wrote to some particular person.
[182]Here the two offices are conjoined as in 1 Tim. v. 17. The “teacher” as an officer of the Church is mentioned in several of the early Church Orders.
[183]Nothing more is known of him: either he had succeeded to the leadership since the death of Nepos, or on this particular occasion took the lead.
[184]The allusion is probably to Gaius of Rome and his school rather than to the Alogi, as they were called, of the East; but both these bodies were strongly opposed to Millenarian views.
[185]If this refers to a formal division into chapters, it disappeared afterwards, for a new division was devised in the sixth century, on which our present system is partly based.
[186]Dionysius plays here on the meaning of the Greek word for Revelation, ἀποκάλυψις, “unveiling.” He is fond of such a device.
[187]If that is the meaning of the words employed, then “saints” (ἅγιοι) is not used in its New Testament sense for the “faithful” generally, but a distinction is made more like the later use of the word for those who attained higher saintliness than the rest; but perhaps the phrase for “churchmen” implies “clerical or ecclesiastical persons,” and “saints” has its earlier sense.
[188]Cerinthus was the earliest exponent of Gnostic views, and as such much abhorred by St. John the Apostle.
[189]_i. e._ reckoning that it is a matter where faith rather than reason should act; or perhaps the translation should be “giving more weight to (the author’s) trustworthiness.”
[190]This title is to be noticed, as the author himself never actually describes himself by it. Dionysius is much more cautious as to the authorship than Origen, his former master, who attributed the book to St. John the Evangelist without hesitation, according to Eusebius, _H. E._ vi. 25, 9.
[191]Rev. xxii. 7, 8: but Dionysius has no authority for joining the latter clause on to the former, its construction being “it is I John who saw and heard.”