XV.

(See p. 400, [57]cap. xvii. and 401, note 2.)

He proclaims the purity of physical generation, because of the parturition of the Blessed Virgin; castigating the docetism of Cassian, who had presumed to speak of the body of Jesus as a phantasm, and the grosser blasphemies of Marcion and Valentinus, equally destructive to the Christ of the Gospel. [^2679] He overturns the whims of these latter deceivers, about Adam's society with his wife, and concludes that our Lord's assumption of the flesh of His mother, was a sufficient corroboration of that divine law by which the generations of mankind are continued.