Tuesday. [Acts 8:5–17; John 6:27–33]

   Then Simon himself believed also: and when he was baptized, he continued with Philip (Acts 8:13). He both believed and was baptized, but nothing came of him. One must think that there was something not quite right in the formation of his faith. Sincere faith is the renunciation of your mind. You must bare your mind and present it to faith as a clean slate, so that faith might inscribe itself on the mind as it is, without any mixing in of alien definitions and tenets. When one’s former beliefs remain in the mind, then a mixture occurs in it after the tenets of faith are written there. The consciousness will be confused between the mind’s sophism and the operations of faith. Simon was therefore a model for all heretics, as all who enter the realm of faith thinking as they did as before. They are confused in the faith and nothing comes of them other than harm: for themselves—when they remain silent, for others—when this confusion is not kept within them alone, but breaks out to others, due to their thirst to be teachers. Hence there always turns out to be a party of people more or less sinning in the faith, with a wretched surety of their correctness, and with a calamitous drive to remake everyone their way.