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Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological and Ecclesiastical Literature

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astrologers, who pretended to calculate mens' nativities by erecting schemes and horoscopes, to know what position the stars were in at their birth, and thence to foretell their good or bad fortune. "And because some of these pretended to determine positively of the lives and deaths of kings, which was reputed a very dangerous piece of treason, therefore the laws of the state were more severe against them even under the heathen emperors, as Gothofred shows out of the ancient lawyers, Ulpian and Paulus; and that was another reason why the Church thought it proper to animadvert upon these with the utmost severity of ecclesiastical censures, as thinking that what the heathen laws had punished as a capital crime ought not to pass unregarded in the discipline of the Christian Church. It was this crime that expelled Aquila from the Church. For Epiphanius says (De Mensuris et Ponderibus) he was once a Christian, but, being incorrigibly bent upon the practice of astrology, the Church cast him out, and then he became a Jew, and in revenge set upon a new translation of the Bible, to corrupt those texts which had any relation to the coming of Christ." — Bingham, Orig. Eccl. book 16, chapter 5. (See DIVINATION).