found it in the school of Judaism; though his successors improved upon his model by still further assimilations, through philosophy, to the heathenism whence it had at first been derived.

The strange and absurd comments, therefore, which we have been compelled to lay before the reader, are now abundantly explained and accounted for. Their authors looked upon the word of God as a mythology; of which, the only parts to be understood in their literal sense were those that treated of the invisible world, of the divine nature, character, and attributes, of the mode of the divine existence,188 and other similar topics. All the rest they considered dark and enigmatical; the apparent meaning being merely the veil that concealed "those allegorical senses in which the gnostical truth delivers itself, whereby one thing is shown and another meant;" as Clement phrases it. 189

188 That the early fathers were orthodox upon these subjects has been abundantly demonstrated; I need scarcely name the elaborate Defensio Fidei Nicana of Bishop Bull, and the admirable treatises upon the works of Tertullian and Justin Martyr by the bishop of Lincoln, as embodying every thing that can be desired upon the question. It appears to me that these were the only doctrines upon which these authors accepted aright the teaching of the Scriptures. Their comments upon all texts relating to the divine nature, are characterised by a scrupulous anxiety to give the literal unsophisticated meaning of the passage: so much so, that they needlessly refine upon it: and the later creeds will be found more accurately to define the revealed truth upon these mysterious subjects, than the works of the AntiNicene fathers; because the former are constructed upon the scope of the whole Bible, whereas the latter make a series of separate deductions from the sense of particular passages. This peculiarity in the early fathers I would thus explain :-The nature and mode of existence of divine personages were precisely the subjects upon which the heathen mythologies were supposed to speak plainly, and without figure or parable: and, therefore, the early church forbore to equivocate or amphibolise upon them; she expected that the sacred books should instruct her upon these points in plain and direct language.

189 1 Strom., § 14.

And, therefore, he who would attain to the perfection of Christianity must pass over the obvious import of the inspired word, and endeavour, by the exercise of his ingenuity and philosophy, to develope the hidden meanings. Thus then, "they made the word of God of none effect by their tradition:" with them it was not "a light unto the feet, and a lamp unto the path" of the believer, but a dark lanthorn; emitting, indeed, a few glimmerings of light through a crevice or two, by the help of which the vulgar and common Christian might possibly find his way to heaven; but these only kindled the ardour of the aspirant after gnostical wisdom to withdraw the slide, and to gaze upon the splendour it concealed; which, however, was secured by a clasp of so rare and ingenious a device, that the most vigorous exertions of his astuteness and philosophy were required to unloose it.

CHAPTER XV.

PECULIAR DOCTRINES OF CHRISTIANITY.

I HAVE now met with an important question which is certainly previous to any other, in the present stage of our enquiry. Is not every useful purpose of our investigation already answered?—or are the opinions of those who have erred to the extent of the early fathers in their mode of interpreting the Sacred Volume, at all to be regarded upon those portions of the Christian scheme of which they could really know nothing but from thence? We certainly deal thus with writings of a more recent date. Who troubles himself to investigate the precise shade of the Calvinism of Jacob Behmen, or of the Sabellianism of Emmanuel Swedenborg? Yet both these enthusiasts were men of respectable talent, and extensive scriptural knowledge; we only contemn their opinions on divinity, because of the frantic absurdity of their ordinary mode of scriptural comment and I really know of nothing in either of their works, which would not successfully dispute the palm both for sanity and sobriety, with the upßoxía of the early fathers!

But passing by this consideration, some of the erroneous opinions which they maintained, had a necessary tendency to influence and bias their doctrinal deductions from the sacred text.-Upon the all-important subject of

inspiration, we have seen that their opinions were very vague and incoherent; they held the verbal and even literal inspiration of the Septuagint: they often appealed to spurious and apocryphal books as to inspired authority ; they also invariably assign a measure of this gift to the teachers of the Greek and barbarian philosophies: and when we add to all this, that they held that every inspired sentence involved two meanings, the one obvious, and the other mystical, I see not how it is possible to avoid concluding à priori, that the doctrinal inferences of Theologians thus grossly erring upon vital points ought, by no means, to be invested with any degree of authority in our estimation; much less are they to be followed as the guides of our faith.

Their claims to authority have always rested upon their proximity to the apostolic times: of these we have already disposed; but I will here state an opinion regarding the apostolical tradition, concerning which I have only to observe, that it has been suggested to me by the perusal of all that remains of early Christian antiquity, and that I offer it with the utmost diffidence. It would appear that the apostles were inspired with the truths they revealed, under those mental aspects alone in which they have recorded them: they were not so disclosed to their understandings, as that they were able also to view them under other aspects, and declare of them from thence infallibly, and by inspiration. So strict was the limitation, that they seem to have varied little, if at all, upon any occasion, even in the phraseology and diction by which they conveyed them, either in speaking or writing: so that had one of the bold enquirers of these latter days into "free will, foreknowledge, fate," been privileged to propound his doubts and his deductions to an inspired apostle, the

only reply that he would have received, would probably have been a rebuke of his impertinence, and a reference to, or repetition of, that which is written; the apostle would not, because he could not, have satisfied his curiosity. Nothing, then, can be more erroneous than the notion, that the doctrinal opinions of the apostolical and early fathers are inspired glosses upon the New Testament, handed down by tradition from the apostles; not only do they never assume such an authority for them, but the tenor of their writings makes it evident that such glosses had no existence; and, therefore, the hearer of the apostolical preaching had, in this respect, no advantage whatever over the reader of the apostolical epistles; since both would receive the same truths, and probably in the same words.

Repeating, therefore, the inference at which we had before arrived,' that the early fathers had no inspired or traditional authority for their doctrinal opinions, of which we are not ourselves also in possession, we proceed to to enquire, whether there is evidence in their writings that these their errors have influenced the views they entertained of those fundamental principles, by which their doctrinal deductions would necessarily be determined.

We will take the much tossed question regarding the Freedom of the Will; upon which there will be no necessity that we should disturb any point in discussion between the Calvinist and the Arminian: the doctrine of the church upon it in the second century, being utterly valueless in that controversy, and not possessed of the weight even of a feather in either scale; inasmuch as it is not derived from the Bible at all, nor was any such origination pretended for it by its supporters. This interminable

1 See Chapters II. and III.