losophy had ever been to the body of mankind, and how violently it now opposed the new religion, which had the body of mankind for its object, they became much disposed to avoid or neglect all prophane literature, without distinction. They saw, in the power of miracles, a more efficacious way of propagating the faith and they thought they saw, in St. Paul's censure of the Grecian wisdom, the condemnation of all human literature, in general. St. Paul had himself abstained from their meretricious eloquence, and had cautioned posterity against their magical philosophy. The first, lest it should occasion a suspicion that the faith had made its way rather by the arts of human speech, than by the power of the spirit: The latter, because he saw it was fatally framed to infect religion; and had some experience, and more divine foreknowledge, that it would speedily do so.

Indeed the time was at hand. For the convictive evidence and rapid progress of the Gospel had so shaken and disconcerted learned pride, that the next age saw a torrent of believers pour into the church, from the schools of their rhetors, the colleges of their philosophers, and the cloisters of their priests. The sincerity of these illustrious converts in embracing a religion which did not hold out, so much as in distant prospect, any advantages of the temporal kind, cannot be fairly brought in question. Their discretion, their prudence, were the things most wanted. For that passion of new converts, zeal, which is then least under the direction of knowledge when zeal most needs it, hindered them from making their advantages of the principles of revelation; so admirably fitted, as we have shewn, to improve human nature on that side where its perfection lies, I mean, in the high attainments of moral science. For, instead of reasoning

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from truths clearly revealed, and so, from things known, to advance, by due degrees, in the method of the mathematicians, to the discovery of truths unknown, They travested obscure uncertainties, nay, manifest errors, into truth; and sought in philosophy and logic, analogies and quibbles to support them.

Their two great objects, as became them, were to increase the number of believers; and to defend the faith against infidels and heretics.

Amongst the means they employed for the speedy conversion of the world, one was to bring Christianity as near to the genius of the Gentile religion, and of the Greek philosophy, as could be done without giving offence to themselves or their brethren. They thought it but prudent to avail themselves of the prejudices of Paganism; and perhaps they themselves were not free from all remains of those prejudices. The Jewish law, ill understood, satisfied them in the propriety of these means. They saw there, compliances made by God himself to the prejudices and superstitions of the times. But this was all they saw: They did not reflect that a local worship, instituted for peculiar and temporary ends, was to be conducted on maxims different from what was required in an universal religion, erected on the general principles of spirit and truth. They did not reflect that one mean was to be pursued when the end was to keep a chosen family from the contagion of idol worship; and another when an idolatrous world was to be invited to the profession of SAVING FAITH.

It is very observable, that, while the fathers were thus dishonouring Christianity by giving it the fashionable air of Paganism, the philosophers, on their side, were as busy in reforming and purifying their systems on the model of the great truths of Revelation*. See the Divine Legation.

And, what is yet more strange, this mutual approach still kept them at an irreconciled distance. For the advances on both sides were made for no other end than that each might the better keep their own ground; the philosophers, by conciliating the reason; the fathers, by indulging the passions; into which various conduct they were alike betrayed by the condition of our common nature, unable either to bear pure and simple truth, or gross and undisguised error.

There were two things in Paganism, which, as they excited and kept up that amusing exercise of the mind, admiration, did, more strongly than any else, hold the people attached to idolatry; and these were MYSTERIOUS RITES and HIDDEN DOCTRINES.

One would have thought it hard to find an equivalent for these in so simple and perfect a religion as the Christian; yet the figurative expressions used in the institution of the Lord's supper, and the frequent mention of mysteries throughout the New Testament (though it be of mysteries which the genius of the gospel had revealed and explained, not of mysteries which it invented and kept hidden), gave occasion to accommodators to ancient prejudices to speak of the last supper as a mysterious rite, to which they ventured to apply all the terms in use at the celebration of the Pagan mysteries; and to speak of REDEMPTION as of one of those hidden doctrines, which the fanatic Platonists of that time boasted they had in trust, for the purification and advancement of human nature.

This will account for a circumstance that never fails of giving scandal to the readers of Churchhistory which is, that the principles and doctrines of the ancient Heretics were infinitely more shocking and absurd than those of any modern sectaries. The reason (we sce) is, that the ancient Heretics formed their

tenets

tenets on the principles of Pagan philosophy; while the modern sectaries form theirs on the books of sacred Scripture. And though the one was on philosophy reformed and purified, and the other is on the Bible perverted and misunderstood, yet the difference in favour of the latter becomes immense.

This mysterious genius of Paganism, together with its popular absurdities, naturally produced a method of teaching, which always pleases the imagination in proportion as it disgusts the judgment, that is to say, the use of allegory. A practice, excellently fitted to cover the early follies of vulgar Gentilism, and to ornament the late knaveries of the philosophic; but very abhorrent of the genius of Christianity, where every doctrine was rational, and therefore every rite should have been plain and open. Yet as allegory was become the general vehicle of instruction, and that which particularly distinguished the school of Plato; the FATHERS, who leaned most towards that sect, thought fit to go into that fashionable mode. They allegorized every thing; and their success was such as might be expected from so absurd an accommodation. Here again they were misled in their ignorance of the nature of the Jewish law: a law full of allegories, and

figurative representations. And with great propriety so, as that religion was dependent on, and preparatory to the Gospel: which, being its end and completion, required to have some shadow of itself delineated in the steps which led to it. But this, which shews the use of allegories to be reasonable in the Old Testament, shews the folly of expecting them in the New. when the substance was advanced, and placed in full light, the shadow was of course to be cast behind. Yet, by the most unaccountable perversity, the very reason which the apostle gives for the necessity of interpreting

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interpreting the law figuratively, that the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life, was made the authority for using the Gospel in the same manner.

We have said, that the school to which the FATHERS chiefly inclined, was the Academy. There is a passage in St. Austin, which shews to what excess the authority of Plato was carried. In his Confessions, he returns thanks to God for having made the books of Plato an instrument of redeeming him from the errors of Manicheism. His partialities for that philosopher must have strangely blinded him; for, humanly speaking, nothing could have more contributed to keep him a Manichean than the doctrines of Plato, who held two coeternal principles, God and matter, and that the latter was the cause of evil. This fondness for the academy arose partly from its being the philosophy in vogue, and partly because (in consequence of that) several of the fathers came from that school into the church; but chiefly because they had entertained greater hopes of bringing over the Platonists to the faith, which, as Plato was in the highest credit, would be deemed a victory over philosophy in general. What they seemed to ground their hopes upon was the sceptical disposition of the academy as in its first institution. The earlier Platonists professed to seek truth; and were not ashamed to own they could not find it. It was therefore imagined they would gladly receive it, in doctrines so rationally deduced, and so clearly revealed. But in this they were deceived: for uncertainty is not the state and condition of the sceptic's knowledge, but the principle and the genius of it, and it was departing from the fundamental laws of their profession to acknowledge any thing certain. As for the enthusiastic part of this sect, which was now daily getting ground, the magic to which they were so madly given, kept them.

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