the year 211. A charge answered by admission, rather than denial, and corroborated by the never-to-be-forgotten fact, that the Egyptian Therapeuts in their university of Alexandria, where first Christianity gained an establishment, were professedly followers and maintainers of the Eclectic philosophy, which consisted in nothing else but this very overt and avowed practice of bringing together whatever they held to be useful and good in all other systems; and thus, as they pretended, concentrating all the rays of truth that were scattered through the world into the common centre of their own system. This is fully admitted by Lactantius, Arnobius, Clemens Alexandrinus, and Origen; and denied by none who have ventured fearlessly to investigate the real origin of Christianity.

CHARGE 5.

PORPHYRY,* whose very name is aconite to Christian intolerance, objects against Origen, that, being really a Pagan, and brought up in the schools of the Gentiles, he had, to serve his own ambitious purposes, contrived to turn the whole Pagan system, which he had first egregiously corrupted, into the new-fangled theology of Christians.

CHARGE 6.

CELSUS, in so much of his work concerning the "TRUE LOGOS" as Origen has thought proper to suffer posterity to become acquainted with, charges the Christians with a recoinage of the misunderstood doctrine of the ancient Logos.+

Charges thus affecting the character of Origen, the great pillar of the Christian church, cannot fall innocent of wound on Christianity itself. Origen is the very first of all the Fathers who has presented us with a catalogue of the books contained in the New Testament. He was the most laborious of all writers; and his authoritative pen was alone competent to produce every iota of variation which existed between the old Pagan legends of the Egyptian Therapeuts and that new version of them

Porphyry.Theodoret calls him Άσπονδος ημών πολέμιος, and Ο παντων niv EXDIOTOS. Augustin calls him "Christianorum acerrimus inimicus." + Quasi refingerent-Τα του παλαιου λόγου παρακουσματα.---Lib. 3.

which first received from him the designation of the New Testament.*

ADMISSIONS OF BISHOP HERBERT MARSH.

Bishop Marsh, in his Michaelis, the highest authority we could possibly appeal to on this subject,+ admits, that "it is a certain fact, that several readings in our common printed text are nothing more than alterations made by Origen, whose authority was so great in the Christian church, that emendations which he proposed, though, as he himself acknowledged, they were supported by the evidence of no manuscript, were very generally received."+ The reader will do himself the justice to recollect, that Origen lived and wrote in the third century, and that " no manuscript of the New Testament now extant is prior to the sixth century; and, what is to be lamented, various readings which, as appears from the quotations of the Fathers, were in the text of the Greek Testament, are to be found in none of the manuscripts which are at present remaining."§

ADMISSIONS, TO THE SAME EFFECT, OF THE EARLY
FATHERS.

To charges of such pregnant inference, we find our Christian Fathers, in like manner, making answers that only serve to authenticate those charges; to demonstrate that they were founded in truth and not in malice; and that, answered as they were, and as any thing may be, they were utterly irrefragible.

"You observe the philosophers," says Minucius Felix, "to have maintained precisely the same things as we Christians, but not so is it on account of our having copied from them, but because they, from the divine preachings of the prophets, have imitated the shadow of truth interpolated: thus the more illustrious of their wise men, Pythagoras first, and especially Plato, with a corrupted and half-faith

See the chapter on Origen.

+ "The Introduction to the New Testament by Michaelis, late professor at Göttingen, as translated by Marsh, is the standard work, comprehending all that is important on the subject."-The learned Bishop of Llandaff, quoted in Ellsley's Annotations on the Gospels, vol. 1. (the introd.), p. xxvi.

Michaelis's Introduction to New Test., by Bishop Marsh, vol. 2, p. 368. § Ibid. vol. 2, p. 160.

And

have handed down the doctrine of regeneration."* Lactantius, after admitting the truth of the story, that man had been made by Prometheus out of clay,-adds, that the poets had not touched so much as a letter of divine truth; but those things which had been handed down in the vaticination of the prophets, they collected from fables and obscure opinion, and having taken sufficient care purposely to deprave and corrupt them, in that wilfully depraved and corrupted state they made them the subjects of their poems.+

Tertullian calls the philosophers of the Gentiles the thieves, the interpolators, and the adulterators of divine truth; alleges, that " from a design of curiosity they put our doctrines into their works, not sufficiently believing them to be divine to be restrained from interpolating them, and that they mixed that which was uncertain with what they found certain."+

Eusebius pleads, that the Devil, being a very notorious thief, stole the Christian doctrines, and carried them over for his friends, the Pagan philosophers and poets, to make fun of.§

Theodoret accuses Plato especially, with having purposely mixed muddy and earthy filth with the pure fountain from which he drew the arguments of his theology.||

Thus, if we may believe Eusebius, the beautiful fable of Ovid's Metamorphosis, describing Phaeton falling from the chariot of his father, the Sun, was nothing more than a wicked corruption of the unquestionable truth of the prophet Elijah having been caught up to heaven, as described (2 Kings ii.)," Behold there appeared a chariot of fire, and HORSES of fire, and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven;" the heathens being so ignorant as to confound the name Helias with Helios, the Greek word for the Sun.

The almost droll Justin Martyr gives us a most satisfactory explanation of the whole matter; that "it having reached the Devil's ears that the prophets had foretold that Christ would come for the purpose of tormenting the * Quoted in Paganus Obtrectator, p. 34.

+ Lactantii Instit. lib. 3, cap. 10. Sic etiam conditionem renascendi, sapientium clariores, Pythagoras primus, et præcipuus Plato, corrupta et dimidiata fide tradiderunt.-Min. Felix.

Tertul. Apolog. cap. 46, 47.

§ Κλεπτης γαρ ο Διάβολος και τα ημέτερα εκφερομύθων προς τους εαυτού υπο OnTas.-Euseb. procudubio sed perdidi locum.

|| Εξ ής ουτος λαβων της θεολογιας τας αφορμας το ιλνωδες και γεώδες ανέμιξεν — Theodoritus Therapeut. libro 2, de Platone loqueno.

S

wicked in fire, he set the heathen poets to bring forward a great many who should be called (and were called) sons of Jove. The Devil laying his scheme in this, to get men to imagine that the true history of Christ was of the same character as those prodigious fables and poetic stories."*

I render from the beautiful Greek of Theodoret, a passage of considerable elegance, in which the reader will trace the rising dignity of style, superior manner, and cultivated taste with which an historian of the fourth century could improve and varnish the awkward sophistry of the honester Christian Father of the second :—

"But if the adversaries of truth (our Pagan opponents) so very much admired the truth, as to adorn their own writings even with the smallest portions they could pillage from it, and these, though mixed with much falsehood, yet dimmed not their proper beauty, but shone like pearls resplendent through the squalors in which they lay, so that, according to the evangelical doctrine, the light shone in the darkness, and by the darkness itself was not concealed; we may easily understand how lovely and admirable the divine doctrines must be, secerned from falsehood, for so differs the gem in its rough matrix, from what it is when seen resplendent in a diadem."t

CHARGE 7.

The Emperor Julian-who, with all his imperfections on his head, was an ornament to human nature, and can by no means be conceived to have wanted any possible means of information on the subject-objects against the claims of Christianity, what a thousand testimonies confirm, that it was a mixture of the Jewish superstition and Greek philosophy, so as to incorporate the Atheism of the one with the loose and dissolute manner of living of the other. "If any one," says he, "should wish to know the

* Ακούσαντες γαρ παραγενησόμενον τον χριστον, και κολαθησομένους δια πυρός τους ατέβεις, προεβάλλοντο πολλους λεχθηναι λεγομένους υιούς τω διι, νομιζοντες δυνήσεσθαι ενεργισαι τερατολογιαν ηγήσασθαι τους ανθρώπους τα του χριστου, και ομοίως τοις υπο των ποιητων λεχθεισι.Justini. Apolog. 2.

+ Ει δε και οι της αλήθειας αντιπαλοι ούτω κομιδη θαυμαζουσι την αλήθειαν, ως . και βραχεσι μορίοις εκείθεν σεσυλημένοις διακαλλύνειν τα οικεία ξυχχράμματα, και πολλώ ψεύδει ταυτα μιγνυμενα μη αμβλύειν το σφέτερον καλλος, αλλά κάν κοπρια και φορύτω κειμένους τους μαργαριτας αστραπτειν λιαν, και κατά την ευαγγελικήν διδασκαλίαν, το φως, εν τη σκοτία φαίνειν, και υπο της σκοτίας, μη κρυπτεσθαι ξυνιδείν ευπετες, όπως εστιν αξιέραστα και αξιαγαστα τα θεια μαθήματα του ψευδους κεχωρισμένα πολλην γαρ δηπου διαφοραν έχει μαργαρίτης εν βαρβυρω κειμενος και ev diadηuati λaμv.-Theodoret. Therapeut. libro 2.

truth with respect to you Christians, he will find your impiety to be made up partly of the Jewish audacity, and partly of the indifference and confusion of the Gentiles, and that ye have put together, not the best, but the worst characteristics of them both."

The answer to which charge, on the part of the advocates of Christianity, was, that they neither took them to be gods whom the Gentiles considered to be such, and so were not assimilated to the Gentiles; nor did they respect the deisidemony of the Jews, and so were not adherents to Judaism. Nor was it a small matter of triumph to their cause, to contrast the apparent contrariety of charges that were alleged against them, in that as Julian accused them of adopting the worst parts of Gentilism, Celsus had accused them of selecting the best parts.

THE CHARGES OF CELSUS.

It is never to be forgotten, that the charges of Celsus stand only in the language in which Origen has been pleased to invest them; nor is it any very monstrous phenomenon that such wholly different characters as Julian and Celsus were, should either of them, with equal conscientiousness, have esteemed those selfsame things the best, which the other considered the worst parts of Gentilism.

Celsus, an Epicurean philosopher, might very naturally think that an imposter acted with sound policy in giving to his new-fangled system all the advantages it could derive from the closest convenient conformity to the Epicurean carelessness of living, and indulgence in innocent, or even in perhaps not quite innocent pleasures; while Julian, all whose virtues were of the severest and most rigid self-restraint, looked with horror on the licence which the doctrines of the apostolic chief of sinners had seemed to countenance in the lives and manners of the Christians. The charge of the Emperor Julian is in striking coincidence of verisimilitude with the apparent fact of the case, that Paul of Tarsus, who, in his Epistle to the Colossians, calls himself a deacon of the Gospel,+ and who could have stood in that humble grade, only as a servant and mis

Ειτις υπερ υμων εθελοι οκοπειν ευρήσει την υμετέραν ασέβειαν έκτε της ιουδαϊκής τολμης και της παρα τοις έθνεσιν αδιαφορίαν και χυδαιότητος συγκειμενην, εξ αμφοιν γαρ ούτι το καλλιστών αλλά το χειρόν ελκυσαντες παρυφήν κακων ειργασασθε. Julian apud Cyrill, lib. 2.

That is in the Greek text.