and the origin of this material universe. The leading principles of this philosophy have already been stated. § 4. All those eastern philosophers, believing that rational souls became connected with matter, and inhabitants of bodies, contrary to the will and pleasure of the supreme God, were in expectation of a mighty legate from the Deity, possessed of consummate wisdom and power, who would imbue, with a knowledge of the true God, the spirits now oppressed with the load of their bodies, and rescue them from bondage to the lords of this material world. When, therefore, some of them perceived that Jesus and his friends wrought miracles of a salutary character, they were ready to believe that he was that mighty legate of God, come to deliver men from the power of the genii, to whom they thought this world subject, and to free souls from their material bodies. This supposition being admitted into minds polluted with gross errors, they interpreted, or rather perverted, whatever Christ and his disciples taught, so as to make it harmonize with their other opinions. § 5. Hence there necessarily arose among them a multitude of opinions, extremely alien to the precepts of Christ. Their belief that the world was not created by the supreme God in whom is all perfection, but by one or more inferior deities, of a bad or at least of an imperfect character, would not allow them to admit the divine authority of the Old Testament Scriptures, and it led some of them to venerate and extol the serpent, the prime author of sin among men, and likewise several of the vilest persons mentioned in the Jewish Scriptures. The same belief induced them to contemn Moses, and the religion that he taught, and to represent him as instigated to impose such hard and unsuitable laws on the Jews, by the world's Creator, who had no regard for human happiness, but only for his own glory and authority. Their belief that matter is eternal and the source of all evil, prevented them from putting a due estimate upon the human body, and from favouring marriage, whereby bodies are produced, and also from admitting the doctrine of the future resurrection of the body. Their belief that malevolent genii ruled over the world, and that from them originated all the diseases, wars, and calamities of men, led them almost universally to addict themselves to magic, or the art of weakening and paralyzing the power of those genii. I omit many other points, as not compatible with a history so summary as this. § 6. Their principles required, that while they admitted Christ to be the Son of the supreme God, and messenger sent from the Pleroma or upper world where God and his family dwell, for the benefit of miserable souls, they should hold most unworthy sentiments concerning his person and offices. They could not, indeed, either call him God, or a real man. True deity was inconsistent with their notion, that he was, although begotten of God, yet every way far inferior to the Father. Man he could not be, because they considered every thing concrete and corporeal intrinsically bad and vicious. Hence most of them divested Christ of a material body, and denied him to have really undergone for the sake of men those sufferings which are recorded of him. The cause of his coming among us, they said, was no other than to strip the capricious genii, who tyrannize in this world, of their power over virtuous and heaven-born souls, and to teach men how to withdraw the divine mind from the impure body, and to fit it for a union with God. § 7. Their systems of morals, we are informed, were widely different. For most of them recommended abstinence and austerity, and prescribed the most severe bodily mortifications; in order that the soul, whose ill fate it was to be associated with a body, might enjoy greater liberty, and be able the better to contemplate heavenly things. For, the more this depraved and grovelling habitation of the soul is weakened and attenuated, the less will it be able to withdraw the mind from the contemplation of divine objects. But some of them maintained, on the contrary, that we may safely indulge all our libidinous desires; and that there is no moral difference in human actions. This contrariety of opinions need not surprise us; because the same principle naturally produced both systems. For persons who believed their bodies to be essentially evil, and meant for holding their souls in bondage, might, according as they were of a voluptuous or of a morose and austere disposition, either fall into the conclusion, that the acts of the body have no connexion with the soul when it has attained to communion with God, or, on the contrary, suppose * See Clemens Alex. Stromat. lib. iii. cap. v. p. 529, ed. Potter. that the body must be strenuously resisted and opposed, as being the enemy of the soul. § 8. As these extraordinary opinions required proof, and as it was not easy to find any thing favourable to them in the writings of the apostles, refuge was necessarily taken in fables and impositions. Therefore, when asked where they had learned what they so confidently taught, some produced fictitious books under the names of Abraham, Zoroaster, and Christ, or his apostles; others boasted of having derived their principles from a concealed and secret doctrine taught by Christ; others again affirmed that they had arrived at this high degree of wisdom, by an innate energy which existed in their own minds; and some pretended that one Theudas, a disciple of St. Paul, or Matthias, one of Christ's disciples, had been their teacher. Those of them who did not wholly reject the books of the New Testament, either interpreted them very absurdly, neglecting the true import of words, or dishonestly corrupted them, by retrenching what they disliked, and adding what they pleased. § 9. It is easy to see, how these persons, after assuming the name of Christians, became divided into so many sects. In the first place, before their adhesion to Christ, as is clear from what has been said above, that they were already divided in opinion. Hence, as each one endeavoured to accommodate his own philosophical opinions to the Christian religion, it was the necessary consequence, that various systems of religion were produced. Moreover, some of them were born Jews, as Cerinthus and others, and did not wish to appear contemners of Moses: while others were wholly estranged from the Jewish religion, and could indulge themselves in liberties which the former could not. And lastly, this whole system of philosophy and religion, being without any fixed and solid basis, chiefly depended upon operations of the mind. Now, who does not know that variety is inseparable from systems and subjects which mind and imagination have under their control? § 10. The heads and leaders of the philosophical sects which troubled the church in the first century, next come to be considered. The first place among them is, by many, given to Dositheus, a Samaritan. And it is sufficiently proved, that there was a man of this name among the Samaritans, about the times of our Saviour; and that he left a sect behind him. But all the extant accounts of this person clearly show that he is to be ranked, not among those called heretics, but among the enemies of the Christian name; or, if it be thought more correct, among the delirious and insane. For he wished himself to be thought the Messiah, or that Prophet whom God had promised to the Jews: he could not, therefore, have held Jesus Christ to be a divine ambassador; nor have merely corrrupted his doctrines.8 § 11. What I have said of Dositheus I would also say of the far-famed Simon Magus. This impostor is not to stand among those who corrupted Christianity by their own errors, that is, among heretics, but is to be thrust into that unhappy class which declared open war against it, in spite of the unanimity, with which writers generally, both ancient and modern, make him the head, ringleader, and father of the whole heretical camp. For it is manifest, from all the accounts which we have of him, that after his defection from the Christians, he ascribed to Christ no honour at all; but set himself in opposition to Christ, and said that he was no other than the supreme power of God." Ac s Ja. Basnage, Histoire des Juifs, l. ii. cap. xiii. p. 307. Rich. Simon, Critique de la Bibliothèque des Auteurs Ecclés. par. M. du Pin, tom. iii. cap. xiii. p. 304. [Mosheim, Inst. hist. Chr. major. p. 376. C. W. F. Walch, Ketzerhistorie, i. p. 182. All the accounts make Dositheus to have lived among the Samaritans; one writer represents him as an apostate Jew. cording to Origen (Philocal, i.) he was a rigorous observer of the law of Moses, and particularly allowed no one to move from the spot where the sabbath overtook him. According to Epiphanius, (Hæres. lib. i. pt. i. hær. 13, previous to the Christian heresies,) he was an apostate Jew, whose ambition being disappointed, he retired among the Samaritans, lived in a cave, and fasted so rigorously as to occasion his death. Other ancient accounts simply mention him among the founders of sects; Hegesippus, in Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 1. iv. c. 22.-It is said, that his followers accounted him the Messiah; (Photius Biblioth. cxxx.)—and that he at first, claimed to be so; but afterwards retracted, in presence of his pupil Simon Magus (Clemens, Recogn. 1. ii. 8, &c.); Eulogius, bp. of Alexandria, in the seventh century, wrote against the Dosi as theans, (according to Photius, Biblioth. cxxx.) and besides his pretended messiahship, he attributes to Dositheus various errors, all of which coincided with either Sadducean or Samaritan opinions. See J. E. C. Schmidt, Handb. d. christl. Kirchengeschichte, vol. i. § 50, p. 214, &c. Tr.] See Origen, adv. Celsum, lib. v. p. 272, ed. Spencer. ["Simon probably was one of that class of adventurers which abounded at this period, or like Apollonius of Tyana, and others at a later time, with whom the opponents of Christianity attempted to confound Jesus and his apostles. His doctrine was oriental in its language and in its pretensions. He was the first on, or emanation, or rather, perhaps, the first manifestation of the primal Deity. He assumed not merely the title of the Great Power, or Virtue of God, but all the other appellations, the Word, the Perfection, the Paraclete, the Almighty, the whole combined attributes of the Deity." (Milman's Hist. of Christianity from the Birth of Christ to the Abolition of Paganism in the Roman Empire. Lond. 1840, ii. 99.) The great power of God appears from Acts viii. 10, to have been a designation for their master in general vogue § 12. There are such obvious discrepancies and inconsistencies in the accounts of Simon's life and opinions, given us by the ancients, that some very learned men deny the possibility of applying them to any single person; and accordingly, besides the Simon known as Magus, who abandoned the Christian religion, they suppose another, who was a Gnostic philosopher. On this point men must judge as they please; but to us it appears neither safe nor necessary to go from the testimony of the ancients, who speak of only one Simon.' He was by birth either a Samaritan or a Jew, who after studying philosophy at Alexandria2 made a public profession of magic, as was common in that age, and by fictitious prodigies, persuaded the Samaritans, among other things, that he had received from God the power of controlling those evil spirits which afflict mankind.3 On seeing the miracles which Philip performed by divine power, Simon joined himself to him, professed to be a Christian, and hoped to learn from the Christians the art of working miracles. When cut off from this hope, by the severe language of St. Peter', he not only returned to his old course of sorcery, but also wherever he went among Simon's disciples. For the other titles borne by him, Mr. Milman cites Jerome. His followers appear to have existed until very near the time of Origen. “Though it may be true that Simon Magus was an enemy to the progress and advancement of Christianity, though he cannot, in fact, be called a Christian, yet if he borrowed any part of the Christian scheme, and united it to his own, he would be called in ancient times an heretic, and the fathers assert that he was the parent of all heretics."-Burton's Bampton Lectures, 98. Ed.] See the Dissertation by G. C. Voelger, revised and published by Mosheim, Diss. ad Histor. Eccles. pertinentes, vol. ii. p. 55, &c. de uno Simone Mago. [The idea of two Simons, the one a Samaritan, mentioned Acts viii., the other a Jewish philosopher, in the reign of Domitian, and the father of all the Gnostic sects, was first thrown out as a conjecture, by Camp. Vitringa, Observ. Sacrar. 1. v. c. 12, § 9, p. 159, and afterwards defended by C. A. Heumann, Acta erudit. Lips. for April, A.D. 1717, p. 179, and J. de Beausobre, Diss. sur les Adamites, pt. ii. subjoined to L'Enfant's His toire de la guerre des Hussites, § 1, p. 350, &c.-But this hypothesis is now generally given up. Tr.] Of Clementina, Homil. ii. in Patr 3 Acts viii. 9, 10. : |