with their principles, holding it to be impossible that a substance intrinsically evil, such as matter, should be united to an angelic or superangelic spirit, contended that Jesus was a man only in appearance; and that he neither felt, nor suffered, like other men, but only seemed to do so. These were called Docetæ. This was the heresy of the apostolic age*. The apostle Paul alludes to it, when he cautions Timothy against the illusions of science, falsely so called†: for the Gnostics pretended to superior knowledge: and when he warns him not to give heed to endless genealogies, there being great disputes among the Gnostics concerning the pedigrees of the Eons. The apostle John certainly refers to the Docetæ, when he represents those as Antichrists, who deny that Jesus is the Christs, or that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh||, or in other words, that

* Jerome says, that while the apostles were still living, and when the blood of Christ was scarcely cold in Judea, there were men who taught that his body was no more than a phantom. Lardner's Works, v. iii. p. 542. Cotelerius says, that a man may as well deny that the sun gives light at noon, as deny that the heresy of the Docetæ broke out in the age of the apostles. Lardner ibid. Cotelerius ad Ignat. ep. ad Trall.

he is a real man. The Gnostic heresy appears to have been silenced by the authority of the apostles, till the time of the Emperor Adrian, when it burst out again with increased violence, was embraced by multitudes in Asia and Egypt, and was split into a great variety of subordinate sects*.

Platonism was the fashionable philosophy of the West. Plato had obscurely taught the doctrine of three principlest. The Supreme Being, whom he calls the GOOD; the Nous, or intellect of the Supreme; and MATTER, or the visible world. The latter Platonists expounded and improved upon the hypothesis of their founder. Porphyry, explaining the doctrine of Plato, extends the divine essence to three hypostases: the first is the Supreme Being or the Good; the second, the Demiurgus, the Maker of the world; and the third, the Soul of the world. Philo, a platonic Jew of Alexandria, contemporary with the apostles, personifies the Nous, or as he calls it the Logos, the wisdom or energy of God, and represents it as the visible symbol of the divine presence; sometimes appearing in the form of an angel, sometimes in that of a man, acting as the medium of divine communications, but having no permanent separate existence*. This notion was early adopted by some philosophic Christians, in order to abate the odium which was entailed upon the christian religion, in consequence of the mean condition and ignominious sufferings of its founder.

Justin Martyr, a platonic philosopher, a man of great integrity, but of warm feelings, and of slender judgment, who embraced Christianity, and who suffered martyrdom about A. D. 165, is the first ecclesiastical writer, now extant, who represents the Logos, or the wisdom of God, as personally united to the man Christ. Others before him had probably held the same doctrine, but had supposed that the Logos, after the ascension of Christ, had been again absorbed into the substance of the Father. Justin appears to have been the first writer who taught the permanent personality of the divine Logos *, which he asserts that he had learned from the Jewish scriptures; for the understanding of which, he professes to have had a special gift from Godt. And his great authority, together with the increasing desire of exalting the person and dignity of Christ, induced the learned Christians who succeeded him to adopt his opinion. Thus the doctrine of the permanent personal union of the divine Logos, with the man Christ, by which he became entitled to divine attributes and honours, gradually made its way among learned Christians in the second and third centuries: and this was the doctrine from which the minds of the great body of unlearned believers so vehemently revolted in the time of Tertullian §, and against which they solemnly protested, as

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a direct infringement of the divine unity. Nevertheless, as it was an essential part of this system, that the Logos which dwelt in Christ was merely an attribute of the Father, the abettors of it regarded themselves as sufficiently supporting the unity of the godhead, by maintaining that the divine nature of Christ was the same with that of the Father. He was not a God different from the Father, and equal to him, but was an emanation from him, and one with him.

The commencement of the fourth century ushered in a novel doctrine, which astonished and alarmed the whole christian world, and which the pious bishop of Alexandria, in his circular letter to the catholic bishops, declares so far to exceed in impiety, every thing which has been heard of before, that in comparison with it, the most daring extravagancies of all former heresies were perfectly innocent *. This was Arianism †. The philosophising prelate to whom