advantages, upon the death of his patroness, Cubricus went into Persia, and changed his name into Manes, and there gave out the books which Terebinthus had thus composed, under the direction of his master Scythianus, as his own original works. These books bore a show and colouring of christianity, but were in reality heathenish; for the im pious Manes directs the worship of many gods; teaches that the Sun ought to be adored. He introduces the doctrine of fatal necessity, and denies the free agency of man. He openly teaches the transmigration of souls,* as held by Pythagoras, Empedocles, and the Egyptians. He denies that Christ was ever really born, or had real human flesh, but asserts that he was a mere phantom. He rejects the law and the prophets, and calls himself the Paraclete or Comforter. All which things are from the true and right faith of the church of God. In his epistle he was not ashamed to entitle himself an apostle. At length his abominations met with their merited punishment."

"The son of the king of Persia happening to have fallen into dangerous illness, his father, having both heard of Manichæus, and believing his miracles to be true, sent for him as an apostle, and believed that his son would by his means be restored. Upon his arrival he takes the king's son in hand, after the fashion of a conjuror. But the king having seen that the boy died under his hands, had him imprisoned, intending to put him to death: but he made his escape, and came into Mesopotamia. The king of Persia, hearing that he was in those parts, sent after him, and upon his second apprehension had him flayed alive." -This king of Persia was Varanes the First.

Notwithstanding the calumnies heaped on Manes, Dr. Lardner has shown that he was, in the best and strictest acceptation of the term, a sincere Christian, and has adduced many passages from his writings equally honourable to his understanding and to his heart. Not only the learned Faustus, Bishop of Melevi in Africa, whose tremendous charge against the authenticity of our canonical Gospels we have elsewhere given; but others, by far the most learned, intelligent, and virtuous men that ever professed and called themselves Christians, were

*The Pythagorean doctrines are still traceable in the Christian Scriptures: the Christ of St. John's Gospel is evidently a Pythagorean philosopher. Ye must be born again (John iii.), is the characteristic aphorism of the Pythagorean school. See the chapter xxxiii, entitled PYTHAGORAS, in the DIEGESIS, p. 204. + Μετα το επιπλαστε σχήματος εγχειρίζεται τον, &c. Dr. Lardner cuts me this knot with a SKIP in his rendering.

Faustus flourished about A.D. 384, at the latest, and had been known to Augustin before that wily and mendacious saint apostatized from Manicheism to orthodoxy.

Manichæans, and amongst these was the renowned St. Augustin himself, till he found that higher distinctions and better emoluments were to be gained by joining the stronger party. Whereupon he left the poor presbytery of the Manichæan church, to become the orthodox bishop of Hippo Regius: and from thenceforth, with the zeal that always characterizes a turncoat he set himself to heap all the calumnies and misrepresentations he possibly could upon that purer and more primitive Christianity which he had deserted; awkwardly enough confessing, that he himself should never have believed the Gospel, unless the authority of the church had induced him* (paid him) to do so. There are, I fear,

more than nineteen out of any twenty bishops that could be named, who owe their orthodoxy at this day to the same sort of inducement.

DEMONSTRATION THAT NO SUCH PERSON AS JESUS CHRIST EVER EXISTED

There were two very different opinions concerning Christ very early among Christians. Some, as Augustin says,† believed Christ to be God, and denied him to be man; others believed he was a man, and denied him to be God. The former was the opinion of the Manichees, and of many others before them: of others so early, indeed, and so certainly, that Cotelerius, in a note on Ignatius's Epistle to the Trallians, assures us that it would be as absurd as to question that the sun shone at mid-day, to deny that the doctrine that taught that Christ's body was a phantom only, and that no such person as Jesus Christ had ever any corporeal existence, was held in the time of the apostles themselves. Ignatius, the apostolic Father expressly censures this opinion, as having gained ground even before his time. “ If, as some who are atheists—that is, unbelievers-say, that he only suffered in appear

*Ego evangelio nequa quam crediderim nisi ecclesiæ auctoritas me commoveret-August. ut. citat Michaelis.

Ait enim Christus Deus est tantum, omnino hominis nihil habens. Hoc Manichæi dicunt. Photiani, homo tantum. Manichei, Deus tantum.-August. Serm. 37, c. 12.

As absurd as to question that the sun shone, &c. Solem negarot meridie lucere, qui Docetas, seu phantasiastas hæreticos temporibus apostolorum inficiaretur erupisse.-Cotel. ad Ign. Ep. ad Trall. c. 10.

§ Apostolis adhuc in seculo superstitibus, adhuc apud Judæum Christi sanguine recenti, phantasma Domini corpus asserebatur.-Hieron. adv. Lucif. T. 4, P. 304.

ance,

-an expression which, as Cotelerius observes, plainly shows the early rise of this doctrine. And from the apostolic age downwards, in a never interrupted succession, but never so strongly and emphatically as in the most primitive times, was the existence of Christ as a man most strenuously denied. So that though nothing is so convenient to some persons as to assume airs of contempt, and to cry out that those who deny that such a person as Jesus of Nazareth ever existed, are utterly unworthy of being answered, and would fly in the face of all historical evidence, the fact of the case is, that the being of no other individual mentioned in history ever laboured under such a deficiency of evidence as to its reality, or was ever overset by a thousandth part of the weight of proof positive, that it was a creation of imagination only.

To the question, then, on what grounds do you deny that such a person as Jesus Christ existed as a man? the proper answer is,

Because his existence as a man has, from the earliest day on which it can be shown to have been asserted, been as earnestly and strenuously denied, and that, not by enemies of the Christian name, or unbelievers of the Christian faith, but by the most intelligent, most learned, most sincere of the Christian name, whoever left the world proofs of their intelligence and learning in their writings, and of their sincerity in their sufferings;

And because the existence of no individual of the human race, that was real and positive, was ever, by a like conflict of jarring evidence, rendered equivocal and uncertain.

CHARGE 4.

It was distinctly charged against the early preachers of Christianity that they had adapted and transferred to their own use the materials they found prepared to their hands, in the writings of the ancient poets and philosophers; and by giving a very slight turn to the matter, and a mere change of names, had vamped up a patchwork of mythology and ethics, a mixture of the Oriental Gnosticism and the Greek Philosophy, into a system which they were for foisting upon the world as matter of a divine revelation that had been especially revealed to themselves. "All these figments of cracked-brained opiniatry and silly solaces played off in the sweetness of song by deceitful poets, by you too credulous creatures, have been shamefully reformed and made over to

端

Ει δε ωσπερ τινες αθεοι οντες, τουτ' εστιν απιστοί, λεγουσιν το δοκειν πεπονθέναι AUTOY X. T. λ.-Ign. ad Trall. c. 16, et passim.

your own God."* Such is the objection of Cæcilius, in the Octavius of Minucius Felix, written in dialogue, about 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

* Omnia ista figmenta malesanæ opinionis, et inepta solatia, a poetis falla cibus, in dulcedine carminis lusa, a vobis nimium credulis in Deum vestrum, turpiter reformata sunt.- Minucius Felix in Apol.

† Porphyry.Theodoret calls him Ασπονδος ημων πολεμιος, and Ο παντων my exitos. Augustin calls him "Christianorum acerrimus inimicus."

† Quasi refingerent-Τα Τος παλαιου λογου παρακουσματα.-Lib. 3.

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

ADMISSION 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 acknowledges, 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 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."S

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

* See the chapter on Origen.

"The introduction to the New Testament by Michalis, late professor at Gottingen, 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.