Part 9 (2/2)

without everHippolytus at all Just such a reference, however, as he did _not_ find in Hippolytus, he _did_ find in _another_ work, of which he speaks under the title of ”The Labyrinth”; and, strange to say, it was at the _end_ of the work,[32] precisely where it stands in our ”Philosophumena” Who can resist the suspicion, that the anonymous ”Labyrinth” of Photius is no other than our anonymous ”Philosophu the evidence collected by M Bunsen, in support of his different conclusion; and we observe that it is the opinion sustained by the great authority of Baur,[33] who even finds a trace in our work of the very _title_ given by Photius; the writer observing, at the beginning of the tenth book, ”The _Labyrinth of Heresies_ we have not broken through by violence, but have resolved by refutation alone with the force of truth; and noe come to the positive exposition of the truth” At all events, the difference of title in the case of a work having probably ht in disproof of identity With this new designation in our possession, we may return to search for our book in the records of ecclesiastical antiquity; and we have not far to go, before we alight on traces affording hopes of a result No ”Labyrinth,” indeed, turns up in the literary history of earlier centuries than Photius; but a ”_Little_ Labyrinth” is en, but as evidently not his; and from his account of it, confirmed by the matter which he borrows froainst a set of Unitarians in Rome, followers of Theodotus It so happens that the very passage from this tract which Theodoret has used appears also, with others from the same source, in Eusebius, only quoted under another title,--the book being called a ”Work against the Heresy of Artemon”

(as another teacher of the sae) The extracts thus preserved to us are not found in our work; which, therefore, if it be the ”Labyrinth,” is a distinct production from the ”Little Labyrinth”; but they are so manifestly from the same pen, occupied in the same task, as to render it perfectly conceivable that the two books ht receive the sauish the lesser froreater Nor are we left, as Baur has shoithout a distinct assertion by our ”great unknown,”

that he had already composed a smaller treatise on the same subject; for, in the introduction to the ”Philosophuiven a brief exposition of their opinions, refuting the them in detail” This shorter ould naturally treat of the particular forms of error most immediately present and mischievous before the author's eyes; and if he dwelt especially on the doctrines of Theodotus and Artemon, it is just e should expect froe of heresy, would naturally be issued at first with the special title by which Eusebius refers to it But if it led the author to execute afterwards a n, to which, froave, on its coht naturally carry the name back to the earlier production, and, to mark the relation between the two, issue this in future as ”The Little Labyrinth” Photius speaks of the tract against the heresy of Artemon as a separate work fro of the latter[36] that Theodoret had reen The result to which we are thus led is the following Our newly found work is not Hippolytus's ???da???? ”On all Heresies,” but the book known to Photius as ”The Labyrinth”; the author of which had previously produced two other works, viz ”The Little Labyrinth” mentioned by Theodoret, and quoted under another name by Eusebius, and the ”Treatise on the Universe,” whose contents Photius reports Whatever, therefore, fixes the authorshi+p of any of these, fixes the authorshi+p of all

Notwithstanding, however, our threefold chance, we have only a solitary evidence on this point Attached to Photius's copy of the ”Treatise on the Universe” was a note, to the effect that the book was not (as had been iined) by Josephus, but by Caius, the Roman presbyter, who also composed the ”Labyrinth”[37] In the absence of other external testiment appears entitled to stand, unless the books themselves disclose some features at variance with the known character of Caius

But, it is said, such variance we do actually find For while our work expressly appeals to the Apocalypse as the production of John, we know from Eusebius that Caius ascribed it to Cerinthus, and, in opposing himself to Montanisht in the Revelations This arguations were indisputable It is curious, however, that the one _locus classicus_,[38] from which is inferred the presbyter's repudiation of the Apocalypse, is confessedly aainst Cerinthus may amount to either of these two propositions; that he had composed the Book of Revelations and palmed it on the world as the production of the Apostle John; or, that he had given hily so to be i to this last interpretation, the work of Cerinthus would be a book distinct fro to share its authority The contents of the production are briefly described by Caius; but they present such a reeuity unresolved They affirdom of Christ, in which the lower nature of ain in servitude to passion and pleasure; and that the nuence of sense

So far as the _place_ and the _duration_ of the kingdoht here be referred to; but it has nothing answering to the description of a gross and luxurious e in conjunction with the similar statement of Theodoret, that ”Cerinthus invented certain revelations, pretending that they were given in vision to himself,” we think it unlikely that our Apocalypse can be meant; and conceive the indictment to be, that Cerinthus had put forth a set of apocryphal visions, in which he abused the style and corrupted the teachings of a great Apostle to the purposes of a sensual fanaticis, in consistency with the fullest acceptance of the Apocalypse as authentic and true It was not the doctrine of a reign of Christ on earth, not the ned to it, to which he objected in Cerinthus; but the coarse and dehts In proportion to his respect for the real Apocalypse and its teachings, would he be likely to resent such a miserable parody on its lofty theocratic visions His opposition to the Montanists in no way pledged hiical expectations which they were distinguished fro If our work, in its notice of their heresy, passes by in silence this particular eleifts of prophecy with less conteonist of Proclus, there is nothing that ought really to surprise us in this It does not follow that, because in our scanty knowledge we have only one idea about an historical personage, the man himself never had another Caius did not live in a perpetual platform disputation with Proclus; and either before that controversy had waked hih dismiss the Montanists with very cursory notice; in the one case, because they had not yet adequately provoked his antipathy; in the other, because they had already had enough of it[39]

Nothing therefore presents itself in our hich should deter us fro it to Caius; and the more we ponder the evidence, the more do we incline to believe it his This result is to us an unwelco the presuenius of M Bunsen, and because he has really made us in love with his ecclesiastical hero,--has put such an innocent and venerable life into that old effigy, that after wandering with hi fancy into the Basilica[40] where he preached, it is hard to return him into stone, and think of him only as a dead bishop who made a bad almanac Should our readers have contracted no such ideal attachment, we fear that this discussion of authorshi+p may appear as trivial as it is tedious Somebody wrote the ”Philosophumena,” and whether we call hie hiht of the _Pharos_, or of the _Milliariu as the elee This utilitarian impression is by no means just, and indeed is at variance with all true historical feeling But it is tihts, and turn fronificance

Many sensible persons are at a loss, we believe, to understand why this refutation of thirty-two extinct heresies should be regarded with so much interest Is it so well done, then? they ask Far froht out every year; and such a controversial arguman or Mr Parker to- Does it addof this kind it certainly contributes; but the gain is not large, and will e in the conclusions of any coht thrown by it on the authenticity of our canonical books? This can hardly be expected from a production of the third century; and M

Bunsen's application of it to this purpose appears to us, for reasons which we shall assign, extremely precarious Perhaps it supplies the hich every student of that period anically joins ecclesiastical to civil history, so that they no longer ree for saints and martyrs, bishops and books, the other for soldiers and senators, ele in the common life of humanity When we think how the author was placed, it is ier hope of this nature He lived at the centre of the vast Roman world, and felt all the pulsations and paroxyshty heart He witnessed the ominous decline of every traditional maxim and national reverence in favor of ienerate barbarities Under Commodus he saw the ancient Mars superseded by the Grecian Hercules, and Hercules represented by an ehter, and the adian slave, as only less brutal than his master In the midst of pestilence, which had become chronic in Italy from the time of M Antoninus, and of which a Christian bishop could not but knowto its senificent baths and grounds that were opened to the public service at the Porta Capena, with the multiplied festivities and donatives, attested how little mere physical attention to the people can arrest the radation Nor could the Christians of that age be wholly without insight into the habits of the highest class in Roeneous faiths, the caprice of taste, if not some better impulse, deterion of Christ; and the favorite mistress of Coed and strangled in his sleep, is the very Marcia whom our presbyter describes as f????e?? and at whose intervention the Christian exiles were released from their banishment in Sardinia If he was at home when the excellent Pertinax was murdered, and cared to knohat tyrant was to have the world instead, he was perhaps in the throng that ran to the Quirinal, and heard the Praetorians shout from their raain with the foolish senator beloho bought it with his money, and paid for it with his head Caius and his people had reason to tremble when they saw in Septimius Severus not only the implacable conqueror who suffered no political opponent to live, but the worshi+pper of deic, pliant only to sacerdotal hate; and when the young Origen cauest awhile, and told of the terror in Alexandria which had joined his father to the band of ht the news of the Eht of fear; especially as one son at least of the two inheritors of the empire had in childhood been committed to a Christian nurse, and been said to shrink and turn away froe spectacles of the amphitheatre They were doomed to be disappointed, if they had placed any hope in Caracalla, and to find that what they had taken in the boy for the nobleness of grace, was but the timidity of nature; the murder, before his mother's face, of his only brother, and then of his best counsellor, for refusing to justify the fratricide, would soonthat he had ever heard the name of Christ

It would be curious to kno the Christians comported themselves when the Priest of the Sun beca every divinity to enrich the horand temple on the Palatine, which he built for the God of Emesa, every passer-by must have seen as it rose from its foundations And when the black stone was paraded on its chariot through the streets, and the elder deities were compelled to leave their shrines and attend in escort to the Eastern idol, or when the nuptials were celebrated between the Syrian divinity and the Goddess of Carthage, and Baal-peor and Astarte succeeded to the honors of Jove, no Christian presbyter could fail to witness the gorgeous and hu procession,--renewed as it was year by year,--or to ask himself into what deeper abomination the city of the Scipios abalus were anism of Rome than injurious to the new faith, which equally detested both; and the offendedof the city reacted perhaps in favor of the Christian cause, and prepared the way for that s avowedly dedicated to the purpose, which was first pern The natural recoil in the iradation of the court tended, perhaps, in the same direction, and drove the astute Mamaea to seek, amid the universal corruption, for so Alexander Severus fronominy of her sister's son

Whether fro force of Christianity as a social power, she had sent for Origen, and had an intervieith him at Antioch; and the Roman disciples had reason to rejoice that her intellectual impressions of their system should have been derived from such a man, and her political estimate of it formed in the East, where the crisis of conflict between the dying and the living faiths was uised augury of the result Fro thence, the pastors of theCaesar and his mother; and would feel no surprise, when he succeeded to the palace of his cousin, that he not only swept out the ministers of lust and luxury, but in his private oratory enshrined, aes also of Abraham and of Christ They could not, however, but observe how little the overnress of decay, and reach in detail the vices and enerate state When they passed the door of the palace, they heard the public crier's voice proclaim, ”Let only purity and innocence enter here”; they visited a Christian trades street, and found him just seized by a nobleed with ave release, and no redress or justice to be had The E in his chapel on the features of Christ, recognized a religion hue was put upon the slave, and a distinctive servile dress adopted; the slave markets were still in consecrated spots, the temple of Castor and the Via Sacra; and if ever some captive Onesimus, recommended by letters froht to the o to find how the auction disposes of their charge, and learn _which_ a the chalked feet it is that are ”shod with the preparation of the Gospel of peace” The coreat jurists as in the age of Papinian and Paulus; but as the science of Laas perfected, the power of Law declined; and Alexander Severus, the justest of ereatest of civilians, from military assassination in the palace itself, or to punish the perpetrators of this outrage on popular feeling as well as public right The three days' tumult, in which this master of jurisprudence fell the victim of Praetorian licentiousness, our presbyter Caius must have witnessed; and countless other eneration painfully affluent in vicissitude, must have passed before his eyes; and had he but known of what value his reports would be to this age of ours, he would have said more of the life he saw, and less of the speculations he denounced To us it would have been worth anything to know just as too close to him to catch his eye;--how the Christians lived in such a world; what thoughts stirred in them as they walked the streets and heard the nehat happened and was said when they ether, and how this could adjust itself with the real facts of an inconsistent and tyrannical present; and how, as the corrupted State beca Church undertook the secret governance of life, and penetrated with its authority into recesses beyond the reach, not of the arm of administration only, but of the definitions of the widest code

But in this respect also our author fails to realize our hopes He gives us a book of fancies rather than of facts, and instead of painting existence, which is transient, andnonsense, which is always to be had The enor hi to him in comparison with heresy in Lesser Asia, which keeps Easter on a wrong day He is shut up within the interior circle of the colie to abolish the mysterious separation of ecclesiastical and ideal froes of our faith He is not peculiar in this defect We all of us live in theit, and ourselves _ it; and that which will ht of other times, which will seem our _power_ to them, our romance and nobleness, hich, therefore, they will most crave to satiate their eye, is precisely what is least consciously present to us,--the natural spirit and daily spring of our coh which not the will of man, but the providence of God, works its appointed ends At all events, the insight which we should be best pleased to gain into the life of the third century is not given even incidentally, except in the scantiest measure, by the ”Philosophuies, and with the writings of Irenaeus and Epiphanius

The book is dogmatic and controversial, and the interest attached to it arises entirely froister of opinion_, a neitness to the thoughts about divine things, which the Christianity of its period owned and disowned For those who care at all to know the state of belief a century before the Council of Nice, the work possesses a high value But the worth of this sort of inforious_ worth; and will be very differently esti to the preconception which occupies us as to the nature of Divine Revelation, and the sources open to us for the attainreat and peculiar strength His religious philosophy, taken by itself, brings us occasionally to a pause of doubt His historical criticis But his doctrine of the _relation between_ religion and history, of theof divine and huency of Christianity in the spiritual education of mankind, appears to us profoundly true and beautiful This it is that makes him attach so much importance to the creed of the second and third centuries, and to the new light now thrown upon it; an importance which, from every ordinary point of view, can scarcely fail to appear fanciful and exaggerated

The Roman Catholic, for instance, entertains a conception about what sacred truth is, and how it is to be had, which, leaving nothing to depend on new discoveries, discharges all the richest interest froion in the past With him divine truth, so far as it is special to Christendon to the humansupernatural, it belongs to another sphere than that to which our thought is restricted, and is totally withdrawn from all the movements of our nature It consists, indeed, in a set of objective facts from which we are absent, and which no ratiocination of ours can seize, any more than our ear can tell whether there beThere is no hu to it; and to resort thither for it is like asking the dreamer or the blindfold to describe the scene in which he stands, or consulting your own feelings to learn what is going on in Pekin or japan On this theory, the objects of faith are conceived of as objects of _perception_, only by senses otherwise constituted than ours; we can have no surmise about them, till they are announced to us by qualified percipients, and no comprehension of them even then, but only reception of the of this doctrine of invisible realism on the treatment of ecclesiastical history is manifest The inaccessible facts are deposited with the sacerdotal corporation; ho and defining them They are not indeed all stated and defined in their last amplitude at once; for definition is always an enclosure of the true by exclusion of the false; and it is only in proportion as the drea perversity of men throws forth one delusive fancy after another, that the Church draws line after line to shut the intrusion out If the creeds seee as the centuries pass, it is not that they have ive, but only ht and conceived coelists, but they were not conteainst_ the follies and contradictions opposed to theonism to be felt, the infallible perception secured in perpetuity to the living hierarchy supplied the due verdict of rejection To the Catholic, therefore, Christianity was eneration; its power of development is only the refusal of deviation; and its intellectual life is ta but stand still and repel temptations The history of doctrines thus becomes a history of heresies; the primitive stock of tradition and Scripture must, on the one hand, be maintained entire in the face of all possible exposures by critical research; and, on the other, remain in eternal barrenness and produce no e, whether of the world or of huhts it may lead us to entertain of God are either _not_ new, or not true; and every pretended enrich but evolution of falsehood

This reion, this expulsion of life and change into the negative region of aberration and denial, eviscerates the past of its devout interest, rests the study of it on contempt instead of reverence for man; with all its pious air, it simply betrays history with a kiss, and delivers it over for scribes to buffet and chief priests to crucify Short work is made in this way of any fresh witness, like the author of our book, who turns up unexpectedly frorees another voice into the _consensus_ of obedient believers Does he say anything at variance with the _regula fidei_? Then have we only to see in what class of heretics he stands His testi

The Protestant, of the approved English type, arrives, under guidance of a different thought, at the saives a more subjective character to divine truth than the Ros both the want and the supply of it more within the attestation of consciousness, he puts its discovery equally beyond the reach of our ruined faculties, and equally cuts it off fro exercise of reason and conscience He further agrees that his foreign gift of revelation was imported all at once, and all coe; that the conceptions of that ti centuries; and that every newer doctrine is to be regarded as a false accretion, to be flung off into the incompetent and barren spaces of human speculation He denies, however, the twofold vehicle of this precious gift; and, cancelling altogether the oral tradition and indeterminate Christian consciousness of the early Church, shuts up the whole contents of religion within the canonical Scriptures The guardianshi+p of unwritten tradition being abolished, and the canon requiring no guardianshi+p at all, the trust deposited with the hierarchy disappears; and no permanent inspiration, no authoritative judicial function, in matters of faith, remains

Whatever Holy Spirit continues in the Church is not a progressively teaching spirit, which can ever ihts or experiences unknown to the first believers; but a personally cohtenment is the exact reproduction of the primitive state of mind The apprehension of Divine truth is thus reduced to an affair of verbal interpretation of docuest play of subjective feeling, so that different es, will unconsciously evolve very various results; these are not to be regarded as possible Divine enrichidly to the standard of the earliest Church, and disoherever they include as absent there This view is less mischievous than the Roman Catholic, only because it is more inconsequent and confused The canon which you take as sacred was selected and set in authority by the unwritten consciousness and tradition which you reject as profane The Church existed before its records; expressed its life in ways spreading indefinitely beyond them; and neither was exempt from human elements till they were finished, nor lost the Divine spirit when they were done So arbitrary a doctrine corrupts the beauty of Scripture, and deadens the noblest interest of history If the New Testament is to serve as an infallible standard, it is thus committed to perfect unity and self-consistency; and you are obliged to contend that the various types of doctrine found within its compass--the Messianic conceptions of Matthew and John, the ”Faith” of Paul and Jaelists and the last, the eschatology of the Apocalypse and the Epistles--are only different sides of one and the sas of several minds

How utterly inadequate such an hypothesis is to the explanation of the Scriptural phenoives of the sacred writers, and their ht, is best known to those who have honestly tried to deal with the fourth Gospel, for instance, as historically the suppleos-doctrine tacitly present in the speeches of Peter; to detect the pre-existence in Mark, or reifts of Pentecost All feeling of living reality is lost from our picture of the Apostolic time, when its outlines are thus blurred, its contrasts destroyed, its grouped figures effaced, and the wholedrizzle of a watery criticislory round the place where Christ should be If, e, then the second, and the third, and all others, must be worse, just in so far as they differ fro and deepening of the Christian faith and feeling, the swelling of its stream by the lapse into it of Oriental Gnosis and hellenic Platoniseneracy Thus to the Bibliolater as to the Ro men_, unless it be the history of decline, or of recovery purchased by decline He also will accordingly care nothing about what the people of Caius or Hippolytus thought Is it in the Bible? If so, he knew it before Is it not in the Bible? Then he has nothing to do with it but throw it away By a fitting retribution, thisworshi+p of the letter of a book and the creed of a generation brings it to pass that both are lost to the norance and elical” believer could be transported suddenly from Exeter Hall into the company of the twelve in Jerusalem, or the Proseucha which Paul enters on the banks of the Stryape is prepared at Rome, we are persuaded that he would find a scene newer to his expectations than by any other ration into a known time and place

But now let us abolish this isolation from the rest of human existence of the _incunabula_ of our faith, and throw open that time to free relation with the whole providence of humanity Suppose Christianity to be the influence upon the world of a Divine Person,--in quality divine, in quantity human,--whose Epiphany was determined at a crisis of ripe conditions for the rescue, the evolution, the spread of holy and sanctifying truth What are those conditions? They consist mainly in the co-presence, within the embrace of one vast state, of two opposite races or types of ift of divine apprehension, and holding in charge an indispensable ele to exhaustion and capable of no separate effortaway for want of the coht which the other only could supply The _Hebrew_ brought his intense feeling of the Personality of God; conceiving this in so concentrated a form as to exclude the proper notion of infinitude, and render Hi in the Universe, its Monarch,--wielding the creatures as his puppets,--acting historically upon its scenes as objective to Hi to the Abrahaion of archives and docunty of Jehovah raised hiht above his creation; dwarfed all other existence; placed him by _nature_ at a distance fro of approximation And hence his worshi+ppers, in proportion as they adored his greatness, felt the littleness of all else; acquired a temper towards their fellow-men, if not severe and scornful, at least not reverent and tender; and regarded them as separate in kind from Hiion of the _hellenic_ race began at the other end,--froles, its nobleness, its mixture of heroic Free-will and awful Destiny; and their deepest reverence, their quickest recognition of the Divine, was directed towards the soul of a ainst superhuood, did they appear to be as lesser Gods, and earth and heaven to be filled with the saht, conscience, admiration in the hu in each individual; but the sy in front of Nature, to the kindred life of the Divine intellect behind Nature, and ever passing into expression through it When this feeling of the hellenic race becaanized itself into philosophy, it represented the universe as the eternal assuht, which ere enabled to read off by our essential identity of nature Hence a whole series of conceptions quite different from the Hebrew representations; instead of Creation, Evolution of being; instead of Interposition fro froht; assigning as the ideal of man's perfection, not so much obedience to Law, as si predoth in Morals, but to beauty in Art

These two opposite tendencies had run their separate course, and expended their proper history; and were talking wildly, as in the approaching deliriuious truth: and to fuse theether, to make it impossible that either should perish or should reularly balanced between them, that neither could resist his power, but both were drawn into it for the regeneration of iven to the one race, and only baffling the visions of prophets to transcend theust and attractive to the other that the faith in Incarnation was irresistible; presented to the Hebrews by his mortal birth, and snatched fro by his holiness the ion of Faith and Love; in the Teht be open co sacrifice into self-sacrifice;--he had every requisite for conciliating and blending the separated ele towards hined to him, and for which the divine and human were so blended in him, it is a function which could not be accoeneration, in a century It is an _historical_ function, freely de time for its theatre; and as the separate factors had occupied ages in attaining their ripeness for combination, sothought, ere the hoeneous truth appeared The words of Christ are not in this view the end in which Revelation ter himself, contributions to the picture we form of his personality Nor are the sentiments of his immediate followers about his office and position in the sche more authoritative to us than the incipient atterasp the whole of his relations while only a part was to be seen The records of the great crisis are no doubt of superlative value, as the vehicles by which alone we understand and feel its power; but their value is lost if they are to dictate truth to our passive acceptance, instead of quickening our reason and conscience to find it: they stop in this way the very development which they were to lead, and disappoint Christ of the very work he came to achieve Hue and its Scriptures, as in every other; and the transitory ingredients they have left, it is a duty to detach from the eternal truth And as conditions of finite imperfection cannot be banished frouidance of the Infinite Spirit be denied, whether a the Hebrew, the hellenic, or the Christian people, in the ages before and after In that new developard to God, which we call Christianity, _all_ the requisite conditions--viz the factors taken up, the Person who blends them, and the continuous product they evolve--include Divine Inspiration as well as Hu presence and communion of the Eternal with the Transitory Mind, of the perfectly Good with the good in the Ie the one from the other, to treasure up the true and holy that is born of God, an