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 Another Random Document on
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against his life was natural. Cp. Long, Decline of the Roman Republic, v, 432–33. as to the
facts. ↑
77 See W. A. Schmidt, pp. 34–108, for a careful analysis of the evolution. As to the book-
censure, see pp. 101–104. ↑
78 Suetonius, Tiberius, c. 28. ↑
79 Id. c. 61. ↑
80 Annals, i, 73. That such a phrase should have been written by an emperor in an official
letter, and yet pass unnoticed through antiquity save in one historical work, recovered only
in the Renaissance, is one of the minor improbabilities that give colour to the denial of the
genuineness of the Annals. ↑
81 Tiberius, c. 69. ↑
82 Petronius, Satyricon, ad init. ↑
83 In the Annals (xiv, 50) it is stated that the book attacked senators and pontiffs; that it
was condemned to be burned, and Vejento to be exiled; and that the book was much sought
and read while forbidden; but that it fell into oblivion when all were free to read it. Here,
again, there is no other ancient testimony. Vejento is heard of, however, in Juvenal, iv, 113,
123–29. ↑
84 Philostratus, Life of Apollonius, iv. 47. ↑
85 Cp. Schmidt, pp. 346–47. ↑
86 Suetonius, Domitian, c. 10. ↑
87 Cp. Schmidt, p. 157. ↑
88 Suetonius, Tiberius, c. 36; Josephus, Antiquities, xviii, 3, §§ 4, 5. Josephus specifies
isolated pretexts, which Suetonius does not mention. They are not very probable. ↑
89 Who destroyed 2,000 copies of prophetical books. Suetonius, Aug. c. 31. ↑
90 See, in the next chapter, as to the rationalistic mythology of Macrobius. ↑
91 Cp. Propertius, ii, 14, 27 sqq.; iii, 23, 19–20; iv, 3, 38; Tibullus, iv, 1, 18–23; Juvenal,
as before cited, and xv, 133, 142–46. ↑
92 Plato, 2 Alcib.; Cicero, Pro Cluentio, c. 68; Horace, Carm. iii, 23, 17; Ovid, Heroides,
Acont. Cydipp. 191–92; Persius, Sat. ii, 69; Seneca, De Beneficiis, i, 6. Cp. Diod. Sic. xii,
20; Varro, in Arnobius, Adv. Gentes, vii, 1. ↑
93 1 Sat. iii, 96–98. Cp. Cicero, De Finibus, iv, 19, 27, 28; Matt. v. 19–28 ; James, ii,
10 . Lactantius, again (Div. Inst. iii, 23). denounces the doctrine of the equality of
offences as laid down by Zeno, giving no sign of knowing that it is also set forth in his own
sacred books. ↑
94 On Seneca’s moral teaching, cp. Martha, Les Moralistes sous l’empire romain, pp.
57–66; Boissier, La religion romaine, ii, 80–82. M. Boissier further examines fully the
exploded theory that Seneca received Christian teaching. On this compare Bishop
Lightfoot, Dissertations on the Apostolic Age, pp. 237–92. ↑
95 Seneca was so advanced in his theoretic ethic as to consider all war on a level with
homicide. Epist. xcv, 30. ↑
96 It is to be noted that preaching had begun among the moralists of Rome in the first
century, and was carried on by the priests of Isis in the second; and that in Egypt
monasticism had long been established. Martha, as cited, p. 67; Boissier, i, 356–59. Cp.
Mosheim, 2 Cent. pt. ii, c. iii, §§ 13, 14, as to monasticism. ↑
Chapter VII
 ANCIENT CHRISTIANITY AND ITS OPPONENTS

§1

The Christian gospels, broadly considered, stand for a certain measure of

freethinking reaction against the Jewish religion, and are accordingly to be
reckoned with in the present inquiry; albeit their practical outcome was only
an addition to the world’s supernaturalism and traditional dogma. To
estimate aright their share of freethought, we have but to consider the kind
and degree of demand they made on the reason of the ancient listener, as
apart, that is, from the demand made on their basis for the recognition of a
new Deity. When this is done it will be found that they express in parts a
process of reflection which outwent even critical common sense in a kind of
ecstatic Stoicism, an oriental repudiation of the tyranny of passions and
appetites; in other parts a mysticism that proceeds as far beyond the
credulity of ordinary faith. Socially considered, they embody a similar
opposition between an anarchistic and a partly orthodox or regulative ideal.
The plain inference is that they stand for many independent movements of
thought in the Græco-Roman world. It is actually on record that the
reduction of the whole law to love of one’s neighbour1 was taught before
the Christian era by the famous Rabbi Hillel;2 and the gospel itself3 shows
that this view was current. In another passage4 the reduction of the ten
commandments to five again indicates a not uncommon disregard for the
ecclesiastical side of the law. But the difference between the two passages
points of itself to various forces of relative freethought.

Any attentive study of the gospels discloses not merely much glossing and
piecing and interpolating of documents, but a plain medley of doctrines, of
ideals, of principles; and to accept the mass of disconnected utterances
ascribed to “the Lord,” many of them associated with miracles, as the oral
teaching of any one man, is a proceeding so uncritical that in no other study
could it now be followed. The simple fact that the Pauline Epistles (by
whomsoever written) show no knowledge of any Jesuine miracles or
teachings whatever, except as regards the Last Supper (1 Cor. xi, 24–25 —
a passage obviously interpolated), admits of only three possible
interpretations: (1) the Jesus then believed in had not figured as a teacher at
all; or (2) the writer or writers gave no credit or attached no importance to
reports of his teachings. Either of these views (of which the first is plainly
the more plausible) admits of (3) the further conclusion that the Pauline
Jesus was not the Gospel Jesus, but an earlier one—a fair enough
hypothesis; but on that view the mass of Dominical utterances in the
gospels is only so much the less certificated. When, then, it is admitted by
all open-minded students that the events in the narrative are in many cases
fictitious, even when they are not miraculous, it is wholly inadmissible that
the sayings should be trustworthy, as one man’s teachings.

Analysing them in collation, we find even in the Synoptics, and without

taking into account the Fourth Gospel, such wide discrepancies as the
following:—

1. The doctrine: “the Kingdom of God is among you” (Lk. xvii, 21 ), side by side with
promises of the speedy arrival of the Son of Man, whose coming = the Kingdom of God
(cp. Mt. iii, 2, 3 ; iv, 17 ; Mk. i, 15 ).

2. The frequent profession to supersede the Law (Mt. v, 21 , 33 , 38 , 43 , etc.); and

the express declaration that not one jot or tittle thereof is to be superseded (Mt. v, 17–20 ).

3. Proclamation of a gospel for the poor and the enslaved (Lk. iv, 18 ); with the tacit
acceptance of slavery (Lk. xvii, 7, 9, 10 ; where the word translated “servant” in the A.V.,
and let pass by McClellan, Blackader, and other reforming English critics, certainly means
“slave”).

4. Stipulation for the simple fulfilment of the Law as a passport to eternal life, with or
without further self-denial (Mt. xix, 16–21 ; Lk. x, 28 ; xviii, 22 ); on the other hand a
stipulation for simple benevolence, as in the Egyptian ritual (Mt. xxv ; cp. Lk. ix, 48 );
and yet again stipulations for blind faith (Mt. x, 15 ) and for blood redemption (Mt. xxvi,
28 ).
5. Alternate promise (Mt. vi, 33 ; xix, 29 ) and denial (Mt. x, 34–39 ) of temporal
blessings.

6. Alternate commands to secrecy (Mt. xii, 16 ; viii, 4 ; ix, 30 ; Mk. iii, 12 ; v, 43 ;

vii, 36 ) and to publicity (Mt. vii, 7–8 ; Mk. v, 19 ) concerning miracles, with a frequent
record of their public performance.

7. Specific restriction of salvation to Israelites (Mt. x, 5, 6 ; xv, 24 ; xix, 28 ); equally

specific declaration that the Kingdom of God shall be to another nation (Mt. xxii, 43 ); no
less specific assurance that the Son of Man (not the Twelve as in Mt. xix, 28 ) shall judge
all nations, not merely Israel (Mt. xxv, 32 ; cp. viii, 11 ).

8. Profession to teach all, especially the simple and the childlike (Mt. xviii, 3 ; xi, 25, 28–
30 ; Mk. x, 15 ); on the contrary, a flat declaration (Mt. xiii, 10–16 ; Mk. iv, 11 ; Lk.
viii, 10 ; cp. Mk. iv, 34 ) that the saving teaching is only for the special disciples; yet
again (Mt. xv, 16 ; Mk. vi, 52 ; viii, 17, 18 ) imputations of lack of understanding to
them.

9. Companionship of the Teacher with “publicans and sinners” (Mt. ix, 10 ); and, on the
other hand, a reference to the publicans as falling far short of the needed measure of
loving-kindness (Mt. v, 46 ).

10. Explicit contrarieties of phrase, not in context (Mt. xii, 30 ; Lk. xi, 50 ).

11. Flat contradictions of narrative as to the Teacher’s local success (Mt. xiii, 54–58 ; Lk.
iv, 23 ).

12. Insistence that the Messiah is of the Davidic line (Mt. i ; xxi, 15 ; Lk. i, 27 ; ii, 4 ),
and that he is not (Mt. xxii, 43–45 ; Mk. xii, 35–37 ; Lk. xx ).

13. Contradictory precepts as to limitation and non-limitation of forgiveness (Mt. xviii,

17 , 22 ).

Such variously serious discrepancies count for more than even the
chronological and other divergences of the records concerning the Birth, the
Supper, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection, as proofs of diversity of
source; and they may be multiplied indefinitely. The only course for
criticism is to admit that they stand for the ideas of a variety of sects or
movements, or else for an unlimited manipulation of the documents by
individual hands. Many of them may very well have come from various so-
called “Lords” and “Messiahs”; but they cannot be from a single teacher.
There remains open the fascinating problem as to whether some if not all of
the more notable teachings may not be the utterances of one teacher of
commanding originality, whose sectaries were either unable to appreciate or
unable to keep separate his doctrine.5 Undoubtedly some of the better
teachings came first from men of superior capacity and relatively deep
ethical experience. The veto on revenge, and the inculcation of love to
enemies, could not come from commonplace minds; and the saying
preserved from the Gospel According to the Hebrews, “Unless ye cease
from sacrificing the wrath shall not cease from you,” has a remarkable
ring.6 But when we compare the precept of forgiveness with similar
teachings in the Hebrew books and the Talmud,7 we realize that the
capacity for such thought had been shown by a number of Jewish teachers,
and that it was a specific result of the long sequence of wrong and
oppression undergone by the Jewish people at the hands of their conquerors.
The unbearable, consuming pain of an impotent hate, and the spectacle of it
in others—this experience among thoughtful men, and not an unconditioned
genius for ethic in one, is the source of a teaching which, categorically put
as it is in the gospels, misses its meaning with most who profess to admire
it; the proof being the entire failure of most Christians in all ages to act on
it. To say nothing of similar teaching in Old Testament books and in the
Talmud, we have it in the most emphatic form in the pre-Christian
“Slavonic Enoch.”8

A superior ethic, then, stands not for one man’s supernormal insight, but for
the acquired wisdom of a number of wise men. And it is now utterly
impossible to name the individual framers of the gospel teachings, good or
bad. The central biography dissolves at every point before critical tests; it is
a mythical construction.9 Of the ideas in the Sermon on the Mount, many
are ancient; of the parabolic and other teachings, some of the most striking
occur only in the third gospel, and are unquestionably late. And when we
are asked to recognize a unique personality behind any one doctrine, such
as the condemnation of sacrifice in the uncanonical Hebrew Gospel, we can
but answer (1) that on the face of the case this doctrine appears to come
from a separate circle; (2) that the renunciation of sacrifice was made by
many Greek and Roman writers,10 and by earlier teachers among the
Hebrews;11 and (3) that in the Talmud, and in such a pre-Christian
document as the “Slavonic Enoch,” there are teachings which, had they
occurred in the gospels, would have been confidently cited as unparalleled
in ancient literature. The Talmudic teachings, so vitally necessary in Jewry,
that “it is better to be persecuted than persecutor,” and that, “were the
persecutor a just man and the persecuted an impious, God would still be on
the side of the persecuted,”12 are not equalled for practical purposes by any
in the Christian sacred books; and the Enochic beatitude, “Blessed is he
who looks to raise his own hand for labour,”13 is no less remarkable. But it
is impossible to associate these teachings with any outstanding personality,
or any specific movements; and to posit a movement-making personality in
the sole case of certain scattered sayings in the gospels is critically
inadmissible.

There is positively no ground for supposing that any selected set of

teachings constituted the basis or the original propaganda of any single
Christian sect, primary or secondary; and the whole known history of the
cult tells against the hypothesis that it ever centred round those teachings
which to-day specially appeal to the ethical rationalist. Such teachings are
more likely to be adventitious than fundamental, in a cult of sacrificial
salvation. When an essentially rationalistic note is struck in the gospels, as
in the insistence14 that a notable public catastrophe is not to be regarded in
the old Jewish manner as a punishment for sin, it is cancelled in the next
sentence by an interpolation which unintelligently reaffirms the very
doctrine denied.15 So with the teaching16 that the coming worship is to be
neither Judaic nor Samaritan: the next sentence reaffirms Jewish
particularism in the crudest way. The main movement, then, was clearly
superstitious.

It remains to note the so-far rationalistic character of such teachings as the

protests against ceremonialism and sabbatarianism, the favouring of the
poor and the outcast, the extension of the future life to non-Israelites, and
the express limitation of prayer (Mt. vi, 9 ; Lk. xi, 2 ) to a simple
expression of religious feeling—a prescription which has been absolutely
ignored through the whole history of the Church, despite the constant use of
the one prayer prescribed—itself a compilation of current Jewish phrases.

The expression in the Dominical prayer translated “Give us this day [or day by day] our
daily bread” (Mt. vi, 11 ; Lk. xi, 3 ) is pointless and tautological as it stands in the
English and other Protestant versions. In verse 8 is the assurance that the Father knows
beforehand what is needed; the prayer is, therefore, to be a simple process of communion
or advocation, free of all verbiage; then, to make it specially ask for the necessary
subsistence, without which life would cease, and further to make the demand each day,
when in the majority of cases there would be no need to offer such a request, is to stultify
the whole. If the most obvious necessity is to be urged, why not all the less obvious? The
Vulgate translation, “Give us to-day our super-substantial bread,” though it has the air of
providing for the Mass, is presumptively the original sense; and is virtually supported by
McClellan (N. T. 1875, ii, 645–47), who notes that the repeated use of the article, τὸν ἄρτον
ἡμῶν τὸν ἐπιούσιον, implies a special meaning, and remarks that of all the suggested
translations “daily” is “the very one which is mostly manifestly and utterly condemned.”
Compare the bearing of the verses Mt. vi, 25–26 , 31–34 , which expressly exclude the
idea of prayer for bread, and Lk. xi, 13 . The idea of a super-substantial bread seems
already established in Philo, De Legum Allegor. iii, 55–57, 59–61. Naturally the average
theologian (e.g., Bishop Lightfoot, cited by McClellan) clings to the conception of a daily
appeal to the God for physical sustenance; but in so doing he is utterly obscuring the
original doctrine.

Properly interpreted, the prayer forms a curious parallel to the close of the tenth satire of
Juvenal, above cited, where all praying for concrete boons is condemned, on the ground
that the Gods know best, and that man is dearer to them than to himself; but where there is
permitted (of course, illogically) an appeal for soundness of mind and spiritual serenity.
The documents would be nearly contemporary, and, though independent, would represent
kindred processes of ethical and rational improvement on current religious practice. On the
other hand, the prayer, “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil”—which again
rings alien to the context—would have been scouted by Juvenal as representing a bad
survival of the religion of fear. Several early citations and early MSS., it should be noted,
give a briefer version of the prayer, beginning, “Father, hallowed be thy name,” and
dropping the “Thy will be done” clause, as well as the “deliver us from evil,” though
including the “lead us not into temptation.”

It may or may not have been that this rationalization of religion was
originally preached by the same sect or school as gave the exalted counsel
to resist not evil and to love enemies—a line of thought found alike in India
and in China, and, in the moderate form of a veto on retaliation, in Greece
and Rome.17 But it is inconceivable that the same sect originally laid down
the doctrines of the blood sacrifice and the final damnation of those who did
not accept the Messiah (Mt. x ). The latter dogmas, with the myths,
naturally became the practical creed of the later Church, for which the
counsel of non-solicitous prayer and the love of enemies were unimaginable
ideals.18 Equally incapable of realization by a State Church was the anti-
Pharisaical and “Bohemian” attitude ascribed to the founder, and the spirit
of independence towards the reigning powers. For the rest, the occult
doctrine that a little faith might suffice to move mountains—a development
from the mysticisms of the Hebrew prophets—could count for nothing save
as an incitement to prayer in general. The freethinking elements in the
gospels, in short, were precisely those which historic Christianity inevitably
cast aside.

§2

Already in the Epistles the incompatibility of the original critical spirit with
sectarian policy has become clear. Paul—if the first epistle to the
Thessalonians be his—exhorts his converts to “prove all things, hold fast
what is good”;19 and by way of making out the Christist case against
unpliable Jews he argues copiously in his own way; but as soon as there is a
question of “another Jesus”20 being set up, he is the sectarian fanatic pure
and simple, and he no more thinks of applying the counsel of criticism to
his dogma21 than of acting on his prescription of love in controversy.
“Reasonings” (λογισμοὺς) are specially stigmatized: they must be “cast
down.”22 The attitude towards slavery now becomes a positive fiat in its
support;23 and all political freethinking is superseded by a counsel of
conformity.24 The slight touch of rationalism in the Judaic epistle of James,
where the principle of works is opposed to that of faith, is itself quashed by
an anti-rational conception of works.25 From a sect so taught, freethinking
would tend to disappear. It certainly obtruded itself early, for we have the
Pauline complaint26 that “some among you say there is no rising from the
dead”; but men of that way of thinking had no clear ground for belonging to
the community, and would soon be preached out of it, leaving only so much
of the spirit of criticism as produced heresies within the sphere of
supernaturalism.

§3

When the new creed, spreading through the Empire, comes actively in
contact with paganism, the rationalistic principle of anti-idolatry, still
preserved by the Jewish impulse, comes into prominence; and insofar as
they criticized pagan myths and pagan image-worship, the early Christians
may be said to have rationalized.27 Polytheists applied the term
“atheistical” alike to them28 and the Jews.29 As soon as the cult was joined
by lettered men, the primitive rationalism of Evêmeros was turned by them
to account; and a series of Fathers, including Clement of Alexandria,
Arnobius, Lactantius, and Augustine, pressed the case against the pagan
creeds with an unflagging malice which, if exhibited by later rationalists
towards their own creed, Christians would characterize in strong terms. But
the practice of criticism towards other creeds was, with the religious as with
the philosophical sects, no help to self-criticism. The attitude of the
Christian mass towards pagan idols and the worship of the Emperor was
rather one of frenzy30 than of intellectual superiority;31 and the Fathers
never seem to have found a rationalistic discipline in their polemic against
pagan beliefs. Where the unbelieving Lucian brightly banters, they taunt
and asperse, in the temper of barbarians deriding the Gods of the enemy.
None of them seems to realize the bearing against his own creed of the
pagan argument that to die and to suffer is to give proof of non-deity.32 In
the end, the very image-worship which had been the main ground of their
rational attack on paganism became the universal usage of their own
Church; and its worship of saints and angels, of Father, Son, and Virgin
Mother, made it more truly a polytheism than the creed of the later pagans
had been.33 It is therefore rather to the heresies within the Church than to its
attacks on the old polytheism that we are to look for early Christian
survivals of ancient rationalism; and for the most part, after the practically
rationalistic refusal of the early Ebionites to accept the doctrine of the
Virgin Birth,34 these heresies were but combinations of other theosophies
with the Christian.

Already in the spurious Epistles to Timothy we have allusion to the

“antitheses of the gnosis”35 or pretended occult knowledge; and to early
Gnostic influences may be attributed those passages in the gospel, above
cited, which affirm that the Messiah’s teaching is not for the multitude but
for the adepts.36 All along, Gnosticism37 stood for the influence of older
systems on the new faith; an influence which among Gentiles, untrained to
the cult of sacred books, must have seemed absolutely natural. In the third
century Ammonios Saccas, of Alexandria, said to have been born of
Christian parents, set up a school which sought to blend the Christian and
the pagan systems of religion and philosophy into a pantheistic whole, in
which the old Gods figured as subordinate dæmons or as allegorical figures,
and Christ as a reformer.38 The special leaning of the school to Plato, whose
system, already in vogue among the scholars of Alexandria, had more
affinity than any of its rivals39 to Christianity, secured for it adherents of
many religious shades,40 and enabled it to develop an influence which
permanently affected Christian theology; this being the channel through
which the doctrine of the Trinity entered. According to Mosheim, almost no
other philosophy was taught at Alexandria down to the sixth century.41
Only when the regulative zeal of the Church had begun to draw the lines of
creed definitely42 on anti-philosophic lines did the syncretic school, as
represented by Plotinus, Porphyry, and Hierocles,43 declare itself against
Christianity.

Among the Church sects, as distinguished from the philosophic, the

syncretic tendency was hardly less the vogue. Some of the leading Fathers
of the second century, in particular Clement of Alexandria and Origen,
show the Platonic influence strongly,44 and are given, the latter in
particular, to a remarkably free treatment of the sacred books, seeing
allegory wherever credence had been made difficult by previous science,45
or inconvenient by accepted dogma. But in the multiplicity of Gnostic sects
is to be seen the main proof of the effort of Christians, before the complete
collapse of the ancient civilization, to think with some freedom on their
religious problems.46 In the terms of the case—apart from the Judaizing of
the Elcesaites and Clemens Romanus—the thought is an adaptation of
pagan speculation, chiefly oriental and Egyptian; and the commonest
characteristics are: (1) in theology, an explanation of the moral confusion of
the world by assuming two opposed Powers,47 or by setting a variety of
good and bad subordinate powers between the world and the Supreme
Being; and (2) in ethics, an insistence either on the inherent corruptness of
matter or on the incompatibility of holiness with physical pleasure.48 The
sects influenced chiefly from Asia teach, as a rule, a doctrine of two great
opposing Powers; those influenced from Egypt seek rather the solution of
gradation of power under one chief God. All alike showed some hostility to
the pretensions of the Jews. Thus:—

1. Saturninus of Antioch (second century) taught of a Good and an Evil Power, and that the
world and man were made by the seven planetary spirits, without the knowledge or consent
of either Power; both of whom, however, sought to take control, the Good God giving men
rational souls, and subjecting them to seven Creators, one of whom was the God of the
Jews. Christ was a spirit sent to bring men back to the Good God; but only their asceticism
could avail to consummate the scheme. (Irenæus, Against Heresies, i, 24; Epiphanius,
Hæreses, xxiii.)

2. Similarly, Marcion (son of a bishop of Pontus) placed between the good and bad Powers
the Creator of the lower world, who was the God and Lawgiver of the Jews, a mixed
nature, but just: the other nations being subjects of the Evil Power. Jesus, a divine spirit
sent by the Supreme God to save men, was opposed by both the God of the Jews and the
Evil Power; and asceticism is the way to carry out his saving purpose. Of the same cast
were the sects of Bardesanes and Tatian. (Irenæus, Against Heresies, i, 27, 28; Epiphanius,
Hæreses, c. 56; Eusebius, Eccles. Hist. iv, 30. Mosheim, E. H. 2 Cent. pt. ii, ch. v, §§ 7–9.
As to Marcion, see Harnack, Outlines, ch. v; Mackay, Rise and Progress of Christianity, pt.
iii, §§ 7, 12, 13; Irenæus, iv, 29, 30; Tertullian, Against Marcion.)

3. The Manichean creed (attributed to the Persian Mani or Manichæus, third century)
proceeded on the same dualistic lines. In this the human race had been created by the
Power of Evil or Darkness, who is the God of the Jews, and hence the body and its
appetites are primordially evil, the good element being the rational soul, which is part of
the Power of Light. By way of combining Christism and Mithraism, Christ is virtually
identified with Mithra, and Manichæus claims to be the promised Paraclete. Ultimately the
Evil Power is to be overcome, and kept in eternal darkness, with the few lost human souls.
Here again the ethic is extremely ascetic, and there is a doctrine of purgatory. (Milman,
Hist. of Christianity, bk. iii, ch. i; Mosheim, E. H. 3 Cent. pt. ii, ch. v, §§ 2–11; Beausobre,
Hist. Critique de Manichée et du Manichéisme, 1734; Lardner, Cred. of the Gospels, pt. ii,
ch. lxiii.)

4. Among the Egyptian Gnostics, again, Basilides taught that the one Supreme God
produced seven perfect secondary Powers, called Æons (Ages), two of whom, Dynamis
and Sophia (Power and Wisdom), procreated superior angels, who built a heaven, and in
turn produced lower grades of angels, which produced others, till there were 365 grades, all
ruled by a Prince named Abraxas (whose name yields the number 365). The lowest grades
of angels, being close to eternal matter (which was evil by nature), made thereof the world
and men. The Supreme God then intervened, like the Good Power in the oriental system, to
give men rational souls, but left them to be ruled by the lower angels, of whom the Prince
became God of the Jews. All deteriorated, the God of the Jews becoming the worst. Then
the Supreme God sent the Prince of the Æons, Christ, to save men’s souls. Taking the form
of the man Jesus, he was slain by the God of the Jews. Despite charges to the contrary, this
system too was ascetic, though lenient to paganism. Similar tenets were held by the sects of
Carpocrates and Valentinus, all rising in the second century; Valentinus setting up Thirty
Æons, male and female, in pairs, with four unmarried males, guardians of the Pleroma or
Heaven—namely, Horus, Christ, the Holy Spirit, and Jesus. The youngest Æon, Sophia,
brought forth a daughter, Achamoth (Scientia), who made the world out of rude matter, and
produced Demiourgos, the Artificer, who further manipulated matter. (Irenæus, bk. i, chs.
24, 25; bk. ii.)

These sects in turn split into others, with endless peculiarities.

Such was the relative freethought of credulous theosophic fantasy,49 turning

fictitious data to fresh purpose by way of solving the riddle of the painful
earth. The problem was to account for evil consistently with a Good God;
and the orientals, inheriting a dualistic religion, adapted that; while the
Egyptians, inheriting a syncretic monotheism, set up grades of Powers
between the All-Ruler and men, on the model of the grades between the
Autocrat, ancient or modern, and his subjects. The Manichæans, the most
thoroughly organized of all the outside sects, appear to have absorbed many
of the adherents of the great Mithraic religion, and held together for
centuries, despite fierce persecution and hostile propaganda, their influence
subsisting till the Middle Ages.50 The other Gnosticisms fared much worse.
Lacking sacred books, often setting up a severe ethic as against the
frequently loose practice of the churches,51 and offering a creed unsuited to
the general populace, all alike passed away before the competition of the
organized Church, which founded on the Canon52 and the concrete dogmas,
with many pagan rites and beliefs53 and a few great pagan abracadabras
added.

§4

More persistently dangerous to the ancient Church were the successive

efforts of the struggling spirit of reason within to rectify in some small
measure its most arbitrary dogmas. Of these efforts the most prominent
were the quasi-Unitarian doctrine of Arius (fourth century), and the
opposition by Pelagius and his pupil Cælestius (early in fifth century) to
the doctrine of hereditary sin and predestinate salvation or damnation—a
Judaic conception dating in the Church from Tertullian, and unknown to the
Greeks.54

The former was the central and one of the most intelligible conflicts in the
vast medley of early discussion over the nature of the Person of the Founder
—a theme susceptible of any conceivable formula, when once the principle
of deification was adopted. Between the Gnosticism of Athenagoras, which
made the Logos the direct manifestation of Deity, and the Judaic view that
Jesus was “a mere man,” for stating which the Byzantine currier Theodotos
was excommunicated at Rome by Bishop Victor55 in the third century, there
were a hundred possible fantasies of discrimination;56 and the record of
them is a standing revelation of the intellectual delirium in the ancient
Church. Theodotos the currier is said to have made disciples57 who induced
one Natalius to become “a bishop of this heresy”; and his doctrine was
repeatedly revived, notably by Artemon. According to a trinitarian
opponent, they were much given to science, in particular to geometry and
medicine.58 But such an approach to rationalism could not prosper in the
atmosphere in which Christianity arose. Arianism itself, when put on its
defence, pronounced Jesus to be God, after beginning by declaring him to
be merely the noblest of created beings, and thus became merely a modified
mysticism, fighting for the conception homoiousios (of similar nature) as
against that of homoousios (of the same nature).59 Even at that, the sect
split up, its chief dissenters ranking as semi-Arians, and many of the latter
at length drifting back to Nicene orthodoxy.60 At first strong in the east,
where it persecuted when it could, it was finally suppressed, after endless
strifes, by Theodosius at the end of the fourth century; only to reappear in
the west as the creed of the invading Goths and Lombards. In the east it had
stood for ancient monotheism; in the west it prospered by early missionary
and military chance till the Papal organization triumphed.61 Its suppression
meant the final repudiation of rationalism; though it had for the most part
subsisted as a fanaticism, no less than did the Nicene creed.

More philosophical, and therefore less widespread, was the doctrine

associated in the second century with the name of Praxeas, in the third with
those of Sabellius and Paul of Samosata, and in the fourth with that of
Photinus. Of this the essence was the conception of the triune deity as being
not three persons but three modes or aspects of one person—a theorem
welcomed in the later world by such different types of believer as Servetus,
Hegel, and Coleridge. Far too reasonable for the average believer, and far
too unpropitious to ritual and sacraments for the average priest, it was
always condemned by the majority, though it had many adherents in the
east, until the establishment of the Church made Christian persecution a far
more effective process than pagan persecution had ever been.

Pelagianism, which unlike Arianism was not an ecclesiastical but a purely

theological division,62 fared better, the problem at issue involving the
permanent crux of religious ethics. Augustine, whose supreme talent was
for the getting up of a play of dialectic against every troublesome
movement in turn, without regard to his previous positions,63 undertook to
confute Pelagius and Cælestius as he did every other innovator; and his
influence was such that, after they had been acquitted of heresy by a church
council in Palestine and by the Roman pontiff, the latter was induced to
change his ground and condemn them, whereupon many councils followed
suit, eighteen Pelagian bishops being deposed in Italy. At that period
Christendom, faced by the portent of the barbarian conquest of the Empire,
was well adjusted to a fatalistic theology, and too uncritical in its mood to
realize the bearing of such doctrine either on conduct or on sacerdotal
pretensions. But though the movement in its first form was thus crushed,
and though in later forms it fell considerably short of the measure of ethical
rationalism seen in the first, it soon took fresh shape in the form of so-called
semi-Pelagianism, and so held its ground while any culture subsisted;64
while Pelagianism on the theme of the needlessness of “prevenient grace,”
and the power of man to secure salvation of his own will, has been chronic
in the Church.

For a concise view of the Pelagian tenets see Murdock’s note on Mosheim, following
Walch and Schlegel (Reid’s edition, pp. 208–209). They included (1) denial that Adam’s
sin was inherited; (2) assertion that death is strictly natural, and not a mere punishment for
Adam’s sin; (3) denial that children and virtuous adults dying unbaptized are damned, a
middle state being provided for them; (4) assertion that good acts come of a good will, and
that the will is free; grace being an enlightenment of the understanding, and not
indispensable to all men. The relative rationalism of these views is presumptively to be
traced to the facts that Pelagius was a Briton and Cælestius an Irishman, and that both were
Greek scholars. (When tried in Palestine they spoke Greek, like the council, but the accuser
could speak only Latin.) They were thus bred in an atmosphere not yet laden with Latin
dogma. In “confuting” them Augustine developed the doctrine (intelligible as that of an
elderly polemist in a decadent society) that all men are predestined to salvation or
damnation by God’s “mere good pleasure”—a demoralizing formula which he at times
hedged with illogical qualifications. (Cp. Murdock’s note on Mosheim, as cited, p. 210;
Gieseler, § 87.) But an orthodox champion of Augustine describes him as putting the
doctrine without limitations (Rev. W. R. Clarke, St. Augustine, in “The Fathers for English
Readers” series, p. 132). It was never adopted in the east (Gieseler, p. 387), but became
part of Christian theology, especially under Protestantism. On the other hand, the Council
of Trent erected several Pelagian doctrines into articles of faith; and the Protestant churches
have in part since followed. See Sir W. Hamilton’s Discussions on Philosophy and
Literature, 1852, pp. 493–94, note; and Milman, Hist. of Latin Christianity, i, 142, 149.

The Latin Church thus finally maintained in religion the tradition of sworn
adherence to sectarian formulas which has been already noted in the Roman
philosophic sects, and in so doing reduced to a minimum the exercise of the
reason, alike in ethics and in philosophy. Its dogmatic code was shaped
under the influence of (1) Irenæus and Tertullian, who set scripture above
reason and, when pressed by heretics, tradition above even scripture,65 and
(2) Augustine, who had the same tendencies, and whose incessant energy
secured him a large influence. That influence was used not only to
dogmatize every possible item of the faith, but to enforce in religion another
Roman tradition, formerly confined to politics—that of systematic coercion
of heretics. Before and around Augustine there had indeed been abundant
mutual persecution of the bitterest kind between the parties of the Church as
well as against pagans; the Donatists, in particular, with their organization
of armed fanatics, the Circumcelliones, had inflicted and suffered at
intervals all the worst horrors of civil war in Africa during a hundred years;
Arians and Athanasians came again and again to mutual bloodshed; and the
slaying of the pagan girl-philosopher, Hypatia,66 by the Christian monks of
Alexandria is one of the vilest episodes in the whole history of religion. On
the whole, it is past question that the amount of homicide wrought by all the
pagan persecution of the earlier Christians was not a tithe of that wrought
by their successors in their own quarrels. But the spirit which had so
operated, and which had been repudiated even by the bitter Tertullian, was
raised by Augustine to the status of a Christian dogma,67 which, of course,
had sufficient support in the sacred books, Judaic and Jesuist, and which
henceforth inspired such an amount of murderous persecution in
Christendom as the ancient world had never seen. When, the temple
revenues having been already confiscated, the pagan worships were finally
overthrown and the temples appropriated by the edict of Honorius in the
year 408, Augustine, “though not entirely consistent, disapproved of the
forcible demolition of the temples.”68 But he had nothing to say against the
forcible suppression of their worship, and of the festivals. Ambrose went as
far;69 and such men as Firmicus Maternus would have had the emperors go
much further.70

Economic interest had now visibly become at least as potent in the shaping
of the Christian course as it had ever been in building up a pagan cult. For
the humble conditions in which the earlier priests and preachers had gained
a livelihood by ministering to scattered groups of poor proselytes, there had
been substituted those of a State Church, adopted as such because its
acquired range of organization had made it a force fit for the autocrat’s
purposes when others had failed. The sequent situation was more and more
unfavourable to both sincerity of thought and freedom of speech. Not only
did thousands of wealth-seekers promptly enter the priesthood to profit by
the new endowments allotted by Constantine to the great metropolitan
churches. Almost as promptly the ideal of toleration was renounced; and the
Christians began against the pagans a species of persecution that proceeded
on no higher motive than greed of gain. Not only were the revenues of the
temples confiscated as we have seen, but a number of Christians took to the
business of plundering pagans in the name of the laws of Constantius
forbidding sacrifice, and confiscating the property of the temples. Libanius,
in his Oration for the Temples71 (390), addressed to Theodosius,
circumstantially avers that the bands of monks and others who went about
demolishing and plundering temples were also wont to rob the peasants,
adding:—

They also seize the lands of some, saying “it is sacred”; and many are deprived of their
paternal inheritance upon a false pretence. Thus those men thrive upon other people’s ruin
who say “they worship God with fasting.” And if they who are wronged come to the pastor
in the city ... he commends (the robbers) and rejects the others.... Moreover, if they hear of
any land which has anything that can be plundered, they cry presently, “Such an one
sacrificeth, and does abominable things, and a troop ought to be sent against him.” And
presently the self-styled reformers (σωφρονισται) are there.... Some of these ... deny their
proceedings.... Others glory and boast and tell their exploits.... But they say, “We have only
punished those who sacrifice and thereby transgress the law which forbids sacrifice.” O
emperor, when they say this, they lie.... Can it be thought that they who are not able to bear
the sight of a collector’s cloak should despise the power of your government?... I appeal to
the guardians of the law [to confirm the denial].72

The whole testimony is explicit and weighty,73 and, being corroborated by

Ammianus Marcellinus, is accepted by clerical historians.74 Ammianus
declares that some of the courtiers of the Christian emperors before Julian
were “glutted with the spoils of the temples.”75

The official creed, with its principle of rigid uniformity and compulsion, is
now recognizable as the only expedient by which the Church could be held
together for its economic ends. Under the Eastern Empire, accordingly,
when once a balance of creed was attained in the Church, the same coercive
ideal was enforced, with whatever differences in the creed insisted on.
Whichever phase of dogma was in power, persecution of opponents went on
as a matter of course.76 Athanasians and Arians, Nestorians and
Monophysites, used the same weapons to the utmost of their scope; Cyril of
Alexandria led his fanatics to the pillage and expulsion of the Jews, as his
underling Peter led them to the murder of Hypatia; other bishops wrought
the destruction of temples throughout Egypt;77 Theodosius, Marcian, St.
Leo, Zeno, Justinian, all used coercion against every heresy without a
scruple, affirming every verbal fantasy of dogma at the point of the sword.
It was due to no survival of the love of reason that some of the more
stubborn heresies, driven into communion with the new civilization of the
Arabs, were the means of carrying some of the seeds of ancient thought
down the ages, to fructify ultimately in the mental soil of modern Europe.

§5

Against the orthodox creed, apart from social and official hostility, there
had early arisen critics who reasoned in terms of Jewish and pagan beliefs,
and in terms of such rationalism as survived. Of the two former sorts some
remains have been preserved, despite the tendency of the Church to destroy
their works. Of the latter, apart from Lucian, we have traces in the Fathers
and in the Neo-Platonists.

Thus Tertullian and Lactantius tell of the many who believe in a non-active
and passionless God,78 and disdain those who turn Christian out of fear of a
hereafter; and again79 of Stoics who deride the belief in demons. A third-
century author quoted by Eusebius80 speaks of ἄπιστοι who deny the divine
authorship of the holy scriptures, in such a fashion as to imply that this was
done by some who were not merely pagan non-Christians but deniers of
inspiration. Jamblichos, too,81 speaks of opponents of the worship of the
Gods in his day (early in the fourth century).82 In the fifth century, again,
Augustine complains bitterly of those impious and reckless persons who
dare to say that the evangelists differ among themselves.83 He argues no
less bitterly against the increduli and infideles who would not believe in
immortality and the possibility of eternal torment;84 and he meets them in a
fashion which constantly recurs in Christian apologetics, pointing to natural
anomalies, real or alleged, and concluding that since we cannot understand
all we see we should believe all we hear—from the Church. Those who
derided the story of Jonah and the whale he meets by accusing them of
believing the story of Arion and the dolphin.85 In the same way he meets86
their protest against the iniquity of eternal punishment by a juggle over the
ostensible anomaly of long punishments by human law for short misdeeds.
Whatever may have been his indirect value of his habit of dialectic, he
again and again declares for prone faith and against the resort to reason; and
to this effect may be cited a long series of Fathers and ecclesiastics, all
eager to show that only in a blind faith could there be any moral merit.87

Such arguments were doubtless potent to stupefy what remained of critical

faculty in the Roman world. In the same period Salvian makes a polemic
against those who in Christian Gaul denied that God exercised any
government on earth.88 They seem, however, to have been normal
Christians, driven to this view by the barbarian invasions. Fronto, the tutor
of Marcus Aurelius, again, seems to have attacked the Christians partly as
rationalist, partly as conservative.89

In general, the orthodox polemic is interesting only insofar as it preserves

that of the opposition. The Dialogue with Trypho by Justin Martyr (about
150) is a mere documental discussion between a Christian and a Jew, each
founding on the Hebrew Scriptures, and the Christian doing nearly all of the
argument. There is not a scintilla of independent rationalism in the whole
tedious work.90 Justin was a type of the would-be “philosopher” who
confessedly would take no trouble to study science or philosophize, but
who found his sphere in an endless manipulation of the texts of sacred
books. But the work of the learned Origen Against Celsus preserves for us a
large part of the True Discourse of Celsus, a critical and extremely well-
informed argument against Christianity by a pagan of the Platonic91 school
in the time of Marcus Aurelius,92 on grounds to a considerable extent
rationalistic.93 The line of rejoinder followed by Origen, one of the most
cultured of the Christian Fathers, is for the most part otherwise. When
Celsus argues that it makes no difference by what name the Deity is called,
Origen answers94 that on the contrary certain God-names have a miraculous
or magical virtue for the casting out of evil spirits; that this mystery is
known and practised by the Egyptians and Persians; and that the mere name
of Jesus has been proved potent to cast out many such demons. When, on
the other hand, Celsus makes a Jew argue against the Christist creed on the
basis of the Jewish story that the founder’s birth was illegitimate,95 the
Father’s answer begins in sheer amiable ineptitude,96 which soon passes
into shocked outcry.97 In other passages he is more successful, as when he
convicts Celsus’s Jew of arguing alternately that the disciples were
deceived, and that they were deceivers.98 This part of the discussion is
interesting chiefly as showing how educated Jews combated the gospels in
detail, at a level of criticism not always above that of the believers.
Sometimes the Jew’s case is shrewdly put, as when he asks,99 “Did Jesus
come into the world for this purpose, that we should not believe him?”—a
challenge not to be met by Origen’s theology. One of the acutest of Celsus’s
thrusts is the remark that Jesus himself declared that miracles would be
wrought after him by followers of Satan, and that the argument from
miracles is thus worthless.100 To this the rejoinder of Origen is suicidal; but
at times the assailant, himself a believer in all manner of miracles, gives
away his advantage completely enough.

Of a deeper interest are the sections in which Celsus (himself a believer in a

Supreme Deity and a future state, and in a multitude of lower Powers, open
to invocation) rests his case on grounds of general reason, arguing that the
true Son of God must needs have brought home his mission to all
mankind;101 and sweeps aside as foolish the whole dispute between Jews
and Christians,102 of which he had given a sample. Most interesting of all
are the chapters103 in which the Christian cites the pagan’s argument
against the homo-centric theory of things. Celsus insists on the large
impartiality of Nature, and repudiates the fantasy that the whole scheme is
adjusted to the well-being and the salvation of man. Here the Christian,
standing for his faith, may be said to carry on, though in the spirit of a new
fanaticism, the anti-scientific humanism first set up by Sokrates; while the
pagan, though touched by religious apriorism, and prone to lapse from logic
to mysticism in his turn, approaches the scientific standpoint of the elder
thinkers who had set religion aside.104 Not for thirteen hundred years was
his standpoint to be regained among men. His protest against the Christian
cultivation of blind faith,105 which Origen tries to meet on rationalistic
lines, would in a later age be regarded as conveying no imputation. Even
the simple defensive subtleties of Origen are too rationalistic for the
succeeding generations of the orthodox. The least embittered of the Fathers,
he is in his way the most reasonable; and in his unhesitating resort to the
principle of allegory, wherever his documents are too hard for belief, we see
the last traces of the spirit of reason as it had been in Plato, not yet
paralysed by faith. Henceforth, till a new intellectual life is set up from
without, Christian thought is more and more a mere disputation over the
unintelligible, in terms of documents open always to opposing
constructions.

Against such minds the strictest reason would be powerless; and it was
fitting enough that Lucian, the last of the great freethinkers of the
Hellenistic world, should merely turn on popular Christianity some of his
serene satire106—more, perhaps, than has come down to us; though, on the
other hand, his authorship of the De Morte Peregrini, which speaks of the
“crucified sophist,” has been called in question.107 The forcible-feeble
dialogue Philopatris, falsely attributed to Lucian, and clearly belonging to
the reign of Julian, is the last expression of general skepticism in the ancient
literature. The writer, a bad imitator of Lucian, avows disbelief alike in the
old Gods and in the new, and professes to respect, if any, the “Unknown
God” of the Athenians; but he makes no great impression of intellectual
sincerity. Apart from this, and the lost anti-Christian work108 of Hierocles,
Governor of Bithynia under Diocletian, the last direct literary opponents of
ancient Christianity were Porphyry and Julian. As both were believers in
many Gods, and opposed Christianity because it opposed these, neither can
well rank on that score as a freethinker, even in the sense in which the
speculative Gnostics were so. The bias of both, like that of Plutarch, seems
to have been to the utmost latitude of religious belief; and, apart from
personal provocations and the ordinary temper of religious conservatism, it
was the exiguity of the Christian creed that repelled them. Porphyry’s
treatise, indeed, was answered by four Fathers,109 all of whose replies have
disappeared, doubtless in fulfilment of the imperial edict for the destruction
of Porphyry’s book—a dramatic testimony to the state of mental freedom
under Theodosius II.110 What is known of his argument is preserved in the
incidental replies of Jerome, Augustine, Eusebius, and others.111 The
answer of Cyril to Julian has survived, probably in virtue of Julian’s status.
His argumentations against the unworthy elements, the exclusiveness, and
the absurdities of the Jewish and Christian faith are often reasonable
enough, as doubtless were those of Porphyry;112 but his own theosophic
positions are hardly less vulnerable; and Porphyry’s were probably no
better, to judge from his preserved works. Yet it is to be said that the
habitual tone and temper of the two men compares favourably with that of
the polemists on the other side. They had inherited something of the elder
philosophic spirit, which is so far to seek in patristic literature, outside of
Origen.

The latest expressions of rationalism among churchmen were to the full as

angrily met by the champions of orthodoxy as the attacks of enemies; and,
indeed, there was naturally something of bitterness in the resistance of the
last few critical spirits in the Church to the fast-multiplying insanities of
faith. Thus, at the end of the fourth century, the Italian monk Jovinian
fought against the creed of celibacy and asceticism, and was duly
denounced, vituperated, ecclesiastically condemned, and banished, penal
laws being at the same time passed against those who adhered to him.113
Contemporary with him was the Eastern Aerius, who advocated priestly
equality as against episcopacy, and objected to prayers for the dead, to fasts,
and to the too significant practice of slaying a lamb at the Easter festival.114
In this case matters went the length of schism. With less of practical effect,
in the next century, Vigilantius of Aquitaine made a more general
resistance to a more manifold superstition, condemning and ridiculing the
veneration of tombs and bones of martyrs, pilgrimages to shrines, the
miracle stories therewith connected, and the practices of fasting, celibacy,
and the monastic life. He too was promptly put down, largely by the efforts
of his former friend Jerome, the most voluble and the most scurrilous pietist
of his age, who had also denounced the doctrine of Jovinian.115 For
centuries no such appeal was heard in the western Church.

The spirit of reason, however, is well marked at the beginning of the fifth
century in a pagan writer who belongs more truly to the history of
freethought than either Julian or Porphyry. Macrobius, a Roman patrician
of the days of Honorius, works out in his Saturnalia, with an amount of
knowledge and intelligence which for the time is remarkable, the principle
that all the Gods are but personifications of aspects or functions of the Sun.
But such doctrine must have been confined, among pagans, to the cultured
few; and the monotheism of the same writer’s treatise On the Dream of
Scipio was probably not general even among the remaining pagans of the
upper class.116

After Julian, open rationalism being already extinct, anti-Christian thought

was simply tabooed; and though the leading historians for centuries were
pagans, they only incidentally venture to betray the fact. It is told, indeed,
that in the days of Valens and Valentinian an eminent physician named
Posidonius, son of a great physician and brother of another, was wont to
say, “that men do not grow fanatic by the agency of evil spirits, but merely
by the superfluity of certain evil humours; and that there is no power in evil
spirits to assail the human race”;117 but though that opinion may be
presumed to have been held by some other physicians, the special ascription
of it to Posidonius is a proof that it was rarely avowed. With public
lecturing forbidden, with the philosophic schools at Athens closed and
plundered by imperial force,118 with heresy ostracized, with pagan worship,
including the strong rival cult of Mithraism, outwardly suppressed by the
same power,119 unbelief was naturally little heard of after the fifth century.
About its beginning we find Chrysostom boasting120 that the works of the
anti-Christian writers had persuaded nobody, and had almost disappeared.
As regarded open teaching, it was only too true, though the statement
clashes with Chrysostom’s own complaint that Porphyry had led many
away from the faith.121 Proclus was still to come (410–485), with his
eighteen Arguments against the Christians, proceeding on the principle, still
cherished from the old science, that the world was eternal. But such
teaching could not reach even the majority of the more educated; and the
Jewish dogma of creation ex nihilo became sacrosanct truth for the
darkening world. In the east Eusebius,122 and in the west Lactantius,123
expressed for the whole Church a boundless contempt of everything in the
nature of scientific research or discussion; and it was in fact at an end for
the Christian world for well-nigh a thousand years. For Lactantius, the
doctrine of a round earth and an antipodes was mere nonsense; he discusses
the thesis with the horse-laughter of a self-satisfied savage.124 Under the
feet of arrogant and blatant ignorance we see trampled the first form of the
doctrine of gravitation, not to be recovered for an æon. Proclus himself
cherished some of the grossest pagan superstitions; and the few Christians
who had in them something of the spirit of reason, as Cosmas
“Indicopleustes,” “the Indian navigator,” who belongs to the sixth century,
were turned away from what light they had by their sacred books. Cosmas
was a Nestorian, denying the divinity of Mary, and a rational critic as
regards the orthodox fashion of applying Old Testament prophecies to
Jesus.125 But whereas pagan science had inferred that the earth is a sphere,
his Bible taught him that it is an oblong plain; and the great aim of his
Topographia Christiana, sive Christianorum opinio de mundo, was to prove
this against those who still cultivated science.

Such pleadings were not necessary for the general Christian public, who
knew nothing save what their priests taught them. In Chrysostom’s day this
was already the case. There remained but a few rational heresies. One of the
most notable was that of Theodore of Mopsuestia, the head of the school of
Antioch and the teacher of Nestorius, who taught that many of the Old
Testament prophecies commonly applied to Jesus had reference to pre-
Christian events, and discriminated critically among the sacred books. That
of Job he pronounced to be merely a poem derived from a pagan source,
and the Song of Songs he held to be a mere epithalamium of no religious
significance. In his opinion Solomon had the λόγος γνώσεως the love of
knowledge, but not the λόγος σοφίας the love of wisdom.126 No less
remarkable was the heresy of Photinus, who taught that the Trinity was a
matter not of persons, but of modes of deity.127 Such thinking must be
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