ponent to confess that the very best of the writers of the nicene age, say Chrysostom, Augustine, Basil, Ambrose, Jerome, and the Gregorys, fall far behind the jewish Prophets, as to the notions. they convey of the benignity and the purity of the divine nature; and in the breadth of their moral systems, and in the respective importance attached by them to the forms, and to the substance of devotion, as well as in the warmth, the expansion, the sublimity, and the energy of the religious sentiment by which they seem personally to have been animated. In a word, this must, I think,

be acknowledged, that the writers of the ancient dispensation were such as those should be, who were looking onward toward the bright day of gospel splendour; while the early christian doctors were just such as one might well expect to find those who were looking toward that deep night of superstition which covered Europe during the middle ages. The dawn is seen to be gleaming upon the foreheads of the one class of writers; while a sullen gloom overshadows the brows of the other.

Every feeling of rational piety would be outraged were those not infrequent passages to be adduced in which the great divines of the fourth century, while labouring to set virginity' above all praise,' endeavour to mix up the notions it involves, with the ineffable relationships of the Trinity, and perhaps, in opposition to the gnostic notion of female æons, or divinities in pairs, attribute an accident of humanity to God himself. Much of this sort that meets the eye, in the fathers, must be left where it lies and may it never find a translator! But let those who would be warned of the danger of running into frightful impieties when the reins are given to fanatical impulses, open Gregory Nyssen, IIɛpì ПapOɛvías, and look up and down, and especially at the second chapter, beginning ovvéσews yàp iμiv. If we shudder, as we must, at the presumption of the gnostics, while they are describing the emanation of the pairs of æons, male and female, from the Supreme Deity, can we regard, without indignant reprobation, the shameless audacity of a christian writer, and a bishop, who dares to speak as Gregory Nyssen does of the relationship of the Eternal Father to the Eternal Son? If this be not gnostic theosophy, it is something worse; and assuredly it is not christian theology. Better renounce christianity, with the gnostics, than thus insult

In order to secure

its most sacred truths, with Gregory Nyssen. for the celibate all possible patronage, and the highest authority, this writer, designating our Lord by a phrase of gnostic origin, as τὴν πηγὴν τῆς ἀφθαρσίας, insists upon the fact of his entering the world in a manner implying a tacit disparagement of marriage; and in another place* he does not scruple to adopt a foolish, but favourite tradition concerning the Virgin Mary, the import of which is to secure her suffrage in support of the practice of vowing virginity in very childhood, a practice cruel in itself, and the occasion of the worst abuses of the monkish system. Joseph, as we are assured by the authors and retailers of this legend, was pitched upon as a worthy man, who would consent to take charge, for life, of the young virgin (Mary) in the ostensible relationship of her husband, but really as the guardian of her innocence. And it is remarkable as an instance of theological infatuation, even with the soundest minds, that the absurd story which Gregory Nyssen introduces, with some apology, as apocryphal, Augustine a few years later, coolly alludes to as if it were an authenticated fact; and, in his customary mode of attenuated reasoning, labours to infer as much from the words of scripture. It is clear,' says he, that Mary had previously (i. e. before the visit of the angel) devoted herself to God, in inviolable chastity; and that she had been espoused to Joseph on this very condition; desponsata viro justo, non violenter ablaturo, sed potius contra violentos custodituro, quod illa jam voverat.' And all this was to be affirmed and believed in order that, as he says, Mary might 'furnish an example to holy nuns in all time to come!'

6

But to return for a moment to Gregory Nyssen, I will refer to the fifth chapter of the tract above mentioned, as furnishing an example of that sort of gnosticized christianity which was felt to be needed in giving support to the practices and sentiments universally adopted by the Church. The contrast, on this point, between apostolic and ancient christianity is striking. Peter affirms that, by the promises of scripture we are made partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world έv ÈTMivμía'—a term which, in its canonical sense, implies

*Oration on Christmas day.

De Sancta Virginitate.

ence.

always-sin; not simple affection. But the writer now before us declares, that the only way of approach to the Deity, is on the path of abstraction from the affections of humanity, as connected with our animal and social state; and that the institute of virginity has this very end in view, that we may the more effectually withdraw ourselves from the entanglement of our mundane existNow all this is sheer gnosticism. The Gospel teaches men 'to deny ungodliness and worldly lust;' gnosticism taught, or would fain have taught its followers, to deny and to resent those humiliating conditions which the malignant or unwise Demiurge the creator of this world, had imposed upon the human race; and thus, in substance, and often with a very near resemblance of language, speak the ancient promoters of asceticism. If the style of Gregory Nyssen, on subjects of this class, be compared with that of mahometan dervishes, or of persian sooffees, or of the grecian stoics, or pythagoreans, or platonists, or with that of the gnostics of his own times, it does not appear that any solid advantage can equitably be claimed for him. Call Nyssen a christian father if you please, and Epictetus a heathen philosopher, and let the Church pay her homage to the former on the 9th of March, or on any other day, and let her reprobate the latter every day of the year; meantime, this I am sure of, that I could take many entire pages from both, and placing them, in their naked merits, before an acute and intelligent christian reader, desiring him, from internal evidence alone, to endorse each quotation with the words Christian or Heathen, and he would as often interchange these designations, as apply them truly. And I think, moreover, that no candid mind would refuse to acknowledge that the praise of good sense, simplicity, and consistency, must decisively be awarded to the dark pagan.

'In order that we may, with a clear eye, gaze upon the light of the intellectual universe,' says Nyssen in the tract before referred to, we must disengage ourselves from every mundane affection, and lay aside the feculence of the corporeal condition.' Thus have talked mystics of every sect, and in all ages, and while dreaming about the 'divine nature,' have totally lost sight of genuine piety and virtue. The mysticism of the fathers is distinguished from that of others, by a peculiar slang, which,

N

unconsciously, they caught from the gnostic teachers, their contemporaries.

There can hardly be a more gross illusion than that of supposing that some few christian phrases, such as our Saviour Christ,' or, through the grace of the Son of God,' really avail to christianize a page, a chapter, or a treatise, which, these naked phrases apart, we should never have surmised to have come from christian lips. Nor are religious writings to be christianized by the formal insertion, here and there, of a creed, nor by the inlaying of texts of Scripture. A christian writing is a composition which breathes the spirit, and which is marked throughout by the peculiar principles of the New Testament. Now, judged by this rule, I think several of the most noted of the fathers would be cashiered of their usurped honours, and set down some way below the level of the better heathen writers. I fear this would be the fate of both the Gregorys-I mean Nyssen, just quoted, and the eloquent Nazianzen.

For propagating their opinions more widely and readily, the gnostic teachers had recourse to the chartns of verse: to supplant them on this ground, several of the fathers struck their lyres; and among these Ephraim, Synesius, and Nazianzen; but of what quality was the antidote they provided? Let us take some samples-Synesius by and by, Nazianzen at present. It seems to have been the belief of these writers, that to make the nearest possible approach to gnostic doctrine and language, while orthodoxy was saved, afforded the surest means of excluding the specious heresy. A mistaken notion surely; but it is thus that, while their opponents were ranting about the vileness of the body, and the sublimity of the endeavour to break away from its humiliations, a christian bishop could follow on the same path, and say-*

Γάμος μὲν ἔστιν ἔννομος σαρκῶν δέσις,

Ἡ παρθενεία δ ̓ ἔκβασις τοῦ σώματος.

Where did Nazianzen learn any such doctrine as this? We can only reply-Where he learned such as the following, and neither the one nor the other from the inspired writings.

Carmina Iambica.

'Happy the course of those the unmarried blessed, who (in this world) having shaken off the flesh, are nearer to the divine purity.'

What teaching more delusive in its tendency, than the telling a company of persons that, because unmarried, they were near to God.' Gnostics taught nothing more pernicious; nor anything practically unlike it. They, or some of them, discouraged marriage, not merely because it involved distractions incompatible with the contemplative discipline; nor merely because it was an additional tie, connecting the soul with the body; but because it was the means of carrying on that process of linking spirits to flesh,' which the Demiurge had set agoing, despite of the Supreme Deity, and which the Supreme Deity was labouring to bring to an end. Now such notions being afloat, how does a christian teacher seek to withstand them? By addressing' a spouse of Christ' in language such as that of the exhortation, πρὸς παρθένους,* not merely abounding with the very cant of gnosticism, about the agency of matter, the commixture of natures, the harmony of spirits with the Supreme Spirit; but presenting, in a distinct form, the gnostic doctrine that the Christos, the Logos, had descended into this world to abrogate the original sexual constitution, and to institute a more spiritual economy. Let the studious reader look to the whole, as it stands; and if he thinks that a florid writer's real opinions ought not to be inferred from his poetic effusions, he may compare, with the composition here mentioned, the following passage from our author's thirty-first oration, which offers the same gnostic jargon, and the same gnostic principles, mixed up indeed with a larger proportion of christian phrases.-'Let her who is under the yoke (of matrimony) be in part Christ's; but the virgin, Christ's wholly. Let not the one indeed be altogether bound to the world; but the other turn from the world altogether. Let that which is partial in the married be entire with the virgin. Thou hast chosen the angelic life, and hast ranged thyself with those who are unyoked (the angels) be not thou borne downward

* Tom. ii. p. 299.