and gentleness in those individuals who do not feign themselves to be Christians for the sake of subsistence, or the supply of any mortal wants, but who have honestly accepted the doctrine concerning God and Christ, and the judgment to come." 1

1 Cont. Celsum, i. 67.

CHAPTER III.

HERESIES AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY.

I. - CLASSIFICATION OF HERESIES.

THE importance of Christianity as an historical fact is well evinced by the all-comprehending movement which it called forth. By repulsion or attraction, it affected the life and thought of the greater portion of the ancient world. Every prominent religious system from Italy to India soon felt more or less the vibrations which its entrance into the world awakened.

In the previous chapters we have traced the movement on the side of repulsion, the struggle of Christianity with an openly hostile Judaism and heathenism. We have now to consider the movement on the side of attraction, the false alliance which Judaism and heathenism sought to make with Christianity, the struggle of the Church with heresy. This struggle did not tax the Church in the same way as the former; still, the demands were formidable. To deal with the professed friends was, in important respects, more difficult than to withstand the open enemies. The former party, if not by their own choice and estimation, were in reality as much enemies as the latter. Their essential antagonism to Christianity had, also, much the same ground. A false conservatism was prominent in both cases.

Ex

treme Judaism and extreme heathenism regarded Christianity as subversive of their old established order, and declared that it ought to be destroyed root and branch. A more liberal Judaism and heathenism confessed the virtue and right of Christianity, and felt attracted toward it; but, at the same time, many within their ranks were unwilling to renounce their previous theories. They carried these over to Christianity, warped in their behalf the interpretation of Christianity; in short, remained in part, and sometimes in large part, Jews and heathens, while they assumed the name of Christians.

The early heresies, then, may in general be characterized as false attempts to blend the old of other systems with the new of Christianity. This was conspicuously the case with two of the principal classes of heresies, and may be regarded, to some extent, the case with the third. These three classes of heresies were the following: (1) the Judaistic, (2) the Gnostic and Manichæan, (3) the Monarchian, or Anti-trinitarian. Of these the Jewish and the Gnostic were largely the antipodes of each other in spirit and aim. Jewish heresy, so far as it was an outgrowth of average Pharisaism, was radically contrasted with Gnosticism. But there were speculative schools within the bounds of Judaism which harbored Gnostic elements. This was to some extent the case with the Essenes, and was especially the case with the speculative Judaism of Alexandria of which Philo was the leading representative at the beginning of the first century. We have, therefore, some heresies in which Jewish and Gnostic ingredients are commingled.

II. THE JUDAISTIC HERESIES.

1. EBIONISM. - While Judaism was truly a forerunner of Christianity, it was in large part unwilling to accept the position of a mere forerunner. It wished to retain its place and prominence after it had performed the work of introduction. It was unwilling to adopt that true maxim of a forerunner, so nobly uttered by John the Baptist, "He must increase, but I must decrease." Hence the greater part of the nation rejected the gospel.

Of those Jews who received Christ as the Messiah, many came into full fellowship with their Gentile brethren, and claimed no superiority in virtue of the law. Others, however, continued in the spirit of those who disturbed Paul's congregations by insisting that it was necessary to keep the law of Moses. Even the destruction of the temple under Vespasian, and the complete banishment of Judaism from the precincts of Jerusalem under Hadrian, could not wean the more zealous of them from their Jewish exclusiveness. Hence, they passed from the condition of a party within the Church to the status of a sect without its borders. Near the middle of the second century we find them ranked as an heretical faction, and shortly thereafter strongly reprobated by Catholic writers under the name of Ebionites. The probable origin of this name is that suggested by Origen, who derives it from ebion, the Hebrew word for poor.1 The name may have been applied at first to

1 De Prin., iv. 1. 22; Cont. Celsum, ii. 1. Origen, however, probably gave a wrong turn to his exposition, in his intimation that the Ebionites took their name from the poverty of the law for which they were such

Jewish Christians generally by the Pharisees, who wished to stigmatize them as belonging to the poorer ranks. The term, having thus become associated with those of Jewish extraction, might very naturally be applied to them by Gentile Christians with reference to their Jewish type of faith.

The main body of those who were classed as Ebionites asserted the obligation of all Christians to keep the law of Moses. They rejected the apostolic office of Paul. They used only the Gospel of Matthew, and that in a mutilated form. In their view Christ was a mere man, conceived in the ordinary way, and distinguished only by his righteous walk and the superior endowment of the Spirit which came upon him at his baptism. They were also millenarians, and looked for the coming of Christ to inaugurate a visible reign at Jerusalem. But the party of Jewish dissent was not altogether homogeneous. Irenæus1 and Hippolytus,2 it is true, make no discrimination between different classes of Ebionites. Origen, on the other hand, speaks of the "twofold sect" of the Ebionites, specifying, as the distinction between the two sections, that the one denied, while the other accepted, the supernatural conception of Christ. A century earlier Justin Martyr had intimated that the Church had to deal with two classes of Judaizers, - the one imposing the law of Moses only upon themselves,

sticklers. Eusebius, iii. 27, says that their name indicates their low and mean opinions of Christ. Tertullian, De Carne Christi, xiv., xviii., xxiv., assumes that there was a founder of the sect by the name of Ebion. This view is opposed by the silence of some writers and the counterstatements of others.

1 Cont. Hær., i. 26. 2. 8 Cont. Celsum, v. 61.

2 Philosophumena, vii. 22.