on Christian fathers; and they imposed them on the whole Christian church, mingled up with those of their own over-heated brains.

But there is another cause of this pneumatical madness to be mentioned. It was not due alone to the fondness philosophers had of seeming to account metaphysically for what they could not account physically; it was due likewise to a fondness of another kind, to a fondness of making man pass for one of those beings that participated of the divine nature. This had long possessed the heathen theists, and it possessed the Christians with more advantage. Neither of them pretended to such constant communications, and familiar conversations with the Supreme Being, as the Jews did; though both of them boasted of divine influences, of inspirations, and of revelations made to them sleeping and waking. But then both of them boasted a natural, though distant relation with the Supreme Being, not only the moral relation of creatures to their Creator, but the natural relation of descendants to their common ancestor, a cognation, as Cudworth calls it, a sort of spiritual consanguinity. Several hypotheses had lengthened the chain of being very far from God downwards: and as divinity had been hauled down, humanity had been hoisted up, sometimes by gross and corporeal representations, sometimes by such as were more refined and spiritual. Man was made after the image of God in more systems than one, or rather, God was made after the image of man. The anthropomorphite heresy represented him with all the members, the shape and figure of a human body; and how the idolatrous heathens represented all their gods, and none more than Jupiter himself, in human bodies, and in human operations, is enough known. But there were other systems in which the similitude and natural relation between God and man were represented under images more refined and spiritual.

In the Jewish system, however, we understand the words of Moses, the Supreme Being made the body of man of the dirt of the earth. But the human soul was a portion of divine breath, "divinæ particula auræ." God breathed it into his face, and he became a living soul;* as God is said, in Scripture language, to be the living God. In the Platonic system, inferior intelligences were commissioned to make the whole animal kind, lest they should have been all immortal; but God reserved to himself the soul of man, which he made of the same substance as the soul of the universe, only a little less perfect, as it has been said. In the system we speak of, the divinity is allied to humanity as

* Inspiravit in faciem ejus spiraculum vitæ, et factus est homo in animam viventem.

effectually as the pride of man could desire, as effectually as in either of these. We assume, and the latter Platonicians as well as their founder assumed, that man is compounded of body and soul. As Plato asserted, that all souls were made at once, so they asserted, that all souls were made of the same nature. Human souls, therefore, proceeding from the first soul, which was sometimes confounded with, and sometimes distinguished from the soul of the universe, and this soul being superior to all natures, except the minds proceeding from the first mind, and the unities proceeding from the first unity, the relation between God and man was not very remote; whether they thought that the three hypostases composed one deity, as two substances composed one man; or whether they thought, that the three were distinct subordinate subsistences, and the soul the lowest of them. The relation, I say, was not very remote either way; and these philosophers might think their hypotheses the more decent for not making this relation closer. Proclus therefore, or Plotinus, or one of that tribe, had reason, you see, on this plan of theology to call the soul of the world the elder sister of the human soul: and if Origen did not come fully up to all these extravagances, he came very near to them, when he asserted that there was no difference, but that of merit, between the souls of archangels and angels, of devils and of men. The soul of Christ, according to this father, who was perhaps the greatest of the fathers, was of the same nature as all other rational souls, and was inseparably united with God, or made one with the word,* only on account of superior merit in a pre-existing state.

Thus human pride, as well as human curiosity, was indulged by heathen philosophers and by Platonising Christians. They grew up into a sort of pneumatical madness, or metaphysics were the dotage of physics: take which of the images you please. What these wild or dreaming philosophers could not do by any hypothesis about body, they attempted to do by the hypothesis of a soul: and since they could not make man participant of the divine nature by his body, however animated up to rationality, or with whatever adventitious powers they might suppose it endued, they thought fit to add a distinct spiritual to his corporeal substance, and to assume him to be a compound of both. A great variety of hypotheses was built on this one; but immortality was common to them all. In all of them, man was allied to God by some metaphysical genealogy, and even those of them, which, giving him immortality, exposed him to eternal damnation by it, were fondly received. He who considers what our

-inseparabilem cum Deo fecerit unitatem-cum Verbo Dei unum efficitur.-Orig. de Princip. lib. 1.

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manner of knowing is, what the faculties of our minds are, what the means we have of acquiring knowledge are; and how uncertain, how precarious, how confined it is in the highest degree of it; will think the soul as unfit to be participant of the divine nature as the body. Nay Plato, whom I quote on these occasions, "instar omnium," was so little able to prove the existence and immortality of the soul, and talked so much nonsense about the essence and essential properties of it, that he was obliged to have recourse from natural to moral arguments, which are indeed more plausible, but not more conclusive.

When these notions were once established, it was no hard matter to persuade men, nay it was no hard matter for those, who had a disposition and a temper of brain prone to enthusiasm, to persuade themselves, that by various methods of purification, and by intense meditation, which were in truth so many methods of growing mad, they could abstract themselves from all sensible objects, wrap themselves up in pure intellect, and be united to the Supreme Being. This madness has prevailed, and still prevails, under some form or other, and with little difference, in the East and in the West, among Christians, and heathens, among the orthodox and heretics. I need not quote instances. They have been frequent and notorious in China, in the East Indies, and in Europe. Pythagoras and Plato taught, that the supreme good of men was to be like God, and to be gods at last. Such opinions as these were held, with some variety of expression more than of substance, by the Manichæans and other heretics. The most orthodox fathers spoke of the communion of men with God, as of a mystery unknown indeed to men and angels till it was revealed, but suspected by the heathen philosophers, who were impelled to desire it by a natural instinct. A strange assertion this must appear, and equally false in every part. The communion of man with God was not a suspicion, it was a dogma, true or false, and an article of the Platonic faith; for Plato too required faith in traditional doctrines. It was not any particular instinct, that impelled the heathen to desire his communion, it was their pride and absurdity, the very human affections and passions from which these men pretended to be freed, that produced this presumptuous desire.

Such extravagant doctrines concerning divine and spiritual natures being taught with much confusion in the schools of heathen theology, they could not fail to be taught in those of Christianity with the same confusion, and to produce all the different opinions, that divided the Christian church. None of them knew very distinctly what they meant by the word spirit and spiritual substance, which were so often in their mouths. That they meant in general nothing more than breath, like animal

breath, and a thin subtile matter that escaped human sight in the ordinary way of seeing, is evident. They said, after Zoroaster and the magi, that God was original light, or an intelligent fire. They said, that this light was incorporeal, and yet they talked of it in such a manner as described a very corporeal light, invisible, however, to all eyes that were not fortified like those that enjoy the beatific vision. In short, spirituality did not imply incorporeity, and if one of those great divines was at hand to be asked what he meant by spiritual substance, he would answer in some metaphysical jargon; he would tell us, perhaps, that it is a substance "ab essentialitate succisa," which are words I have read, but cannot translate.

END OF VOL. III.