not crown the attempt to get rid of millenarian doctrine, till a style of interpretation was introduced, sanctioned, and worked into a system, which actually rendered the Sacred Scriptures useless to common people, and prepared the way for their becoming the exclusive possession of the priests.

5. And that it became necessary, on the part of the first opposers, to deny or to doubt the canonical authority of the book of Revelations, or practically and skeptically to reject, and to undervalue a portion of the Word of God, from the beginning admitted to be genuine and of divine authority, and especially commended to our study and valuation.

CHAPTER IX.

TRADITIONARY HISTORY.

IN pursuing the history of the views entertained in the primitive church, relative to the coming and kingdom of Jesus Christ, we have found but one unbroken chain of testimony in favor of the personal pre-millenial advent and appearance of the Saviour until the close of the second century. The opposition first publicly raised by Caius, against what was called the orthodox faith on this subject, became subsequently much more formidable, as prosecuted by Origen, and his disciple, Dionysius of Alexandria. It was not, however, till an entire new system of interpreting the Scriptures had been excogitated, and received the sanction of the wise and learned, that the millenarian views began to fall into disrepute.

In speaking of this method of interpretation, wrought into a system by Origen, Milner says, “No man, not altogether unsound and hypocritical, ever more hurt the church of Christ, than Origen. From the fanciful mode of allegory introduced by him, uncontrolled by Scriptural rule and order, arose a vitiated method of commenting on the Scriptures, which has been succeeded by a contempt of types and figures altogether, just as his fanciful ideas of letter and spirit, tended to remove from men's minds, all right conception of genuine Christianity. A thick mist, for ages, pervaded the Christian world, supported by his absurd allegorical mode. The learned alone

were looked at as guides implicitly to be followed; and the vulgar, when the literal sense was hissed off the stage, had nothing to do but to follow the authority of the learned. It was not till the days of Luther and Melancthon that this evil was fairly and successfully opposed."*

With Origen commenced a new era in the church. He prepared the way for that union of paganism and Christianity, which, soon after his day, became so extensive and corrupting in the world. This he did by means of his philosophy, being, according to Milner, “full of Platonic notions concerning the soul of the world, the transmigration of spirits, free will, the preexistence of souls, and allegorical interpretations without end."t

Echard says, that "being a vast proficient in philosophy, and too much possest with the notions of Plato's school, he grew very solicitous to accommodate the divine truths to his beloved opinions. And from three of them, all his errors seem to have proceeded, 1. That all intelligent beings ever did and ever shall exist; 2. That they have always been free to do good and evil; and 3. That they have been precipitated in lower places and confined to bodies for a punishment of their sins." The allegorical system of Scriptural interpretation, which he introduced, was itself the genuine offspring of his pagan philosophy.

Mr. Taylor, in his work on Ancient Christianity, has shown, that the evangelical truths of redemption by the blood of Jesus Christ, which lie everywhere on the very surface of the Sacred Scriptures, attracted very little of Origen's attention, and that his whole

* Milner's Ch. Hist., vol. i. pp. 435-6. † Milner's Ch. Hist., vol. i. p. 428. Echard's Ecc. History, b. iii. p. 609.

system of mythic interpretation, as he calls it, had its origin and foundation in Gnostic sentiments and feelings. By these, he understands those particular notions with regard to the nature of God, engendered by the Platonic philosophy, and which compromise his moral, by means of a refinement of his natural attributes, and fashions a Deity allied to the imagination,* and not to the conscience.

The elements of the Gnostic philosophy were in existence in the days of the apostle. It was but the Oriental philosophy, which Cerinthus, the heretic, first wrought into a system, although they were not by him fully and consistently developed, but in some respects accommodated to Jewish opinions. "The Alexandrian Gnostics," says Giesseler,† "in their speculations on these subjects, (viz. the origin of evil, the creation of the world, and the internal relations of the world of light), followed vaguely a notion borrowed from the Platonic doctrine of ideas, that the visible world is an image of the invisible. With this, they readily united the allegorical interpretation of the Scriptures, already in use, which they managed in the most arbitrary way."

The present world, with its material elements jarring with each other, with its organized and animated orders, perishable, corruptible and inimical, and its intelligent races degenerate and wretched, was pronounced by the Gnostic philosophy, in direct contradiction of the Mosaic theology, to be altogether unworthy of the Supreme and Infinite power-that it was in fact the work of inferior and imperfect beings, and consequently, that Jehovah, the God of the Jews,

* Ancient Christianity, p. 212.

↑ Giesseler's Eccles. Hist., vol. i. p. 70.

was not the Supreme Deity. Accordingly, it rejected the expiatory sacrifice of Christ. It wanted no such Saviour as Jesus Christ, according to the literal and historical account of the New Testament. Sin and guilt were not, according to it, the immediate obstacles in the way of happiness, but the connection of the immortal mind with matter was. Let the human spirit break away from the material thralls of the Demiurge, the creator of this gross system, and it would instantly be happy. Matter being dropped, sin, its accident, would fall with it. The Gnostic philoso phy admitted, that to effect this emancipation, Christ was sent, and that he, by his opposition to Demiurge, the imperfect Creator and God of the Jews, recalls the purer minds of the human family to their original place in the intellectual system.

Mosheim* gives the following account. Under the appellation of Gnostics, are included all those in the first ages of the church, who modified the religion of Christ, by joining with it the Oriental philosophy, in regard to the source of evil, and the origin of this material universe. All those eastern philosophers-believing that rational souls become connected with matter, and the inhabitants of bodies, contrary to the will and pleasure of the Supreme God-were in expectation of a mighty legate from the Deity, possessed of consummate wisdom and power, who would imbue with a knowledge of the true God, the spirits now oppressed with the load of their bodies, and rescue them from their bondage to the lords of this material world. When, therefore, some of them perceived, that Jesus and his friends wrought miracles of a salutary character, they were ready to believe, that Jesus was that mighty legate of God,

* See Mosheim's Ecc. History, vol. i. pp. 63, 64.