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innumerable apocryphal versions, wherefrom to collect their opinions, or whereby to decide their controversies. It is admitted by Mosheim, that the more intelligent among the Christian people in the third century had been taught, that true Christianity, as it was inculcated by Jesus, and not as it was afterwards corrupted by his disciples, differed in few points from the Pagan religion, properly explained and restored to its primitive purity;* so that these good people very conveniently found the way of swimming with the tide, and were converted to Christianity, while they continued as staunch Pagans as ever. But this, of

course, could be viewed by a modern advocate of Christianity in no other light than as an invention of the enemy; however, it was neither a weak one in itself, nor unsuccessful in its issue. "Many were ensnared," says the Christian historian, "by the absurd attempts of these insidious philosophers. Some were induced by these perfidious stratagems to abandon the Christian religion, which they had embraced. Others, when they were taught to believe that Christianity and Paganism, properly understood, were virtually but one and the same religion, determined to remain in the religion of their ancestors, and in the worship of the gods and goddesses. A third sort were led, by these comparisons between Christ and the ancient philosophers, to form to themselves a motley system of religion, composed of the tenets of both parties, and paid divine honours indiscriminately to Christ and to Orpheus, to Apollonius, and the other philosophers and heroes, whose names had acquired celebrity in ancient times."

THE DOCTRINE OF MANES AND HIS HISTORY.

MANI, properly so called, though more commonly Manes or Manichæus, from whom the most important Christian sect that ever existed takes its designation, was by birth a Persian, educated amongst the Magi, or wise men of the East, and himself originally one of that order.

The ecclesiastical historian Socrates gives us this account of him :

"Not long before the reign of Constantine, there sprang up a kind of heathenish Christianity, which mingled itself

* Mosheim, vol. 1, cent. 3, chap. 2. Collate herewith the terms of compromise with Paganism offered by St. Peter, St. Paul, St. Gregory, and other holy popes.

with the true Christian religion; for in those days the doctrine of Empedocles, a heathen philosopher, was clandestinely introduced into Christianity. One Scythianus, a Saracen, had married a captive woman, native of the upper Thebais, and upon her account he lived in Egypt. Having been instructed in the learning of the Egyptians, he introduced the doctrine of Empedocles and Pythagoras into Christianity; asserting the existence of two natures, the one good, the other evil, as Empedocles did, and calling the evil nature Neikos (Discord), and the good nature Philia (Friendship). Buddas, formerly namedTerebinthus, became a disciple of that Scythianus; he travelled into Persia, where he told a great many strange stories of himself, as, that he was born of a virgin, and brought up in the mountains. Afterwards he wrote four books: one of which was entitled the Mysteries; another THE GOSPEL; a third Thesaurus, or the Treasury; the fourth a Summary. He pretended a power to work miracles; but on one occasion, being on a high tower, the Devil threw him down, so that he brake his neck and died miserably.* The woman at whose house he had resided buried him, and succeeding to the possession of his property, bought a boy of seven years old, whose name was Cubricus. This youth she adopted; and after having given him his freedom, and a good education, she bequeathed him all the estate she had derived from Terebinthus, and the books which he had written according to the instructions of Scythianus his master. With these possessions and advantages, upon the death of his patroness, Cubricus went into Persia, and changed his name into Manes, and there gave out the books which Terebinthus had thus composed, under the direction of his master Scythianus, as his own original works. These books bore a show and colouring of Christianity, but were in reality heathenish; for the impious Manes directs the worship of many gods, teaches that the Sun ought to be adored. He introduces the doctrine of fatal necessity, and denies the free agency of man. He openly teaches the transmigration of souls,+ as held by Pytha

* The reader, who may find this entire passage in Dr. Lardner's Credibility, vol. 2, p. 141, will observe my variations from it. I take this liberty only upon the grounds of preference for my own translation of the original itself, which I have on my table, and with which I compare the text of Lardner through every sentence.

+The Pythagorean doctrines are still traceable in the Christian Scriptures: the Christ of St. John's Gospel is evidently a Pythagorean philosopher. Ye must be born again (John iii.), is the characteristic aphorism of the Pythagorean

goras, Empedocles, and the Egyptians. He denies that Christ was ever really born, or had real human flesh, but asserts that he was a mere phantom. He rejects the law and the prophets, and calls himself the Paraclete or Comforter. All which things are far from the true and right faith of the church of God. In his epistles he was not ashamed to entitle himself an apostle. At length his abominations met with their merited punishment.”

"The son of the king of Persia happening to have fallen into dangerous illness, his father, having both heard of Manichæus, and believing his miracles to be true, sent for him as an apostle, and believed that his son would by his means be restored. Upon his arrival he takes the king's son in hand, after the fashion of a conjuror.* But the king having seen that the boy died under his hands, had him imprisoned, intending to put him to death; but he made his escape, and came into Mesopotamia. The king of Persia, hearing that he was in those parts, sent after him, and, upon his second apprehension, had him flayed alive." -This king of Persia was Varanes the First.

Notwithstanding the calumnies heaped on Manes, Dr. Lardner has shown that he was, in the best and strictest acceptation of the term, a sincere Christian, and has adduced many passages from his writings equally honourable to his understanding and to his heart. Not only the learned Faustus,+ Bishop of Melevi in Africa, whose tremendous charge against the authenticity of our canonical Gospels we have elsewhere given; but others, by far the most learned, intelligent, and virtuous men that ever professed and called themselves Christians, were Manichæans, and among these was the renowned St. Augustin himself, till he found that higher distinctions and better emoluments were to be gained by joining the stronger party. Whereupon he left the poor presbytery of the Manichæan church, to become the orthodox bishop of Hippo Regius: and from thenceforth, with the zeal that always characterizes a turncoat he set himself to heap all the calumnies and misrepresentations he possibly could upon that purer and more primitive Christianity which he had deserted; awkschool. See the Chapter xxxiii. entitled PYTHAGORAS, in this DIEGESIS, p. 217.

* Μετα το επιπλαστε σχήματος εγχειρίζεται τον, &c. Dr. Lardner cuts me this knot with a SKIP in his rendering.

+ Faustus flourished ahout A.D. 384 at the latest, and had been known to Augustin before that wily and mendacious saint apostatized from Manicheism to orthodoxy.

wardly enough confessing, that he himself should never have believed the Gospel, unless the authority of the church had induced him* (paid him) to do so. There are, I fear, more than nineteen out of any twenty bishops that could be named, who owe their orthodoxy at this day to the same sort of inducement.

DEMONSTRATION THAT NO SUCH PERSON AS JESUS CHRIST EVER EXISTED.

There were two very different opinions concerning Christ very early among Christians. Some, as Augustin says,+ believed Christ to be God, and denied him to be man; others believed he was a man, and denied him to be God. The former was the opinion of the Manichees, and of many others before them; of others so early, indeed, and so certainly, that Cotelerius, in a note on Ignatius's Epistle to the Trallians, assures us that it would be as absurd as to question that the sun shone at mid-day,‡ to deny that the doctrine that taught that Christ's body was a phantom only, and that no such person as Jesus Christ had ever any corporeal existence, was held in the time of the apostles themselves.§ Ignatius, the apostolic Father, expressly censures this opinion, as having gained ground even before his time. If, as some who are atheists—that is, unbelievers-say, that he only suffered in appearance," an expression which, as Cotelerius observes, plainly shows the early rise of this doctrine. And from the apostolic age downwards, in a never interrupted succession, but never so strongly and emphatically as in the most primitive times, was the existence of Christ as a man most strenuously denied. So that though nothing is so convenient to some persons as to assume airs of contempt, and to cry out that those who deny that

'

* Ego evangelio nequa quam crediderim nisi ecclesiæ auctoritas me commoveret.-August. ut citat Michaelis.

+ Ait enim Christus Deus est tantum, omnino hominis nihil habens. Hoc Manichæi dicunt. Photiani, homo tantum. Manichei, Deus tantum.-August. Serm. 37, c. 12.

As absurd as to question that the sun shone, &c. Solem negaret meridie lucere, qui Docetas, seu phantasiastas hæreticos temporibus apostolorum inficiaretur erupisse.-Cotel. ad Ign. Ep. ad Trall. c. 10.

§ Apostolis adhuc in seculo superstitibus, adhuc apud Judæam Christi sanguine recenti, phantasma Domini corpus asserebatur.-Hieron. adv. Lucif. T.4, p.304.

|| Ει δε ώσπερ τινες άθεοι οντες, τουτ' έστιν απιστοι, λεγουσιν το δοκειν πεπονθέναι AUTOV K.T.A.-Ign. ad Trall. c. 10, et passim.

such a person as Jesus of Nazareth ever existed, are utterly unworthy of being answered, and would fly in the face of all historical evidence, the fact of the case is, that the being of no other individual mentioned in history ever laboured under such a deficiency of evidence as to its reality, or was ever overset by a thousandth part of the weight of proof positive, that it was a creation of imagination only.

To the question, then, On what grounds do you deny that such a person as Jesus Christ existed as a man? the proper answer is,

Because his existence as a man has, from the earliest day on which it can be shown to have been asserted, been as earnestly and strenuously denied, and that, not by enemies of the Christian name, or unbelievers of the Christian faith, but by the most intelligent, most learned, most sincere of the Christian name, who ever left the world proofs of their intelligence and learning in their writings, and of their sincerity in their sufferings;

And because the existence of no individual of the human race, that was real and positive, was ever, by a like conflict of jarring evidence, rendered equivocal and uncertain.

CHARGE 4.

It was distinctly charged against the early preachers of Christianity, that they had adopted and transferred to their own use the materials they found prepared to their hands, in the writings of the ancient poets and philosophers; and by giving a very slight turn to the matter, and a mere change of names, had vamped up a patchwork of mythology and ethics, a mixture of the Oriental Gnosticism and the Greek Philosophy, into a system which they were for foisting upon the world as matter of a divine revelation that had been especially revealed to themselves. "All these figments of cracked-brained opiniatry and silly solaces played off in the sweetness of song by deceitful poets, by you too credulous creatures, have been shamefully reformed and made over to your own God."* Such is the objection of Cæcilius, in the Octavius of Minucius Felix, written in dialogue, about

Omnia ista figmenta malesanæ opinionis, et inepta solatia, a poetis fallacibus, in dulcedine carminis lusa, a vobis nimium credulis in Deum vestrum, turpiter reformata sunt.-Minucius Felix in Apol.

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