satisfy me, notwithstanding what some may say, that he was a good as well as a great man.”* Du Pin says “that Eusebius seems to have been very disinterested, very sincere, a great lover of peace, of truth, and religion. Though he had close alliances with the enemies of Athanasius, he appears not to have been his enemy; nor to have any great share in the quarrels of the bishops of that time. He was present at the councils where unjust things were transacted, but we do not discern that he showed signs of passion himself, or that he was the tool of other men's passions. He was not the author of new creeds-he only aimed to reconcile and reunite parties. He did not abuse the interest he had with the Emperor, to raise himself, nor to ruin his enemies, as did Eusebius of Nicomedia, but he improved it for the benefit of the church." Such is his character, as drawn by his advocates and friends, a character unfortunately pregnant with admissions of enough, and more than enough, to justify the charges of Baronius and others, sincere professors of the Christian faith, who have branded him as the great falsifier of ecclesiastical history, a wily sycophant, a consummate hypocrite, and a time-serving persecutor. Indeed, there is no fair evidence in any thing that appears in his writings, or is known of his life, to support our wish, for the honour of human nature, to believe that he himself believed the Christian religion. Had he done so, can we think that he would have deemed it necessary to promote that cause by forgery and imposture, by trickery and falsehood, as he has constantly endeavoured to do? "He had a great zeal for the Christian religion," says Dr. Lardner, and so far, undoubtedly, he was in the right, nevertheless he should not have attempted to support it by weak and false arguments. "It is wonderful," he adds, "that Eusebius should think Philo's Therapeutæ were Christians, and that their ancient writings, should be our gospels and epistles. "Agbarus's letter to our Saviour, and our Saviour's letter to Agbarus, copied at length in our author's Ecclesiastical History, are much suspected by many learned men not to be genuine. "If the testimony to Jesus as the Christ, had been from the beginning in Josephus's works, it is strange it should never have been quoted by ancient apologists for Chris * Lardner, Vol. 2, p. 363. tianity, and now in the beginning of the fourth century, be thought so important as to be quoted by our author in two of his works still remaining." That is to say, surely Eusebius forged it himself! for the purpose of quoting his own forgery. There was never an advocate of the Christian evidences yet, whose conscience would have opposed any hesitation to such services, in so good a cause. There is a work ascribed to Porphyry, quoted by Eusebius in his Preparation and Demonstration. If that work is not genuine (and I think it is not) it was a forgery of his own time, and the quoting it as he does, will be reckoned an instance of want of care or skill, or of candour and impartiality.". "Where Josephus says that Agrippa, casting his eyes upwards, saw an owl sitting upon a cord over his head; our ecclesiastical historian says, he saw an angel. I know not what good apology can be made for this." So delicately does Dr. Lardner glance at the peccadilloes of the great Christian historian to say nothing of his entirely passing over the altogether Popish character of the religion he professed; the masses said for the soul of Constantine, his own fulsome panegeric on that great monster of iniquity, and the innumerable instances of deceit and cunning which will be found by every shrewd student of his writings. Eusebius held that Jesus Christ created the substance of the Holy Ghost, and ridiculously, or rather perhaps sarcastically, hints that miracles were still in vogue, even in his own time, only they were little ones. His adducing, however, of the authority of the elders of the churches of Lyons and Vienne, without directly pledging his own authority, to obtain belief from whoever would believe the stories of the martyrdoms of the saints of those churches, and of some whose bodies were actually found alive and uninjured in the stomachs of the wild beasts who had devoured them, is proof enough of his art in supplying miracles adapted to the meanest capacity, and a grand specimen of that peculiarly ecclesiastical finesse, in which Dr. Lardner himself is an exquisite proficient; the contriving to reap the effect of falsehood, without incurring its responsibilities, lying by proxy, and pushing what they never believed themselves into credence, as far as credence would follow, without committing themselves in any sufficiently honest * Lardner's Credibility, Vol. 4, p. 91. expression to enable a man to lay the blame of it directly at their own door. Thus also, the grave and solemn Tertullian assures us of a fact which he and all the orthodox of his time credited, that the body of a Christian which had been some time buried, moved itself to one side of the grave to make room for another corpse which was going to be_laid by it.* We have no less credible accounts of a holy dog, who used to slide along on his haunches to receive the sacrament, and to watch over the church-yard like a guardian angel, and when he saw any other dogs about to ease themselves upon the graves of the saints, he would instantly set on them, and teach them to go further. He was actually canonized by the Bishop of Rome, and many splendid and glorious miracles were wrought at the shrine of the Holy Dog, St. Towzer.f Saint Augustin, in like manner, preached the Gospel to whole nations of men and women, who he assures us had no heads.-Query, could he mean any thing else than that, in believing the gospel, men and women have no need of heads. In a word, Eusebius, like many other great men was drawn into the frightful vortex of superstition, and had no alternative but to whirl round in it, or sink. Like thousands of his order at this day, he both preached and wrote what he never believed himself, nor could believe. It is only when Religion shall be no more, that Hypocrisy shall be no more: as it is, there is but one rule in theological arithmetic—i. e. the greater saint, the greater liar! CHAPTER XLIV. TESTIMONY OF HERETICS. THE only definition that will express the distinction between orthodoxy and heresy, is, that the orthodox party are those who have the upper hand, the heretics are those who have the misfortune to get ousted. All Dissenters are heretics. Should any order of those of the present day come to possess themselves of the ascendancy, (which * Tertullian De An. c. 51, quoted by Evanson, p. 15. The relics of this truly Christian DoG are preserved in the parish church of San Andres, near Valladolid, to this day. His soul is with Jesus. We may laugh at this in England; but he would be a brave man who laughed at it in Spain. See Catholic Miracles, p. 43. God avert) how absurd or monstrous soever their religious tenets might be, they would forthwith become perfectly orthodox; and the church, in its turn, losing hold of the great primum-mobile of divinity (its revenues and honours) might carry with it the selfsame doctrines which it now holds, into a state of the most deplorable and damnable heresy. "The learned have reckoned upwards of ninety different heresies which arose within the first three centuries; nor does it appear that even the most early and primitive preachers of Christianity, were able to keep the telling of the Christian story in their own hands, or to provide any sort of security for having it told in the same way. St. Paul accuses St. Peter of wilfully corrupting the gospel of Christ,* and (whatever we may feel ourselves bound to think of himself) makes no mincing of the matter, in telling us, that the other apostles were "false apostles, deceitful workers, dogs, and liars, and that they preached Christ out of envy and strife."+ In the epistles ascribed to John, and which are admitted to have been written some time before either of our gospels; it appears that there were persons professing the Christian faith, who considered that a belief that such a person as Jesus Christ had ever existed, was no part of that faith; and that he was denied to have had any real existence as a man, or to have come in the flesh, at a time when, if that fact could have been established, there would have been no occasion to make a virtue of any man's faith: the matter could at once have been settled for ever on a basis of certainty that would have prevented the power of the mind to conceive a doubt on the subject. The very earliest Christian writings that have come down to us, are of a controversial character, and written in attempted refutation of heresies. These heresies must therefore have been of so much earlier date and prior prevalence; they could not have been considered of sufficient consequence to have called (as they seem to have done) for the entire devotion and enthusiastic zeal of the orthodox party to extirpate, or keep them under, if they had not acquired deep root, and become of serious notoriety—an inference which leads directly to the conclusion that they were of anterior origination to any date that has hitherto been ascribed to the gospel history. When the * Galatians ii. 14; Acts xv. 39; Philippians iii. 2; Phil. i. 15, &c. simple fact of the existence of such a man as Jesus Christ is questioned, it is usual for the modern advocates of Christianity to shelter themselves from all contemplation of the historical difficulties of the case, by assuming his existence to be incontrovertible, and that nothing short of idiotcy of understanding, or an intention to irritate and annoy, rather than either to seek or to communicate information, could prompt any man to moot a doubt on the subject; nor is it in the power of language to exceed the airs of insolence and domination which even our Unitarian theologers assume, to cloak over their inability to give satisfaction on this, the simplest and prime position of the case, by taking it for granted, forsooth, that none but reckless desperates, or downright fools,* could ever have held the human existence of Christ as problematical. We might, say they, as well affect to deny the existence of such an individual as Alexander the Great, or of Napoleon Bonaparte, and so set at defiance the evidence of all facts but such as our senses have attested. It being quite forgotten that the existence of Alexander and Napoleon was not miraculous, and that there never was on earth one other real personage whose existence as a real personage was denied and disclaimed even as soon as ever it was asserted, as was the case with respect to the assumed personality of Christ. But the only common character that runs through the whole body of heretical evidence, is that they one and all, from first to last, deny the existence of Jesus Christ as a man, and professing their faith in him as a God and Saviour, yet uniformly and consistently hold the whole story of his life and actions to be allegorical. "The greatest part of the Gnostics (taking that name as the most general one for all the heretics of the three first centuries) denied that Christ was clothed with a real body, or that he suffered really." Tertullian speaks of only two heresies, that existed in the time of the Apostles, i. e. the DOCETE, so called from the Greek orμois opinion, suspicion, appearance merely, as expressive of their opinion that Christ had existed in appearance only, and not in reality; and the EBIONITES, so called from the Hebrew word abionim, in expression of their poverty, ignorance, and vulgarity. Docetism, says * Let any man only read the Preface to the Rev. J. R. Beard's Historical Evidences of Christianity Unassailable, and imagine if he can, how either God or Pope could ever have thundered with more audacious Godhead. † Mosheim, Vol. 1, p. 136. + Quoted in Lardner, vol. 4, p. 512. |