fatal to the interests of vital Christianity. Their attacks were directed against the nature and the offices of our Blessed Lord, against the unity and the simplicity of his revealed truth. "Fables and endless genealogies, which minister questions rather than godly edifying," supplanted the wholesome doctrine of Jesus; the abstrusest questions of faith, equally with those of physical and moral science, were submitted to the canvassings of human intelligence, unilluminated by "the good and perfect gift," or by the substantial truths of a sound philosophy; and "undefiled religion" was gradually enveloped in an atmosphere, distorting every ray which issued from the fountain of light (4).

We may appeal therefore to those, whose office it has been to detail the eventful annals of the Christian church, for the truth of our position, that the elements of philosophical lore, when incorporated with the body of its doctrine, have vitiated its essence and impaired its beauty. We seek in vain for the symmetry of exterior, for the loveliness of expression, for the image impressed by its almighty founder, in those mutilated and monstrous births, which deformed, even in the apostolic age, its admirable and characteristic unity. Error ingrafted on truth engendered an offspring hideous, and more hideous still-until the Gnosticism of the first century ended in the wild impieties of the

Eclectic, his theurgical doctrine, his senseless superstition, his inanimate mysticism, and his solitude of being.

With this aspect of things present to their view, or embodied in their anticipation, their course lay open to the first promulgers of our faith. They fortified against the tempest, and with redoubled energy, the sacred edifice of their erection. They preached-admonished-reproved. They pointed to the mercy and the longsuffering of God, as displayed in his gracious councils; and they contrasted with man's unreasonableness the surpassing excellence of God's provisions for his welfare. "Where," exclaims the Apostle of the Gentiles, "is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this world? Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For after that, in the wisdom of God, the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God, by the foolishness of preaching, to save them that believe. For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom: but we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness: but unto them which are called, both Jews and Gentiles, Christ, the power of God, and the wisdom of God. Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men" (5).

In this animated passage, the inspired writer adverts to the peculiar circumstances of the Jew and Greek, which respectively impeded the access of his spiritual admonitions to their hearts. A comparison with our preceding view exhibits the fidelity of the portrait. The one is mailclad in his intellectual systems; the other is obdurated by his traditions and his phantasies. To the mental vision of the one has a keenness of unnatural temper been imparted; an obtuse. ness of perception withholds from that of the other aught save evidence the most palpable, and conviction the most overpowering; the subtilties of metaphysical discussion have marred the taste of the latter for the sublime realities of revealed truth; the mazes of Talmudical error have bewildered the reasonings of the former, and have converted into the lifelessness of mere instinctive existence the vigor of apprehension, and the intensity of feeling. Zeno is here, and Epicurus; the Stagyrite, with his researches commensurated with the widest extent of created things; the Pupil of Socrates with his Demiurge, and his eternal archetypes; the Philosopher of Abdera with his chaotic elements, and he of Cyrene with his seductive blandishments :-there stands the Scribe, the legalised perverter of the law of the Holy One, extracting, with a worse than Gentile ingenuity, error from truth, defilement from purity, death

from life with his Mishna and his Cabbala (6) on the one hand, his bigotry and his superstition on the other. To those is the revealed will of God addressed in its simplicity and its truth : the fastidiousness and the sensuality of taste are alike opposed to its reception.

Such being the perversions of human intellect, when daring to intermix its native speculations with the heaven-derived announcements of the Gospel, and the precepts of that Law, which was "the schoolmaster to lead unto Christ;" such being the proneness of the unregenerated affection, to blend the things of earth with those of heaven, and fashion for itself a compound, wherein it might admire withal somewhat of the creativeness of its own fancy, superadded to the wonderworkings of almighty power;-a research, of all others the most interesting, presents itself, into the causes and the progress of this delusion, from the first feeble efforts of man's intelligence, to the consummation of those efforts in this our age of unlimited achievement. To us, who are students in a philosophy so preeminent in form and substance, as that which characterises those latter days, an inquiry of this nature becomes doubly interesting. The different attitudes assumed by the human mind, actuated by powers of such unequal compass as are the physical systems of ancient and modern times, afford matter of abundant con

templation, even to those whose views are limited to phænomena purely intellectual: to inquirers of a different and a higher class, who overstep the boundaries of this ideal world, and advance to the contemplation of the human mind, as the recipient of moral motives and religious impulses, the interest of the research augments to an incalculable degree. The former announce but in abstract investigation what the latter associate with our profoundest sympathies.

To inquirers of this latter class the following reflections are submitted. They comprise a brief survey of events of the intellectual world, confirmative of the applicability of our text, not merely to the age of apostolic ministry, but to all which preceded, and all which followed, the promulgation of its doctrine ;-confirmative, we say, of the truth of the assertion, that " philosophy" has proved but too often "a vain deceit," and detrimental to the purity of religion, as well natural as revealed.

The notices which respect the Jews come first in order. It is, however, to be observed, that the influence of local, enhanced by the cooperation of moral and political, causes, which interposed between them and their Gentile neighbours a wall of partition impassable and unpassed, unless by the sacrifice of their constitutional peculiarities and their deepest pr