writings of the first century, and even in some respects of superior evidence. The learned and ingenuous Peter Stalloixius, who had for some time, through the craft and subtlety of Satan, been tempted to doubt the genuineness of this correspondence, subsequently avows his repentance of that dangerous scepticism, and declares that the arguments of that serious writer, Flavius Dexter, had so convinced his mind, that he dared no longer hold their claims as questionable. They are as follows: The Epistle of the blessed Ignatius, to the holy Virgin Mary, Mother of our Lord Jesus Christ.+ "To the Christ-bearing Maria, her own Ignatius sendeth his compliments. "You ought to comfort and console me, who am a new convert and a disciple of your friend John; for I have learned things wonderful to be told concerning your Jesus, and am astonished at the hearing; but I desire from my very soul to be certified immediately by yourself, who wast always familiar and conjoined with him, and privy to his secrets, concerning the things I have heard. I have written to you other epistles also, and have asked concerning the same things.-Farewell; and let the new converts who are with me be comforted by thee, and from thee, and in thee. Amen." The blessed Virgin's Answer. "To Ignatius, the beloved fellow disciple, the humble handmaid of Christ Jesus sendeth her compliments.‡ "The things which you have heard and learned from John concerning Jesus are true; believe them, cleave to *This divine was one of the thousands who reason that there can be no danger in believing too much, belief being at any rate the safe side; for if the moon after all should prove to be made of a green cheese, what will become of philosophers! + Christiferæ Mariæ, suus Ignatius! Me neophytum Johannisque tui discipulum, confortare et consolari debueras. De Jesu enim tuo percepi mira dictu, et stupefactus sum ex auditu. A te autem quæ semper ei fuisti familiaris et conjuncta, et secretorum ejus conscia, desidero ex animo fieri certior de auditis. Scripsi tibi etiam alias, et rogavi de eisdem. Valeas : et neophyti qui mecum sunt ex te et per te, et in te confortentur. Amen. Ignatio delecto condiscipulo humilis ancilla Christi Jesu. De Jesu quæ a Johannæ audisti et didicisti, vera sunt. Illa credas: illis inhæreas et Christianitatis susceptæ votum firmiter teneas, et mores et vitam voto conformes. Veniam autem cum Johanne, te et qui tecum sunt visere. Sta in fide, et viriliter age, nec te commoveat persecutionis austeritas sed valeat et exsultet spiritus tuus in Dco Salutari tuo. Amen.-Fabricii, Cod. Apoc. tom 2, p. 841. them-hold fast the vow you have made to the Christianity which you have embraced, and conform your life and manners to that vow; and I and John will come together to visit you. Stand firm in the faith; act manfully, nor let the sharp severity of persecution move you. But may your soul fare well, and rejoice in God your Saviour. Amen." To be sure these precious epistles were not forthcoming before the faith of the church was ripe to receive them; being first published at Paris in the year 1495, but they are none the less genuine on that account; nor is there a single argument that can be urged against them but what, in parity of application, would be fatal to the credibility of either of our four Gospels. Nothing hinders but that these jewels might have lain hid under the miraculous keeping of divine providence, till the proper time was arrived for their being brought to light and set to shine in the bright diadem of Christian evidences. And as for all arguments drawn from chronology, geography, and other profane sciences, Christians have ever found their best policy to consist in regarding those who adduce them as objects of contempt, in committing their writings unread to the flames, and themselves unheard to gaols and dungeons. It may, however, be a profitable exercise for the ingenuity of believers to try if they can imagine or invent a single sentiment of hostility, expression of scorn, or action of cruelty, that could be justly merited by the rejecters of the writings contained in the New Testament, that would not, but a few years back, have seemed with equal justice to be merited by the impugners of the epistles of Ignatius. RESULT. Here ends the utmost extent of testimony to the facts of the Christian history to be derived from the apostolic Fathers, that is, from all who can be pretended to have written or lived at any time within a hundred years of the birth of Christ. It is not possible to produce so much as one single sentence or manner of expression from any one, friend or enemy, historian or divine, maintainer or impugner of the Christian doctrines, within the first century; the like of which we can conceive to have been used by any person who had been witness of the facts on which the doctrines are founded, or contemporary of those who had been witnesses, or who had believed that those facts had really happened, or had so much as heard that there were any persons on earth that had seriously asserted that they had happened. The language of these Fathers, who are accounted orthodox, to say nothing of what we may hereafter gather from heretical information, is every where the language of a religious fatuity, childish beyond all names of childishness-foolish as folly itself. We should just as well find evidence and authentication to Magna Charta in the scribblings of an idiot on a wall, or make out the particulars of the Punic wars from the records of a baby-house, as discover a trace of testimony to fact in any documents of the Fathers of the first century. It remains only for those who, after an elapse of eighteen centuries, have moulded or new-fangled to themselves a system which they would now have us consider as "worthy of all acceptation," to show how that which had so little evidence at first, could come to have more afterwards; or how what was never known nor spoken of but as a matter of imagination, conceit, and faith, in the first century, should come to have a right to be put on the score of historical evidence at any later period. The orthodox Fathers (as far as doctrine is concerned with orthodoxy) seem only to be distinguished from the heretics, in that they occasionally use a strength of language in their descriptions of allegorical figments, which might seem to approximate to the style of history, and might make what they only intended as emblems, pass for actual circumstances. Yet against such an acceptation of such occasional over-drivings of the allegory, we have to consider that we are in possession, not only of the argument arising from the natural improbability of such allegorical exaggerations when mistaken for facts, and the total absence of all corroborative and coincident testimony which could by no possibility be conceived to have been wanting if such facts had ever happened; but we have the concurrent, and it may be called unanimous consent of the whole body of Christian dissenters (that is, in the church term, the heretics), who from the very first, and all along, never ceased to maintain and teach, that no such a person as Jesus Christ ever existed, and that all the evangelical statements of his miracles, actions, sufferings, birth, death, and resurrection, were to be understood in a high and mystical sense, and not, according to the letter as facts that had ever happened; and this, too, confirmed by admissions of those who are called orthodox themselves, in many positive passages; unabated by so much as a single sentence that can be produced from any one writer within the first hundred years, which is such as he would have written, or would have suited his character to write, had he believed that the Gospel had been founded upon historical fact. And absolutely the only difference between Paganism and Christianity-Christians themselves being judges-was the difference between the allegorical fictions in which the one or the other couched the same physical theorems; as is demonstrated, without need of further comment, by the juxta-position of their respective texts: Julius Firmicius, But in those funerals and lamentations which are annually celebrated in honour of Osiris, their defenders wish to pretend a physical reason; they call the seeds of fruit, Osiris, the earth, Isis, the natural heat, Typhon; and because the fruits are ripened by the natural heat, are collected for the life of man, and are separated from their matrimony to the earth, and are sown again when winter approaches, this they would have to be the death of Osiris; but when the fruits, by the genial fostering of the earth, begin again to be generated by a new procreation, this is the finding of Osiris. Sed in his funeribus et luctibus, defensores eorum volunt addere physiciam rationem. Frugum semina Osirim dicentes esse, Isim terram, Typhonem calorem. Et quia maturatæ fruges calore, ad vitam hominis colliguntur, et a terræ consortio separantur, et rursus appropinquante hyeme seminantur: hanc volunt esse mortem Osiridis, cum fruges redduntur: inventionem vero, cum fruges genitali terræ fomento conceptæ, nova rursus, cæperint procreatione generari.-De Errore Profanarum Religionum, p.6. Beausobre, in description of the Christian Mysteries, quotes Christian Fathers. In one word, the suffering Jesus is nothing else than what the Manichæans called the members of God; that is to say, the celestial substance, or the souls which have descended from heaven. The earth is the Virgin; the heavenly substance which is in the earth, is the substance of the Virgin, of which Jesus Christ was formed; the Holy Ghost is the natural heat, by whose virtue the earth conceived him; and he becomes an infant in being made to pass through the plants, and from thence again into heaven. En un mot, le Jesu Passible, n'est autre chose que les Manichéens appelloient les membres de Dieu, c'est a dire la substance celeste, ou les ames qui sont descendues du ciel.-Beausobre Histoire des Dogmes de Manichee, liv.S, c. 4, tom. 2, p. 556. La terre est la Vierge, la substance celeste, qui est dans la terre, est la substance Virginale qui compose Jesus; S. Esprit est l'agent par la virtue du quel la terre le conçoit, est l'enfante en le faisant passer dans les plantes, et dela dans le ciel. With more than the significancy that will strike one at the first sight, has the learned Montfaucon observed, that "when once a man begins to use his own judgment in matters of religion, it is no wonder that he should frequently be in error, since all things are uncertain, when once we depart from what the church has decreed:"*-that is, in other words, there is no other real argument for the truth of the Christian religion, than " He that believeth not shall be damned!"-Mark xvi. 16. CHAPTER XLI. THE FATHERS OF THE SECOND CENTURY. PAPIAS, A.D. 116. Bishop of Hierapolis. THE first of all the Fathers of the second century, and next immediately following on those of the first to whom exclusively is applied the distinction apostolical, is PAPIAS, placed by Cave at the year 110; according to others, he flourished about the year 115 or 116. He is said by some to have been a martyr. Irenæus speaks of him as a hearer of St. John, and a companion of Polycarp. +Papias, however, in his preface to his five books, entitled An Explication of the Oracles of the Lord, does not himself assert that he heard or saw any of the holy apostles, but only that he had received the things concerning the faith from those who were well acquainted with them. "Now we are to observe," says Eusebius," how Papias, who lived at the same time, mentions a wonderful relation he had received from Philip's daughters. For he relates, that in his time a dead man was raised to life. He also relates another miracle of Justus, surnamed Barsabas, that he drank deadly poison, and, by the grace of the Lord, suffered no harm." This deadly poison was certainly not arsenic. Dr. Lardner concludes his very brief account of this Father, with a remark which, from any pen but his, would Cum quis eò devenit ut fidei dogmata ex sui judicii arbitrio definiat, nihil mirum est si frequenter aberret: omnia quippe sunt incerta, cum semel ab ecclesiæ statutis discessum est.-Montfaucon in prolegom, ad Euseb. Comment in Psalmos. + I claim to be excused from giving the Greek text in all cases in which the translation is not my own. This is Dr. Lardner's. |